I went to an afternoon baseball game Thursday. The temperature was 72 degrees and the sky was cloudless. But despite looking like a giant mall from the outside, the ballpark has surprisingly few entrances so there's a lot of walking in crowds to get in. I suppose it's not much worse than Dodger Stadium, but since that's built into a hillside it's less obvious there. Once I got inside, the sightlines were lousy because the seat angle is too shallow. You have to crane to see the plate, and the staircase railings are intrusive (although they do use glass to minimize it, that's a bandaid after the fact).

So I was grumpy, despite all the suntan lotion seeping into my pores, and the only Dodger paraphanalia I had was my pencil, which needed sharpening. I was pretty much in a funk from the third inning to about the eighth inning, when my mood, very surprisingly, lifted considerably, and from then on I had a lovely time. (Correlating this information with the box score is left as an exercise to the reader.)

How did the new scorecard do? See for yourself: Front side, back.

Success

• The light background lines work really well. They are visible as guides but still keep the pencil marks most prominent.
• The pitch count area is a good graphical representation; the difference between pitchers is very obvious. Lawrence was on cruise control into the 8th inning, and was pulled at 83 pitches and 7+ IP only because the manager got nervous. (By rule of thumb, 100 pitches is when you start to think about pulling a pitcher, and 120+ is a danger zone for injury. For fragile pitchers, such as Pedro Martinez, the numbers are 80 and 100, but fragile, excellent pitchers can throw 9 innings in under a hundred pitches, so that doesn't reduce Pedro's value much.) Dessens was the opposite, throwing 93 pitches! in four innings. Dessens is a righty, the Padres lineup was heavy with lefties, and he appears afraid to throw inside to them. So he kept aiming for a magical spot six inches off the plate where nobody could possibly hit the ball, but only Tom Glavine gets strikes called there, so it was pretty brutal to watch. I'm stunned that Dessens only gave out four walks, and only had a single full count in twenty batters.
• The out counts in shaded, unbordered discs are nicer than the previous little circles with black borders.

Failure

• My previous scorecards had player # after player name, and position in a little box. For some reason I reversed it, and it screwed me up. I will change it back.
• Since I've stopped trying to mimic newspaper box scores, the only purpose of the player stats columns on the right is to show, at a glance, who had a good night. Having five columns, two of which are derivative, isn't helping that. I could replace OBP and SLG with OPS, but then I have to figure out an easy way to calculate that.
• I started by keeping the pitch counts on the same side as the pitchers' teams, but that's the opposite side as the batters, so after two innings I switched to the other way, which is much easier since you can just count on top and draw lines on the bottom. I think I'm going to put the pitcher stats on the same page, which means that each page will show one team's batting and the other team's pitching. But I guess that makes sense.
• The pitch count boxes can be much smaller. I went with four boxes across because I wanted to use shading to show at a glance whether or not the pitcher is staying at the magic ~12 pitches an inning for a complete game. You can see that pretty well in the first seven innings of the front side. But I ended up with a checkerboard pattern and a lot of base-twelve math. It should be easy just by looking at the lines to see the pitch count. I think I'll make it five or maybe 10 pitches across, add counters, and shade in a stairstep pattern.

I also found this site with lots of baseball scorecards. Some are intended for youth games or other participatory stuff like coaching, and I did pick up the cool idea of putting everything on one side of one (extra-large) sheet of paper. But the real problem with all of them is that they are ugly. They would all benefit from a hefty sprinkling of Tufte; specifically, they have terrible data-ink ratios. That is, they have a lot of heavy black lines and grids for a small amount of writing, especially given that the writing may be in pencil. The Mk 2 Scorecard was also guilty of this, but I believe I have corrected the problem with the Mk 3 and, after I add the refinements outlined above, will try submitting it to the aforementioned site.

Conveniently timed for my review of Wild Blue Yonder, a 1988 book about the B-1B bomber's history and the military-industrial complex (published in 1988), is this fresh news:

Controversy continued to swirl Monday over U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's sale of his Del Mar home to a Nevada company which then resold the home at a $700,000 loss.

Mitchell J. Wade is a corporate officer for the Nevada company that bought the home, records with the Nevada Secretary of State show.

The real estate deal has raised ethical questions because Wade is also president of a Washington D.C.-based contracting firm that has benefited from millions of dollars in defense contracts, some of which were approved by a committee on which Cunningham is a member.—WILLIAM FINN BENNETT - Staff Writer, North County Times.

George Bush ... addressed his visitor as "President Abbas", and not accidentally. The use of this appellation was a deliberate choice.

...

