The discussion about What's the Matter With Kansas? interested me because it brought up a new wrinkle. Executive summary:

Premisses:  Red-state voters are concerned about family values.
            Budgets express values by funding or defunding programs.
            Bush Administration budgets cut funding for many programs
              valuable to red-state voters.

Hypothesis: Red-state voters will not support the Bush administration 
            on the basis of values.

Evidence:   Red-state voters do support the Bush administration on the
            basis of values.

Conclusion: Does not compute!

The new wrinkle (to me) is this proposed explanation: By family values, red-state voters mean, primarily, a sexual code of conduct. "People are frantic about homosexuality, abortion/easy sex, kinky Teletubbies, and the whole nine yards. The lack of interest in money makes sense in this context. People tend to be willing to sacrifice and die for what they believe in, and, let's face it, what they believe is that sex can destroy everything they care about. ... There is no point talking money to people who fear losing their way of life. We need to address the issues they care about."

I'm looking for an OLAP VAR for a client. (OnLine Analytic Processing Value-Added Resellers.) In English, that's a consulting company which sells you an OLAP software program and sets it up for you. OLAP software program lets you do lots of fancy reports on your data. That is to say, OLAP programs should be really good at handling databases and letting you do things like make a pretty pie chart of how many candy bars you are selling in Western Idaho on weekends, and which stores do the best business relative to the per-capita income of the surrounding census tracts. Given that data handling is their "core competency", it's disconcerting to use their website to search for VARs in California and find some in New Jersey.

After Dodger rookie D.J. Houlton kept pace with Roger Clemens for seven innings, I was inspired to a frenzy of data analysis and some wrestling with the OpenOffice graphing system. I now have some pictures to show, which should clear things up.

Comparing pitchers directly is very difficult. Numbers like wins and losses are very easily shown to have little intrinsic value, since they are strongly dependent on how a pitcher's team performs. Earned Run Average is more useful, but favors pitchers with short, excellent careers, and also varies somewhat year to year, most notably in the 1960s when pitchers became so dominant that the height of pitchers' mounds was dropped from 15" to 10" to restore balance. For my comparison I used one of the newfangled nerd stats, WARP-3. It measures how many wins a particular player is responsible for based on their performance, compared to a hypothetical "replacement-level" player, taking into consideration the quality of opponents and the bias of the home and away parks, balanced over all seasons since 1890 including adjustments for different season lengths, and quite possibly incorporating the phases of the moon and ladies' skirt lengths.

This all means that WARP-3, or "wins" as I'll call it, has many nice properties. It's directly comparable across different decades or centuries; it's cumulative, so that a pitcher with 15 wins is better than one with 10. It's relative to a baseline, so that a pitcher hanging on past their prime will accumulate fewer and fewer wins even in full seasons, and can actually lose points if they perform badly enough. And it has a clear intrinsic meaning: if pitcher X had a WARP-3 of 10 this year, then his team won 10 more games than it would have with a generic replacement (eg, a journeyman or unremarkable rookie who is barely able to compete at the major league level).

With all that in mind, let's look at the first chart. It shows the career performances of the best currently active pitchers in baseball, Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and Curt Schilling. I added the best major league pitcher ever, Walter Johnson, for comparison. (The "Big Train" pitched for the Washington Senators from 1907 to 1927 and is consistently considered one of the top five pitchers ever. By WARP-3, he's the best.)

First, we can see that Clemens is on the verge of overtaking Walter Johnson as the best pitcher ever. Second, we can that Maddux and Clemens have traded the lead a few times (Clemens is a few years older than Maddux; this chart lines them up by age, so Maddux is shown four years behind Clemens even though both are still pitching), but Maddux has been falling behind for several years. Maddux last had the lead at age 35; Maddux's 2002 season brought his total to 144.2 wins, Clemens was 35 in 1999 and his total was then 143.6. Since then, Clemens has rebounded while Maddux has declined.

Meanwhile, Pedro Martinez is only slightly behind either of them at age 33, but he'll have to maintain his current plateau for another six or eight years to reach their level. The Big Unit (Randy Johnson) and Curt Schilling are well behind by age, but Johnson has been able to log good years up through age 42, whereas Schilling has already lost most of 2005 to injury and is unlikely to catch Johnson, much less the others. Still, everyone but Schilling is certainly headed for the Hall of Fame, and Schilling is knocking on the door.

How do they look in the context of the best pitchers in history?

