Lazy Minds

This year was the probably the first time that I’ve heard general agreement that we’ve entered a new, more passing-oriented era of football. It’s sad that it’s taken so long to recognize this, but then football, the NFL, and the football community are quite conservative. If it wasn’t clear before Sunday that football had changed, it is now. The Colts-Jets game perfectly represents what’s happened in the NFL at large.

The Top Pass Defense of the past 10 years played against the best quarterback of the past ten years (perhaps ever), and was thrashed resoundingly. The Jets had the best run game in the NFL, and they simply couldn’t keep up. It’s not that they made a lot of mistakes: Mark Sanchez was competent and generally efficient and there weren’t a lot of turnovers. The Jets were just outplayed.

I really like Rex Ryan as a coach: he’s fun, exciting, very smart, and he’s obviously taking the Jets in the right direction. But old-school “smashmouth” football is overrated; the run game is overrated. The Colts have now rolled over two defense/running teams, and three of the top four teams this year (and 6 of the top 8), particularly Indianapolis and New Orleans, were part of the new breed of pass-oriented offenses.

There are so many excellent quarterbacks in football right now: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees are tops, but there’s also Carson Palmer, Ben Roethlisberger, Matt Schaub, Philip Rivers, Tony Romo, Eli Manning, Donovan McNabb, Aaron Rogers, Bret Favre and Kurt Warner. That’s 13 teams led by what I’d consider premier passers. There are at least 5 Hall of Fame quarterbacks currently in the game (Manning, Brady, Brees, Warner, Favre).

What’s even more remarkable is how balanced the run-pass ratio has been this past season. Although the Colts have lately been pass-heavy, the only team in recent history that has blatantly ignored the run has been the 2007 Patriots, and it worked well for them. The ratio in the New Orleans-Minnesota game was so run-heavy for New Orleans that I can only conclude that Drew Brees was playing hurt. Otherwise, poor playcalling nearly knocked the Saints of the playoffs.

As someone who’s been gaming, mostly on the PC, since I was 5 or 6 years old, it’s distressing to discover that games “expire,” in two different ways. First, technology moves past them and in some cases renders them unplayable. Second, many of the features of newer games mean that older games are too painful to play.

As PCs modernized, older games that ran fine on slower computers begin to show problems. In some cases the processor speed of new machines is so fast that games will “speed up,” sometimes becoming several times faster. In other cases, games written for older operating systems or setups simply won’t be ported. I was a huge fan of Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! and its sequel, Sid Meier’s Antietam. But after a recent install, I encountered problems with coloration, resolution, and running with multiple monitors. There are a lot of other issues, and it seems as though the game simply won’t work on modern operating systems. I might give it a shot on a Linux virtual machine and see if I have any luck.

Even if the game technically works, it can sometimes be rendered unplayable by advances in game design. My all-time favorite series of games was the Age of Empires series, which I played straight through to the end. It broke my heart when Microsoft (for reasons that make absolutely no sense to me) shut down Ensemble Studios. The thing is that the old Age of Empires game, though still playable and graphically quite attractive, is missing essential features of later games. There’s no idle villager button, farms don’t replant automatically, and the list goes on. Although minor, the level of annoyances builds up. It’s not the same game as it was at the time. Similarly, it’s annoying games like Doom that you can’t jump, aim up or down, etc, though this isn’t as crippling.

Is it ever possible to overcome this sort of shock? Or was there just a minimum bar that games need to clear before they will be “forever playable.” I can go back to Age of Mythology and still enjoy the game; I might try Age of Kings which is now over 10 years old.

It’s always possible to enjoy older movies, older books, and older music. You can even wistfully return to childhood books. Are video games the only media that has an expiry date? Does this change how whether we ought to classify video games as art? As fewer and fewer people play the original Civilization, or Wolfenstein, or Jazz Jackrabbit, or Game X, will these games disappear from our consciousness? If you look at “Best PC Games, ever” lists, you find that many of the earliest games are already forgotten, or remembered only as dutiful footnotes. Yet Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life, M, and other “classic” movies are still beloved, and a new generation will always want to watch them (by many, at least). Here, classic games are the odd ones out. I wonder if things will seem different in 15 years or longer.

I watch some football each week during the season (though not as much as I used to), and there’s a lot of things that drive me nuts. They’re things that seem so obvious to me, I don’t know why they’re not done already.

1. The OT rules are terrible. In most cases, it seems as though OT comes down to a coin flip, since whoever wins the flip is gauranteed a chance to win outright, and the other team has no such luck. At the very least, teams winning the flip have a substantial advantage. I wrote a simple python script that expresses odds of winning, and it’s pretty grim. Assuming evenly matched teams, if teams score on 50% of all possessions, then the team winning the coin flip wins 67% of its games. If teams score on 60% of all possessions, then the team winning the coin flip wins 71% of its games (if teams score on 40% of all possessions, the twtcf wins 61% of its games). I’d switch to college football rules, where drives are given in repeated sets of 2, starting from the 25 yard line. OT should be fair.
2. No ties. It seems as though every other year there’s a tie in one game in the NFL. It makes things confusing, because how do you rate a tie? It’s not a win, but how much of a win should it count for? Ties should simply be eliminated. Play OT until the game is over. As time goes on, the players become more tired, and scoring gets easier. No one would miss tie games.
3. Implant a chip in the football. Actually, I’d put three pieces of electronics in the football: a tiny chip in either end and a band that wraps around the centerpoint. I suspect RFID would work, but if it’s not sensitive enough, there must be another candidate. With sensors placed around the field to triangulate position, the position of the ball ought to be exactly determined on every play.