During the negotiations which led to the 1993 Oslo agreement, there was much controversy about the title appropriate for Yasser Arafat. The Palestinians demanded that he be called "President", the Israelis agreed only to refer to him as "Chairman".

Why? Well, "president" sounds like a head of state. States have presidents. Ordinary institutions normally have chairpersons. The Israeli negotiators did not agree at all that the Palestinian Authority, which was set up by the agreement, should have the attributes of a state.

... Arabic ... uses the same word for president and chairman. Both are called Ra'is (from Ras, head). Therefore the agreement says, in all its three versions (English, Hebrew and Arabic) that the chief of the Palestinian Authority will bear the title of "Ra'is".

Since then, all the Israeli media, as well as all Israeli politicians and diplomats, insisted on calling Arafat "Chairman of the Palestinian Authority". Nowadays, they stick this label on Abu-Mazen.

Therefore, when Bush calls his guest "President Abbas", it is a slap in the face for Israeli diplomacy and an intentional boost for the prestige of the Palestinian leader.—Uri Avnery

In his latest column, Avnery explains some of the linguistic and technical subtleties in Israel/Palestine struggle. Points accrue to Bush for doing something constructive.

1. It's a criminal affair with no significant implications, and so it's none of our business
2. It's celebrity gossip and so it's none of our business

The San Diego Union-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times all had Jackson headlines above the fold. Only the Wall Street Journal had a respectable front page.

Wild Blue Yonder, Nick Kotz

One of my favorite non-fiction genres: the journalistic reporting at book length. Nick Kotz reports on the history of the B-1 bomber, from precursor concepts in the 1950s up to 1988, shortly after it entered production. Essentially, the B-1 bomber is designed to blow up the Soviet Union, a mission which is now obsolete and for which the B-1 was never a good choice. And politics is mostly to blame.

Most interesting for me, from a hard news standpoint, were the well-footnoted descriptions of how the Air Force and other services play politics. They maintain voting scorecards on all members of Congress, use strategic military decisions as bargaining decisions such as trading base locations for funding votes, and generally place narrow service-specific goals above the national defense and the national welfare. (Some of this behavior is illegal, but the only prosecution I can remember is the Boeing tanker case, which was about the revolving door between industry and the Air Force, but not about illegal lobbying of Congress.) Manipulation is also standard in presidential politics; in 1960 Eisenhower restored a bomber development program, against his own military judgment, solely to put money into California to help his VP, Nixon, against Kennedy. That's only the first example; each president since has shameful decisions to answer for.

Kotz goes overboard ascribing positive motives to the guilty parties, and asserts repeatedly that they are surely all very concerned to make sure that America remains well defended. I think that's almost completely BS. The evidence shows that even well-meaning individuals are quickly forced to adopt the party line. The basic political system we use to fund military procurement inevitably leads the services to ask for impossible things, the companies to promise to provide them, and everybody involved to cover up the inevitable failures and cost overruns and pretend that everything's perfect.

Kotz doesn't offer any solutions, but it seems to me that the root of the problem is peacetime procurement. The maintenance of fully staffed, war-ready standing armies with continuously upgraded equipment is a Cold War innovation, and it's a bad idea. Wartime profiteering, ugly as it is, may be less egregious than what people are getting away with in peacetime. Especially at a time when the United States faces no significant military threat, maintaining arms spending equal to the sum of the rest of the world combined clearly shows a confusion of problem and solution. Even if you believe that terrorism wants a military solution, surely the B-1 bomber, Crusader Artillery, and other machismo-oriented weapons systems are not part of it. But because these projects offer prestige and promotion to military officers, money to contractors, and re-election credits for politicians, we're going to pay for them for the forseeable future.

The Great Unraveling, Paul Krugman

Audio book, read by the author.

Of course the catalog of self-serving Administration lies is upsetting, and going back even four years reveals that the predictions continue to underestimate the will of the Bush partisans. But that's practically background noise by now. The new upset I got from listening to this collection of Krugman columns is that he keeps straying away from the economic issues that he illustrates so well. Instead, he reports and analyzes political misdeeds, and here he's adequate but not markedly better than any of the myriad sources for same. Please focus on the economics, Mr Krugman; it's where your real value-add lies.

The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein.

A classic example of how to lose an argument even while proving your points. Finkelstein's thesis is that there exists a Holocaust Industry of Jews who profit financially and morally from exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust, and in doing so live up to the the most revolting anti-Semitic stereotypes. Although Finkelstein presents strong evidence and I believe the basics of his argument, his perpetual venom and contempt, and the way his prose assumes you share these feelings, even before he has started making his case, are very off-putting.

