Pater Familias

INTERNATIONAL ROCK-FLIPPING DAY. Annalisa suggested that I post on this event. I like back-yard science, but I don’t know whether I’ll do it.

BREW ANOTHER POT OF COFFEE. One of the advantages of watching a baseball game is that you don’t have to pay attention at every moment. There are 162 games in a season, and most fans select what they watch. There is some evidence now that ballplayers and umpires as well don’t always pay close attention. This story tells how a batter for the Angels and the umpire forgot what the ball and strike count was. The batter stayed at the plate after receiving the four balls needed for a base on balls and then struck out. In other words, he struck out on a four-two pitch. Further, Coco Crisp walked earlier in the year after only three balls. What is really remarkable is that in each case there were 24 other players on the disadvantaged team, and coaches, and a manager, and nobody objected. In contract bridge, there is no penalty for a revoke from dummy. Since all of dummy’s cards are face up, all of the players can see a misplay. If there is a revoke from dummy, the appropriate action, it is often said, is to brew another pot of coffee.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST–GERHARD SCHROEDER. Imagine the head of state of a country retiring and accepting a lucrative position with a company controlled by another country. It happened.The former head of state is Gerhard Schroeder, who was the Chancellor of Germany from late 1998 until November 2005. After he retired, he immediately took an executive position with Gazprom, a huge energy company controlled by the Russian state. Try to imagine an American President retiring and then immediately going to work for a foreign government. Inconceivable. One wonders about German policies during the Schroeder years.

“DO YOU WANT TO GO BOWLING?” An indicator of medical progress is this upbeat story about how catcher Koyie Hill has come back to the majors after a home workshop accident in which the thumb and three of the fingers on his throwing hand were cut off. Surgery was able to restore the fingers and thumb. Almost thirty years ago shortstop Roger Metzger had his career effectively ended by the loss of four fingertips in a similar accident. A teammate called him a month after the accident and, in an example of ballplayer humor, asked him if he wanted to go bowling.

HOW THE MIDWEST IS DISORIENTING. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by Hannah Karp about the increase in the number of freshmen from the Northeast at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The father of a freshman from New Jersey is quoted as saying, “It almost feels like something’s not right here. Everyone’s just so friendly.”

STENDHAL ON THE PROCESS OF TRAVELING. Annalisa’s e mail about enjoying all of a vacation trip came as I was reading some quotations from Stendhal in Graham Robb’s THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE. Stendhal described at length a trip he took on a steamboat on the Loire. Ten minutes after leaving Tours it was stuck on a sandbar for several hours. Stendhal wrote that he recounted the difficulties of the trip “to encourage the reader to take a cheerful view of ‘all the little mishaps that often spoil the jolliest expeditions–passports, quarantine, accidents.” The traveler should avoid ill humor “‘as a kind of madness that eclipses the objects of interest that may surround one and amongst which one will never pass again.’” Of course, one can extend the thought to the journey of life….

ENJOYING THE TRAVEL PROCESS. Annalisa sent me this post, from the blog of a lady who spent a year testing every theory she could find about how to be happy. In this post, the author tried one of her father’s two main admonitions: “Enjoy the process.” She adopted that policy on a family trip to Denmark, telling her family, “The airport is part of the fun, and the car ride will be part of the fun. The time spent waiting in line to go on the canal tour is just as important as the canal tour itself.”

APPLYING THE PAGE 69 TEST AND A RECOMMENDATION. I looked at page 69 of a book I am currently reading, Graham Robb’s THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE. On page 69 he is writing of how the French Revolution created “departements”, each with an administrative center of at most one day’s journey for its inhabitants. Robb says that the result of the Revolution’s egalitarian reforms accelerated the rise of an urban middle class which was not attached to local identities: “The historical divisions of France came to be associated with quaint provincials and primitive peasants.” So in this case, the Page 69 Test gets at the central argument of a great book. And I do think this is a great book, one of the best history books I have ever read.

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN RED WINE AND WHITE WINE. I posted previously on our family’s wine knowledge (”How big is it?”). As I recall, it was on the old television show RHODA that a character claimed to be a wine expert. The joke was that she would close her eyes and unerringly distinguish white wine from red wine. This article describes an experiment by a French researcher who presented 54 wine experts with an array of red wines for comparison which included some white wines which had been doctored with tasteless food coloring to look red. All the experts missed the white wine taste. Apparently people who know little about wine do a little better when faced with this kind of deception. Teller, the magician, says that it is easier to fool experts. Of course, all of this casts some doubts on Malcolm Gladwell’s argument in BLINK.

THE PAGE 69 TEST. Annalisa sent me this link, which passes on Marshall McLuhan’s recommendation that in deciding whether you want to read a book, you should decide whether you enjoy reading page 69 of the book. I have suggested to Annalisa in the past that she read the first page of a book in making a decision. Of course you have to be willing to stop reading if you don’t like the first page. Tyler Cowen in DISCOVER YOUR INNER ECONOMIST says that you should always be willing to treat “sunk costs as sunk”, to “let bygones be bygones.” He says he follows this precept by finishing only one out of every ten books he starts. His test is, “Is this the best possible book that I could be reading right now of all the books in the world?” He applies the same test to movies. He writes of happily choosing to see only parts of four movies in a single day.