Category: Sunday Judgment

Newbie Soccer Thoughts

Kyle 2 Comments

I am a systems person; I enjoy watching new systems in action and trying to figure out what makes them tick. I’m also, as one of my CPE supervisors pointed out to me this week, an associative person; I like making connections between seemingly disparate things (both a blessing and a curse in the CPE context, let me tell you).

As such, I’ve had a field day–or would it be a pitch day?–watching World Cup games this weekend with my my über-enthusiastic, half-German girlfriend. I’ve been dipping my toes into soccer’s waters off and on since the last Cup, but it’s starting to get a bit more serious. Among the questions I’ve been pondering are the following: why don’t more Americans like soccer, and am I allowed to support* Germany in the plausible event that Germany and the U.S. meet in the Round of 16 (apparently it would happen if Germany wins its group and the U.S. takes second in its, or vice versa)?

Regarding the former, my working hypothesis is built on the lens of looking at the two most dominant presences on the American sports landscape: football** (it dominates our current sports culture; we can’t get enough of it) and baseball (it dominated our past sports culture; we’re slowly abandoning it). I’m coming to the conclusion that soccer is more like baseball than football. It’s subtler. It requires the fan to have a greater appreciation of small details and a more patient orientation toward brief, intense action rather than the throb of regular scoring. And, just like in the game where the best players only succeed about a third of the time, soccer doesn’t always reward brute effort. Kristin caught this telling gem in the Times this morning: “It was a characteristic American effort, full of resolve[***] instead of beauty.”

This comment actually sort of leads me to my second question. Many people rightly sing the praises of international soccer’s coolest attribute: that the teams’ styles often mirror their national personalities. And a major reason I want to support Germany in this tournament is that they play, well, like Germans: organized, patient, attentive to detail. Somewhere around the tenth minute today, I said, “They look like they’re spending more of their energy thinking than playing.” Like a Bo Ryan basketball team, they’re patient, plotting, and sometimes plodding. They’re like my parent’s Volkswagon Cabrio, which was a humorous and kinda futile attempt at a midlife-crisis car. They’re not a sexy pick. They’re a sensible one. Sounds like my kinda team.

My problem is this: I’m not so sure we get to pick our loyalties. I grew up a Pirates fan because I lived in the town in Florida where they Spring Trained (this was before the Marlins). And then, when I moved to Milwaukee, I became a Brewers fan. “Root, root, root for the home team” is not easily dismissed in my sports worldview. I think Americans who have spent substantial time in countries that actually care about soccer are well within their rights to transfer their allegiances abroad. But that’s not me. Am I stuck with Team USA until they’re out?

What do you think about sports allegiances? Do we get to be primarily aligned with the team that makes us say, “I like they way they play”? Or is there something bigger at stake?

* Pitch instead of field and support instead of root for are among the charming vocabulary upgrades you get when you watch soccer (others: match instead of the more pedestrian game and side instead of team, which is fun even though the connotations are troubling). But see below for a major vocabulary pet peeve.

** If you are an American living in America and have not spent significant time in a foreign country (that’s context information your hearers usually have), please don’t call soccer football. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s kind of obnoxious and typically American that we call our much more provincial game by the same name that everybody else (more accurately) uses for the world’s most popular sport. But you only confuse things when, as an American having a conversation in America, you use the non-American convention. Not only is it confusing, it’s kinda obnoxious. It’s like insisting on calling the theater the theatre, spelling gray with an e, or putting periods and commas outside of quotation marks: nice idea, classier perhaps, but you’re in the wrong country. I want to be British too–that doesn’t give me license to punctuate or spell as if I were.

*** Even I can see that this is why an America-Germany matchup will just be a train wreck. The Americans will be stubbornly flying all over the pitch wearing themselves out while the Germans very patiently pass the hell out of the ball and dissect their opponents’ feeble defense (especially if Howard is out).