Clemens is in second place for all time. Maddux is in fourth, but unlikely to move up. Martinez will have to stay healthy and motivated for years to break into the top 20. Walter Johnson really stands out. Bob Feller had an even better start, but that flat line from age 23 to 26 (when he was serving in World War II) cuts him down brutally. He roared back in 1946 with the fourth-best season ever, but was ineffective by age 33. Randy Johnson's late bloom is the only thing keeping him in the second tier. Nolan Ryan, many people's pick for best, was good but not great for a very long time, but still doesn't break into the top ten. Phil Niekro started later than anybody else but played until age 48.

One name commonly found in this company but missing on this chart is Sandy Koufax. Although he was utterly dominant for four years, his peak coincided with Dodger Stadium (which strongly benefits pitchers) and with the pitcher-dominant 1960s. His career was short, and his peak, though anecdotally awesome, was less impressive in context. By WARP-3, Walter Johnson's 1912-1915 stands above all others, with Pedro's 1997-2000 and Maddux's 1992-1995 tied for distant second. (Looking at relative ERA, gives similar results.)

And that Dodger game where the Dodgers' rookie pitcher matched Clemens for seven innings? The Astros won 3-2 in the ninth. The National League Western Division is the weakest in the majors, and the Dodgers are sinking towards last in it. The Dodgers disabled list has claimed their entire starting outfield, half of the starting infield, the closer, and a big fraction of the rotation. If they could field the DL instead of the healthy players, they could easily win the division. Or at least tie with Barry Bonds solo.

A Leap in the Dark, John Ferling

A very readable account of the American revolution, from the mid-18th century to Jefferson's inauguration. Although six or seven hundred pages long, it is very well balanced: readable but not too chatterful, fairly wide in scope but deep in parts, with detailed accounts where appropriate, liberal quoting from primary sources, and summaries of events elsewhere. It provides a good sense of the character of the main American players, though it's short on the British, French, and Spanish sides. Ferling mostly avoids cheerleading, at least until the last few pages, and does not whitewash the players. Economic interests are among the key motivators for most of the Founding Fathers most of the time. For example, Washington's political interest in nationalism and western expansion, not to mention his pre-revolutionary military career, align conveniently with his frontier land speculation. And concern for his image is integral to many of his second-term actions.

It might be a leap for anyone completely unfamiliar with the time period, and it's too clearly one person's interpretation of current scholarship to be taken completely at face value, but I found it perfectly well suited to moving my understanding forward a few notches. In particular, Ferling shows clearly and comprehensively that partisanship was endemic to the system even as soon as Washington's first administration, and Washington himself was the first and last nonpartisan candidate. I had had a notion that there was always dirty politicing in American history, but this book spells out with plenty of examples the depth of vitriol in the newspapers and the rumor campaigns. People like Karl Rove have invented new varieties of filth, but they're just variations on a theme and nothing new even in depth or shamelessness. I was a bit surprised to find the extent to which democracy was a dirty word for most of the aristocrats involved.

All in all, an excellent book and a good read.

I've fallen behind about a year in concert reviews. Briefly:

Ani DiFranco. Saw her at a concert hall downtown. The audience was predominantly swooning adolescent girls, who were so self-absorbed in their rapture that it wasn't much fun to be in the audience but not on their trip. Perhaps Ani felt the same, because she ended a very tight, pleasent set in about 70 minutes, including the brief encore. Opening act Andrew Bird was entrancing but hard to hear over the hubbub.

David Byrne. At Humpries, an out-door venue in the San Diego Bay. Both intimate and cramped, with a criminal shortage of bathrooms. The opening act was lousy and featured a spastic dancer on stage; they were deservedly ignored. Later, doing something with a catchy latin beat and Spanish lyrics, Bryne had the whole audience eating out of his palm with the slightest of shimmys and rump twists. He is a truly incandescent musician, and at his best sings about life's bitterness with optimism shining through the cracks.

On the minus side, the second half of the show was very heavy on Talking Heads hits, and the guest Extra Action Marching Band, though as engaging and talented a bunch of degenerate San Francisco street musicians as you could hope to find, was more a distraction than an enhancement, especially as they played to the end and then did the encore in lieu of Byrne.

Indigo Girls, at Humpries. A perfectly nice retrospective show, mostly stripped down to the two of them with guitars or banjos and still producing, especially in numbers like Chickenman, plenty of racket. A few songs from almost every album, going way back, and a mix of warhorses and less common songs. Each did one solo performance, and these really highlighted Emily's unfortunate tendency to put words into the lyrics and bend them to the melody and rhythm without any regard for their natural meter, and in contrast Amy's sharp-as-a-tack knack for the beat. I could easily go a decade without hearing Galileo or Closer to Fine again live, but then this was my nth IG show.