   The simple fact is that ball spotting plays way too much of a role in determining the outcome of a football game. The refs are astonishingly accurate, they get the right position 80-90% of the time (or perhaps more likely, 80-90% of the time the position doesn’t matter). But each game there are 4-6 spots that seem blatantly wrong, and these can have a huge impact, from ending a drive to losing a TD. There is no reason to keep refs spotting the ball, except for tradition. And the chains/spotting refs just serve to slow down the game.

   I suspect that over the next few years there will be more pressure to do this, and it may be inevitable. Announcers are occasionally talking about it as well.

Something I’ve been thinking about for a while is how my understanding and desire to manipulate public perception defines what I consume. For over a year now, I’ve regularly recorded all books I’ve read and all movies I’ve watched. For almost four years now, all the music I’ve listened to on my computer (which is somewhat over 1/2 of all the music I’ve listened to) has been online on Last.FM.

We’re all, I think, hoping that in some way our decision to read, watch, or listen to something will cause others’ perception of us to change. I think this is probably the biggest reason Oprah’s book club causes people to buy so many books. I think it’s probably why people choose to watch some Oscar-winning movies. Obviously there is merit in both those books and those movies, but that’s not always why people want to watch them. An open question: does wanting to consume something for petty or superficial reasons make the consumption of that media itself petty or superficial? For instance, by choosing to read The Brothers Karamazov for petty reasons, does the actual reading of The Brothers Karamazov become ultimately pointless and superficial? I think no, but it’s a tricky question.

The biggest question is how the knowledge that the multimedia I consume will appear online affects what I choose to consume. Let’s start with choosing not to consume something. In the simplest case, I might choose not to read a marginal book or watch a “guilty pleasure” movie, because I’m aware that it would appear online. This is most frequently the case with movies. I have very little desire to listen to music that would embarrass me. Bad popular music like Lady Gaga or whatever else is out there simply has no pull on me. There’s so much else out there to listen to.

With books, the situation is different. Although some very bad books do have some pull on me (although I hate Dan Brown’s prose and counterfactualities, his subject matter is interesting and his work is addictive). I’d have no shame in admitting to reading Clive Cussler or John Grisham, both of whom I generally enjoy. But I think that people reading books is so regrettably rare these days that I read any book would be regarded as a positive.

Movies are a little different. I am a sucker for guilty pleasure movies, or movies I know are going to be mediocre but still watch. Such was the case with Sherlock Holmes, (astonishingly forgettable), as well as Funny People (better than expected). I do sometimes choose not to watch movies because I know they’re overwhelmingly vapid and I otherwise might fall under their trance.

I have noticed two different pressures on me. First, is a pressure away from “vulgar” entertainment (movies or indie rock) and towards “sophisticated” entertainment (books or jazz/classical/post-rock), although I use these terms extremely loosely. The pressure is not what I choose to consume within a medium but rather what medium I choose to consume.

The second pressure is not to shy away from consuming something, but rather to favor consuming something else. Although I could read Grisham or Cussler, I have so much on my “to read” pile that’s more highbrow -and ultimately more enjoyable and stimulating.

All this leads inevitably to the question: am I nuts, and is this pressure a good thing? There’s something a bit obsessive and, yes, crazy, about recording everything I consume, but I think that the pressure has been a good thing. What in the end I seek to control is how I am perceived, and how I want to be perceived is as someone I consider a better person than I currently am. Thus, there is a constant imagined outside pressure to improve who I am. It’s pretty much the same as the widely-given advice to tell people you’re dieting so you have outside pressure to perform, but in this case applied to consumption of media.

The fact that, in all likelihood, no one actually views any of my online logs does nothing to diminish this imagined outside presence.

Probably the most obnoxious statistics I’ve seen are of the “Every X seconds Y happens” type. They’re disingenuous and generally inaccurate. Here’s an example I saw on the TV screens during my ride on the PATH today:

Every 9 seconds an American student drops out of high school. [PDF]

Wow! What a statistic! But there’s no way to interpret it and I was suspicious. If we calculate it out:
60*60*24*365/9 = 3,504,000 students drop out of high school each year.

That’s an awful lot. There are about 22mm Americans from 14-18,. If we assume they’re evenly distributed, then there are 5.5mm students in each grade. That would be a 60% dropout rate! If you follow the sources in the PDF linked, you end up looking at this study. There you discover that the statistic is during school hours (7 hours day/180 days). Doing the math, you end up discovering that in reality 500k students drop out of high school. That’s still a big number but it’s much more plausible.