Missing, Presumed Fed

Kyle 1 Comment

It may appear that I’ve pulled a succession of Lig Lury, Jr.’s these last two weeks’ worth of evenings. However, this editor hasn’t been out grabbing food every night. I’ve actually just been trying to recover and catch up a bit from the semester, to get moving on summer research, and to take care of some business I’ve been putting off for a long time. More to come on that final front soon, I expect.

In other news…

This editor, I just discovered, is awesome. You should read his blog, especially in light of the sad track record of Sunday Judgment recently. All the magnificently nerdy copy-editor talk notwithstanding (my favorite line, regarding Myanmar v. Burma: “In any event, the State Department does not hold sway over our house style.”), perhaps the most compelling reason to check out McIntyre’s blog is here.

And this is so cool I won’t even bother with an introduction, though I’ll mention that I was sad it didn’t get mentioned here. Friends of mine and I have been talking about taking a “spontaneously generated adventure” one of these days; let me know if you want to join in.

Sunday Judgment VII

Kyle

Today’s lesson: not all copy is created equal.

If you have the final responsibility (or even part of it) for the copy in some publication, I submit to you that it’s a good rule of thumb to spend twice as much time copy editing the text in headlines, captions, etc. than you would on the same volume of text in some random paragraph. Why? Because everyone loves pointing out mistakes, and there’s a much greater chance of others finding them when they’re in conspicuous places. Cruelly, there’s also a decreased chance of you, the copy editor, finding them, since it’s easy to take their correctness for granted (“oh, I would have noticed an error in that cutline already”).

It’s 8:52 a.m. CST, and an online caption for a photo in the New York Times Magazine‘s “Young Gay Rites” article still has a pretty whopping error. Can you find it before they do?

Special Combined Sunday Judgment/Hacker Within: March Madness

Kyle

Today’s subject: the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

First, a couple of confessions.

(1) It’s a bit of a stretch to throw the Hacker Within label on this post, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to integrate my two regular features in one post.

(2) Since I have picks to make, and also fair number of goals for genuine productivity during this week (which is spring break at UW-Madison), I’m totally half-assing this post with respect to both the commitment-to-quality-science-writing and commitment-to-meaningful-integration-of-technical-
and-non-technical-material ambitions of this blog. Thus, the whole integration thing in (1) is also a stretch.

So here we go. First, Sunday Judgment. If you’ve been watching Sports Center or listening to any sports talk radio this week, you know that the trendiest game in NCAA basketball journalism is coming up with clever synonyms for bubble team. (See especially this week’s Mike Tirico Show.) Not surprisingly, this trend makes for good radio and plenty of fun armchair etymology (or maybe reverse-etymology?).

However, this seemingly harmless game reminded me of a serious problem that mars a lot of college writing. Call it synonymic hyper-proliferation. Or restless diction. Or mythesaurus rex.

Actually, please call it only one of those things.

I can’t tell you how many student writers feel pressured to substitute synonyms when repeatedly referring to an important theoretical construct or technical term. Of course, variety is an important attribute of all good writing, and it’s often a bad idea to use the same word twice in one sentence, in the same position in subsequent sentences, etc. But, more often than not, if you’re writing a paper about, say, disciplinary matrices, it’s a mistake to give in to the urge to come up with a million different ways of saying disciplinary matrix. These precise terms come about for a reason; don’t feel pressured to over-substitute.

OK, onto some quasi-Hacker Within material. For reasons of, well, basically realizing it was a huge waste of time, I’ve abandoned draft.gms, my probably futile attempt to turn my fantasy baseball draft into a huge assignment-problem-like GAMS model. Naturally, I’ve re-channeled my silly interest in applying mathematical programming to, say, sporting events and dice games in bars, and so I wanted to point you in the direction of resources for using the power of science to make better March Madness picks.

You may have heard last year about some professors at Georgia Tech who published a paper in Naval Research Logistics called “A logistic regression/Markov chain model for NCAA basketball.” If memory serves, the UW-Madison libraries don’t carry this one, but it looks like Kvam and Sokol have posted a manuscript of the paper here. There’s also a kinda funny “powerpoint style equivalent” to the non-mathematical summary they wrote, presumably for all the media (I heard about it via some ESPN article last year that also included an “insider look” at how the oddsmakers go about their business). I haven’t read the whole thing, but even checking out the first few pages gives you an appreciation for their methodology. If you need some help with Markov chains (I certainly did), this AMS primer is pretty comprehensible.