Steve Earle at the Belly Up, a club in Solana Beach. He looks old and shrunken and pained, plays as hard as ever (I would guess, never having seen him play while young and coked up), sounds ragged yet tuneful, and flirted discomfitingly with the saucy young opening singer. His fervent political and social positions, though well-aligned with mine, were hard to swallon in the fresh despair of January 2005. He's been around long enough and faced enough hardship that I would have preferred some more comforting elder wisdom about hanging in there in dark times instead of a song with the hollow chorus, "the revolution starts now" when it very obviously doesn't. I was glad to finally see him play in person, and enjoyed it, but it was an uncomfortable show.

Gomez at the Belly Up. Saw them twice. Musically excellent, but their songs are mismashes that with jarring stylistic jumps every few bars. Whenever they start to build a groove, they abandon it for something less promising. Live, they still manage to pull it off with drunken charisma. The patrons of the Belly Up, however, are drunken but devoid of charisma, and if you aren't there early enough to get a seat, it's a bad place to catch a show sober.

Sports journalism is traditionaly the weakest branch of journalism in the US, and it's not like the average journalist is a genius, but this article features some of the dumbest writing I've ever seen. Sports Illustrated writer John Donovan:

No regular starter in baseball over the past 17 years has been as consistently successful ... as Greg Maddux. ... Maddux -- there's no sugarcoating this -- is getting hit these days, maybe harder than he ever has in his career.

...

His ERA, the mark that once set him apart, climbed to a galling 5.02.

The dart-throwers out there will insist that the 39-year-old Maddux is finished, that his stuff has stopped moving, that hitters are finally on to him ... The problem with that assessment is that, despite getting hit on occasion, Maddux still wins. Sometimes it's hard to figure out how he does it. But he does.

Maddux (who, before Tuesday's game, enjoyed the fifth-best run support in the National League at more than six runs a start) is clearly no longer the pitcher who won four straight Cy Young awards (1992-95). Still, he is the only pitcher in history to win 15 or more games in 17 straight seasons (1988-2004). During that run, he boasted a 2.83 ERA.

He is 7-6 -- that's more wins than anyone on that decimated Cubs' staff, and more losses, too -- even with his embarrassingly large 5.02 ERA. ... But even with that ballooning ERA, Maddux has proven his worth. ...Somehow, still, he keeps baffling.

Let me get this straight, John. Maddux is giving up an average of five runs per game, which is much worse than his career average of about three. But because he has a seven win, six loss record this season, he isn't actually a worse pitcher; he just has a mysterious ability to keep winning. Oh, and paranthetically, he's had the good fortune that his team is scoring, on average, over six runs each time he starts.

I know that serious mathematical analysis of baseball is only slowly penetrating the inside circles of baseball, but I feel confident that even my readers without any knowledge of baseball will be able to uncover the mystery of Maddux's winning record.

The Joss Whedon tv show Firefly had many winning attributes. One of the most charming was that the characters frequently spoke in Chinese, usually to swear. Firefly is a western space opera. The episodes of the first reason run through many basic Western plots, but with a spaceship. It's notable for the excellent writing and frequently superior acting. The science is deliberately vague, and the overall tone is pretty much anti-Star Trek. The characters often interject in Chinese in a way that, based on my observations of how people in other countries include English in their speech, is quite typical in reaction to a foreign, dominant language. The original pitch, I'm given to understand, included a racial element in that the Han Chinese were the dominant culture and language. The captain was on the losing side of a war and presumably in the original context he would have been on the losing cultural side as well; the authorities on many planets would have been Han; the two upper-class fugitives who join the crew would have been Han; etc. All that remains of this very cool background idea is some mis-pronounced Chinese dialog and big Chinese characters stenciled onto the sets. The show was cancelled in the first year, though a medium-budget movie is due for theatrical release this year.

Meanwhile, this site with translations should be an invaluable companion to the DVDs.

Serenity, Part 1

Ta1ma1 de5!

他媽的！・他妈的！
Ta ma duh!
"F*** me blind!"
—Mal, on learning of approaching Alliance cruiser

• ta1ma1 de5
: [vulgar] Damn (it)!, F***!; ta1ma1 [literally] his ma (ta1 he; [understood de5 possessive marker]; ma1 ma); de5 possessive marker

This is one of the few bits I already know, and I question the translation. Ta ma duh is literally "his mother's", so I would think that a more ideomatic translation would be simply "motherf***er". I would certainly welcome more input on this point.