This sort of garbage happens all the time when you see statistics, and it’s infuriating. As mentioned above, statistics of the sort “Every x seconds y happens” are damning for the following reasons:

1. They’re impossible to interpret. Why not just say “500,000 students drop out of school year?”
2. They cause you to overestimate the real numbers. When you see “every 9 seconds,” you think “there must be a bajillion seconds each year” and so there are bajillion/9 students dropping out! The scale is far too granular.
3. They’re just wrong. Part of the reason this statistic is used is to make you feel guilty. “Every 9 seconds? Why, in the time until my train comes, 10 students will have dropped out!” But of course that’s not how it works. No one is dropping out of school at 7:30 PM. Of course this is obvious but why make a statistic more inaccurate than it has to be. It’s also difficult to say if it’s true when the facts concern the whole world and you don’t know how people are distributed across it. So someties you have to kinda assume it’s accurate.

There are a lot of annoying statistical cliches, but this kind is, to me, one of the most deceptive. And it’s really prevalent, too. After all, every 6 seconds an American reads a ridiculous statistic like this.

Everytime I hear someone called “un-American” it gives me chills. I can’t think of a progressive country X where “un-X” is as widely credited as it is here. Can you imagine someone being “un-Spanish” or “un-French” or “un-Japanese”? The idea is ludicrous. What about “un-German”? If your immediate thought on hearing that it is “neo-Nazi,” that’s the right reaction.

The idea of publicly lambasting someone for being “un-X,” that is, not being “patriotic” enough, or not toeing the line is incredibly authoritarian. In Soviet Russia you’d be disappeared for not being a communist or being “un-Russian,” and the same sort of thing happened in Nazi Germany. Those aren’t countries I want America to be like.

The very idea that there’s a prescribed “American” way is itself ridiculous, but I won’t go into that. And the whole idea of being un-American probably arose sometime around the Sacco & Vanzetti trials and really came to the front during the early 50s during the communist witch hunts. Not an auspicious beginning.

Suffice it to say, if I hear any public figure describing something as “un-American,” I immediately lose all respect for them.

Sometimes I wonder whether great historical figures ever had to deal with the utterly mundane details of modern life – or modern creativity. Did Mark Twain write to-do lists? Did Dostoevsky create outlines? I bet Shakespeare never worried about character development.

I know that Anthony Burgess always wrote one page at a time, from start to finish, and when he was done with that page, he was done. He never changed it or edited it.

All these tools that help me do anything creative always feel so childish or even demeaning.

When I was younger, I wondered why my father was always up at ungodly hours – 6:00 or sometimes earlier. Since I started working in July, though, I’ve slowly become incapable of sleeping much past 8 AM. Even if I stay up really late, I’ll only sleep until 9, and then nap later in the day. This never happened to me in elementary/middle/high school or college. Weird.

I just watched Cube again. It’s a very, very good movie. Thought provoking, simple, self-contained, and done on a shoestring budget (~250k US$). The summary: 6 people find themselves in a massive series of rooms with hatches on each wall. Some rooms contain death-traps. They have to figure out how to escape. That’s pretty much it.

The film is cheap, the dialogue spotty, the special effects bad and the actors tend to overact. Yet I’m tempted to say it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen. The sense of completeness, and the depth of character interactions, logic, and generally awesome premise make a huge difference. Add in the Kafkaesque setting, existentialist factor, and you’ve got a great movie.

There’s also the fact that it’s the best kind of horror. I don’t watch much of them, but I actually enjoy horror movies, but only a particular type (ok, two particular types, since I love zombie movies – but I enjoy those for the survivalist aspect). The horror movies I enjoy are atmospheric and cerebral, not gory or shocking. I like Hitchcock, not Hostel. It’s true that Cube is a little gory, but it’s amazingly tightly scripted and tense, and there are only 4-5 moments of gore in a 90 minute film – but the claustrophobic atmosphere completely dominates the film.

Highly recommended.

This article on recent events in the battle for animal welfare by Michael Pollan pretty much summarizes my opinion on the matter. People have an extraordinary ability to either dismiss these abuses outright (“It’s all just propaganda” – extremely well documented propaganda) or – perhaps worse – acknowledge that horrible treatment occurs, yet keep doing what they know is wrong. I’ve heard an astonishing number of people say “I know how poorly animals in agriculture are treated, but meat is just so tasty.” It boggles the mind, but I’ve heard it from enough people – probably half the people who I talk to about being vegetarian – that I have to assume that it’s some kind of natural psychological defense. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth. There’s no ethical defense for ignoring your own wrongdoing.

Also worth noting: 17% of America’s energy usage is directly related to agriculture – more energy than is used for transportation. Much of this is in the form of nitrogen-based fertilizers (fertilizers created from oil). When you consider that meat requires roughly 5kg of feed to produce 1kg of meat, you can see that there’s a heavy ecological (and national defense) cost associated with eating meat. And that completely ignores problems with deforestation, waste management, pollution or ethical treatment of animals.