Not interested in Markov chains? No problem. Profs. Kvam and Sokol make the output of their model, applied to this year’s game results, available here. You can choose between three versions of the model that take one of the types of input data, margin of victory (MOV), into account in various ways. Not surprisingly, the “pure” strategy (which doesn’t cap the contribution of MOV) is best. Nevertheless, the selection committee, which at least last year had access to the LRMC, won’t use tools that consider MOV (for sportsmanship reasons, presumably). Anyway, if you’re interested in trying this, just choose a model and use the rankings to pick each match-up. And remember: the pure LRMC is the most successful systematic ranking system available.

Couple of thoughts:

(1) Check out the top eight teams for each of the three rating schemes–
Pure: Kansas, Memphis, UCLA, Duke, North Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Clemson
Capped MOV: Kansas, Memphis, Duke, UCLA, Tennessee, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Stanford
No MOV: North Carolina, UCLA, Memphis, Duke, Tennessee, Kansas, Texas, Wisconsin

This is kinda neat. You can see the effects of all those close games North Carolina won reflected in their placement under each model. Are they actually overrated? I dunno, but I like the sound of it.

(2) See, Wisconsin, shoulda been a two seed, no matter how you look at it (or, rather, no matter how these two industrial engineers looked at it).

(3) Pull a Joe Morgan if you like, either by criticizing the very idea of using stats to predict this stuff or by gloating when the inevitabilities of statistical randomness play out and the models break down from time to time. But please don’t say that this kind of analysis sucks the life out of playing or watching these games. That mentality totally missed the point. Of course we shouldn’t reduce sports to mechanical calculations. Of course what’s really exciting is watching people overcome their mathematical destiny and do something special. Of course these methods overlook all kinds of intangibles.

But the point of doing brackets is to get the most picks right, right? There are all kinds of arguments against using the LRMC method to make your picks, but wanting to give yourself the best chance to win isn’t one of them.

Kvam and Sokol humorously observe, “With so much money on the line, a model that predicts outcomes more effectively than standard ranking and rating systems can be useful.” I myself am risking a total of two beers, so I’m going to let pride cloud my scientific judgment and tweak the pure LRMC rankings a bit. To my detriment, no doubt.

Off Today

Kyle

I’m gonna take a break from the Sunday Judgment column, and posting in general, today. If you really need a language fix, Safire‘s got the etymology of waterboarding. An added bonus is that it’s a vicious, though typically subtle, indictment of this horrifying practice.

Also, congrats to Wauwatosa East, my alma mater, for winning the WIAA boys basketball tournament last night (seriously, I’m not that into basketball, it’s just that time of year). They beat Madison Memorial in overtime. I wish I’d have gone down the street to watch it, although we watched American Astronaut (trailer) instead, and it’s hard to regret that decision. Seriously, this movie is bizarre and brilliant. Here’s a taste:

Sunday Judgment VI

Kyle

A couple of years ago, my one-a-day usage errors calendar (yes, I had one) went off mission for a page to tackle a pronunciation issue. I’ll take that as license to do likewise. To be honest, though, I think the author and an awful lot of other people make too big a deal about this particular mistake.

Who cares if people say “nucular” instead of “nuclear”?

Aren’t there tons of other words that get mispronounced all the time that no one cares about? Why do we reserve special condemnation for this one in particular? Hell, I’ve heard professors and industry professionals say “nucular.” I dislike George Bush as much as the next guy, and I agree that no one’s going to confuse him with George Plimpton, but can we just let it go?