The bulk of the book illustrates how several international Jewish agencies collaborated with American politicians to blackmail the Swiss banks, who had profited from Jews fleeing the Nazis. Under international and American pressure, the Swiss Banks agreed to pay for a US$500 million external audit and $1.25 billion non-refundable advance payment to Holocaust survivors. The audit has since turned up only a few tens of millions of dollars, and additional audits, even with extremely lenient parameters, are unlikely to uncover substantially more accounts.

Finkelstein charges that the Holocaust Industry estimates of numbers of survivors go up when it is expedient to get money, and go down when it comes time to disburse money to the survivors themselves. Another charge is that the Holocaust Industry professionals, the officials of these organizations and museums and the like, frequently offer themselves high six-figure salaries, hire friends and family, take junkets, and generally live high on the hog on money that was theoretically earmarked for survivors.

Finkelstein points out that the United States had at least as bad a record in refusing refugees and confiscating bank accounts as Switerland, but that the Holocaust Industry has not pursuing these claims with any vigor because that would be a harder political fight.

Finkelstein also makes the intriguing argument that, by insisting on the uniqueness of the Jewish holocaust and marginalizing all other Nazi victims, as well as other victims of genocide,

Perhaps the strongest argument in support of Finkelstein's attacks is simply this: if "never again" is the justification for the Holocaust Industry, where is their leadership in intervening in possible or real genocides around the world, such as Rwanda and now Sudan?

On Monday morning, after six months of Republican posturing that an evil liberal cabal in King County had stolen the gubernatorial election, stubborn GOP candidate Dino Rossi got his comeuppance. Let's not mince words: Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges methodically destroyed the Republican case in his hour-long recitation from the bench, unraveling months of spin and dismissing as meritless the wild charges of fraud from Rossi lawyers. By the time Bridges finished, Rossi's hopes of overturning the election were over. His defeat was so total that at a Monday evening press conference, despite previous promises to appeal an unfavorable ruling to the state supreme court, Rossi threw in the towel.—The Stranger

After many mistakes and dead ends, I have finally completed the newest version of the baseball scorecard. I made a serious error in my approach which led to many problems: I mistook a high-quality picture on screen for my end product, which was actually a high-quality printout. I had a nice SVG file to look at six weeks ago, but getting it on paper was a great trial. First I tried using the Adobe SVG plug-in in Windows, but that produced a cut-off, distorted page. Then I tried converting it to a bitmap using the batik java tools, but Kinko's choked on the large 600dpi .tif files.

Next I bought a new Samsung Scx-4100 laser printer, which is pleasingly less-than-catastrophic linux support. However, linux printing remains nightmarish to the point where I consider any successful print job, even of a spreadsheet or web page, a blessed event, and the idea (or reality) of printing high-resolution bitmap graphics from linux would require entirely too many dark rituals.

So, I rebooted my laptop to Windows and plugged in the printer. First I tried printing the SVG directly, but the Adobe plugin and two other SVG tools each producing charmingly different, charmingly wrong output. One changed the fonts, one ignored the circles and diamonds, one just shrunk everything. Next, I tried printing the high-quality, 10mb bitmap from Paint, to no avail. Finally I found a free graphics viewer/printer called Brava! which could load and print 600dpi pages acceptably well.

So the process to create my scorecard is:

1. Edit the source SVG files in emacs and preview with batik squiggle.
2. Run this batch script to change them to tif files:

   #!/bin/sh
   for file in baseball_scorecard baseball_scorecard_back
     do
     java -Xmx800m -jar /usr/local/batik-1.6/batik-rasterizer.jar -dpi 600 -m image
   /tiff $file.svg
     convert -compress rle $file.tif $file.tif
   done
   

3. Transfer files to windows
4. Load files in Brava!
5. Print one side
6. Reload the paper upside-down and backwards
7. Print the other side

As a result of this, I had to use the mark 2 scorecard to record Rickey Henderson's debut with the independent Class A San Diego Surf Dawgs (sic). At age 46, Ricky didn't get invited to any major-league training camps this spring, probably because of a batting average barely above the Mendoza line. Thanks to his ability to walk, his on-base percentage is still a perfectly competitive .320 to .360, so I think he's not as washed up as traditional stats make him appear, but he's certainly not a player for the future. Still, he sold out the (San Diego State University) ballpark, drew a walk, hit a towering double to deep center, and stole a base, so no complaints from me.

Now that I have the new model, I'm eager to get to another game and try it out. But probably not a Dawgs' game.