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s thought about this. And, actually, the “army of coal-powered zombie dolphins” bit notwithstanding, I think this video might be on to something regarding what quite probably is a rhetorical move on Bush’s part:

In other nuclear news, my old friend Ryan Hagen just sent me a link to a video he came across. He sums it up pretty well: “It’s not even really fair to say it’s an intellectually lazy guide, because it’s on a whole different planet–but it’s an interesting look into the way nuclear energy continues to be perceived.” The subject of the video? “Hunting the Radioactive Beasts of Chernobyl,” apparently.

I won’t insult your intelligence by discussing what’s wrong with it, although I’ll share that my favorite line was “This is what happens when we play with technology we don’t understand.” You can say that again.

Warning: This video contains foul language. Like, a lot of it. And also booze.

Sunday Judgment V

Kyle 1 Comment

I don’t have much ire left after two straight grumpy posts, so I thought in this installment we could just all meditate on an increasingly divisive issue: “‘They’ as a third-person singular gender-free pronoun.” It sounds as if Randall Munroe is “all for it,” as is my friend Scott, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology who studies developmental linguistics. I don’t think it will ever sound right to my ear though, so I guess I’m doomed to further hours of toil figuring out ways to avoid “he or she” without being sexist or unnecessarily pluralizing the whole sentence. If you’re able to embrace the singular they, though, more power to you.

Speaking of xkcd and language, I highly recommend LimerickDB.com, which Munroe created and which has some hilarious stuff in the Top 150. (I should probably warn you that some of the content there is sexual–though also textual.)

I also recommend this delightful little riff on semicolons from the New York Times. I missed it originally; thank goodness my friend Liz sent it along. I especially like the little celebrity interviews. It is hilarious, though, that they mispunctuated the title of Lynn Truss’s book (see the correction). I guess they’ve never heard the joke.

(N.B.: The they in each of the two proceeding sentences is meant to refer to the author and various editors of the piece collectively and is not an attempt at singular they usage in response to the gender-ambiguity of the author’s name. Just to be clear.)

Sunday Judgment IV

Kyle

Today’s subject: the naked this.

My copy editing habits for any particular usage issue tend to go in cycles:

  1. Depend on logic, intuition, and sound before taking time to do research on the issue or to realize it’s even an issue at all.
  2. Research the issue or be told about it by someone else.
  3. Develop or steal a means of explaining the issue and its prescription, and abide by it with dogged consistency.
  4. Chill the hell out and go back to basically doing whatever functions well and sounds best, only this time armed with argumentative material accumulated in steps (2) and (3).

This whole cycle is a pretty good illustration of the common know-the-rules-before-you-break-them phenomenon.

I just arrived at step (4) regarding the “naked this,” a subclass of the often deadly ambiguous antecedent. The naked this (and its fraternal twin the “naked that“) is a pox on much college writing. It happens when the author doesn’t realize he or she has expressed a complex series of ideas and then ambiguously referred to one of them as “this.” Often times, “this” idea has never been discretely and explicitly defined at all. I’ll refer you to the MIT Online Writing and Communication Center for a couple of examples.

A moment of clarity regarding my overzealous enforcement of the naked this came for me when reading Lance Williams’s most recent coverage of the Roger Clemens circus in SI:

The YouTube clip and the 60 Minutes interview, the infamous press conference at which he and his lawyer Rusty Hardin dramatically presented a recorded phone conversation with McNamee that proved maddeningly inconclusive, the statistical analysis of his pitching career that landed with a thud, the tour of congressional offices so he could meet with the politicians who would be posing Wednesday’s questions–none of this helped, and much of it hurt, his cause, and to a degree that has yet to be calculated (emphasis added).

When a naked this follows a list, it’s assumed that it refers to the items in the list. Williams could certainly have clothed this this, but he needn’t fear indecent exposure charges for choosing not to.

Thus, my editorial judgment for today is this: stick with the rule of thumb that most every this or that should be paired with a noun (in the Clemens example, “none of this nonsense” or “none of these boneheaded moves” would work), but there’s no need to be too draconian about it in cases where there’s no risk of ambiguity.

Sunday Judgment III

Kyle

Today’s subject: nauseated vs. nauseous.

As I folded laundry this morning, trying to decide on a “Sunday Judgment” topic, I listened to some especially good moments in today’s special encore addition of Prairie Home Companion. In the “News from Lake Wobegon” segment, Garrison pulled a typically self-conscious SNOOT move: he used nauseated where most of us would use nauseous.

(“SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is [David Foster Wallace’s] nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Satire’s column’s prose itself. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for ‘Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance’ or ‘Syntax Nudniks of Our Time’ depended on whether or not you were one.“)

My good friend Rachel, whose mom works for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was the one who first alerted me to this (faux?) faux pas. The SNOOTs claim that if you’re “nauseous” then you’re actually causing someone else to feel “nauseated” (that is, nauseous means just “causing nausea” and not “affected with nausea”). David Foster Wallace apparently agrees, both implicitly (he, or rather Hal in Infinite Jest, cares not for Webster’s, which issued the ruling that the SNOOTs “are mistaken” on this issue) and explicitly (“Nauseous for nauseated” makes his list of grievances at the beginning of “Authority and American Usage,” aka “Tense Present”).

Let’s be clear: I’m a SNOOT, though perhaps not a very good one. I do a lot of yelling at the TV when people get expressions wrong, especially when they hone in or confuse run the gamut (I try to) with run the gantlet (I’d rather not). And I relentlessly adhere to the typical advice that, while it’s no longer necessary to use that for restrictive clauses and which for nonrestrictive ones, it’s best to just do so anyway, since there’s no harm in doing it in what used to be the only correct way, whereas someone might assume that you’re unaware that there’s even a controversy if you disregard the outdated rule.

All that said, I’ve never been able to get worked up about nauseated vs. nauseous.

Of course, the very idea of the “Sunday Judgment” feature is that we can all have our own preferences about such matters. However, on this particular day, I worry that I’m perhaps the worst kind of SNOOT, the kind who’s only SNOOTy about the things he’s always known to be SNOOTy about. Is it wrong to feel like I should try to be more of an asshole so that I’ll at least be a consistent one?

—–

On a completely unrelated note, I realized today that Garrison and DFW have another preference in common. They both favor abrupt and less immediately satisfying ultimately more thought provoking story endings over the superficially more witty one-liner types that bring the story full circle by making some reference to the introduction. Would that I had the insight and daring to attempt the latter more often.

Sunday Judgment II

Kyle

Today’s subject: punctuation.

Let’s demonstrate today’s bifurcate Sunday Judgment topic with a few interesting links from today’s Sunday Times: “Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama Senate,” “A ‘Bold’ Step to Capture an Elusive Gas Falters,” and “It Really Takes Years of Hard Work.”

Let’s be brief.

(1) In American usage, commas and periods go inside the quotation marks. For cryin’ out lout, it’s not that difficult. I don’t necessarily agree with the rule (it introduces some ambiguity), but the alternative is aesthetically atrocious.

(2) The serial (or Oxford) comma is crucial for eliminating ambiguity in some cases. The AP Style-ists forbid it solely for space reasons, and even they admit that sometimes it’s necessary. Courtesy of the far superior (though admittedly harder to use) Chicago Manual of Style, here’s an example I tweaked a bit to better demonstrate my point:

The meal consisted of soup, salad, macaroni and cheese, and rice and beans.

The point is that when you’ve got simple and compound items in a list, we need all the commas we can get to impose a little order. There are no doubt more subtle and sophisticated examples out there as well. Holler if you have some.

Sorry to go all Lynne Truss on you. I’ve never agree with “zero tolerance” policies of any kind, but I admit that it’s easy to get worked up about some off this stuff. As I’ve said before, when you’ve worked as a copy editor, it’s easy to take some of this stuff personally.

By the way, the latter link above contains some crucial remarks on the hot subject of innovation:

“The most useful way to think of epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems,” explains Scott Berkun in his 2007 book, “The Myths of Innovation.” “Most innovations come without epiphanies, and when powerful moments do happen, little knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn’t the magic moment: it’s the end result of a useful innovation.”