Ron's View

I love the NYT Metropolitan Diary column, which appears on Mondays in the New York Region section. (This puts it in the back pages of the first section of the national edition, a page or two before the editorials.) This is the feature in which people write in with cute little tales of something that happened on the bus, or in the train station, or wherever. Dog stories, kid stories, tourist stories, overheard cell phone conversation stories. Heartwarming stories all, the sort that make you glad to be human. (Except when the writer has to end the story with the worst of all phrases, “Only in New York.” Sigh. I mean really. That’s so beside the point. And anyway, let us be the judges. And by the way, if you’ve never lived outside New York, how would you even know? What kinds of lives do you think the rest of us live? And I’m a New Yorker, mind you, but I have no patience for that chauvinism.)

But let me not get distracted. Here’s what I was going to say. Every so often, when I get to the end of a diary entry, there’s a surprise in store. It’s written by someone famous. Or at least someone well known in his or her field, whose name I happen to recognize. Someone who, despite fame, has taken the trouble to send in his or her own cute little story. I love them.

Take this week for instance. As I often do, I looked online for the diary just after 9:00 Sunday night. No waiting to bring in the paper in the morning. So there I was, reading this week’s diary, which has five entries, and when I got to the end of the fourth one, the author’s name leapt out at me. Keir Dullea! Is that cool or what?

You don’t know Keir Dullea? Well, okay, so maybe you have to be a certain age, or a film buff. A film buff I’m not, but I am that certain age, and though I was never too excited about 2001: A Space Odyssey, I did see it during its initial release in the theaters in 1968, and I’ve watched bits of it on TV. The scene I always think of first is the one on the spaceship as HAL (the computer) and Bowman (the astronaut played by Dullea) go at it. No doubt Dullea wishes he were known for more than that one role, but it’s that role that makes his name instantly recognizable to so many of us. And now, thanks to his contribution to Metropolitan Diary, I know a little more about him.

I seem not to have written anything for a week now. Sorry about that. Maybe I was feeling self-conscious after the appearance of an article last Thursday in the university’s weekly newspaper (now on-line only) about my blog, lying low until the one-time visitors stop coming. (Are you gone yet? For others, see here if you must.)

But beyond that, I allowed myself last week to get absorbed yet again in a Lee Child thriller. This time it was his second Jack Reacher novel, Die Trying, from 1998. And then there were the President’s Cup golf matches to watch, last Thursday through Sunday. And above all, travel planning, with our departure just 12 days away. First there were the flights, then the hotels. Then revising the hotel dates by two days. Then revising them back a day. Then trains. Now tour and museum reservations.

Our timing in Florence isn’t the best, arriving on a Saturday afternoon and leaving on a Tuesday just after noon, with the Uffizi closed on Mondays. We’ll have our work cut out for us that Sunday. We could have left Tuesday night on an overnight train to Paris, but then we’d be boarding when we should be having dinner to celebrate Gail’s birthday. So instead, we’ll head up to Milan in the afternoon and spend the rest of the day there before boarding an 11:35 PM train to Paris. This will give us time, if all goes to plan, to see The Last Supper and then go out for the birthday dinner.

More on all this later. Perhaps.

[Richard Perry, New York Times]

A month ago, when I was back in New York, I wrote about Ben’s, a deli that started on Long Island but now has additional locations in Queens, Manhattan, and even Boca. As I wrote then, it’s not the greatest, but it’s sure better than anything around here. Today, Joan Nathan has a piece in the food section of the NYT on the lost art of Jewish deli food and the steady disappearance of the delis themselves. Sad reading.

Nathan opens her article by introducing the Brummers.

Hobby’s Delicatessen & Restaurant in downtown Newark may have lost much of its more traditional clientele over the years, but it has held on to tradition. The corned beef and the tongue are cured for 14 days in stainless steel bins in the basement. The salamis hanging on the wall look as if they’ve been drying there, their flavor intensifying, since the Brummer family bought the place in 1962.

Samuel Brummer and his sons, Michael and Marc, even make their own matzo ball soup and potato pancakes.
But in Newark, as in so many cities, holding on has been tough for delis.

“In 1945, there were 12 delis in Newark,” said Samuel Brummer, 86. “Now we are only two.”

Read the article, but also I recommend watching the accompanying video, in which Brummer father and sons talk about the business.

Nathan’s article also introduces us to Save the Deli blogger David Sax*, who observes that “the best delis have a master cutter, not a slicing machine. When you steam a piece of meat for a long time, as with a good piece of pastrami once it has been cured and smoked, it will tear apart if it isn’t cut by hand.” Marc Singer of Irving’s [no relation] Delicatessen in Livingston, New Jersey, adds that “Hebrew National pastramis are a round cut intended for machine slicing at the local deli.”

This got me to thinking of how special Hebrew National once was, before it became part of ConAgra Foods and lost its identity. (See here for its self-provided history.) Growing up on Long Island, I didn’t know there was any kind of salami besides Hebrew National. We would always have the yard-long ones at home. At least I remember them as being about a yard long. Thirty inches at least. My father was in the food business, and Sonny, one of the salesmen in the company, would stop by the Hebrew National plant every week or two to pick up supplies on his way home from the city. Out on the Island, he would make another stop, at our house, appearing at the kitchen door with a box holding our share: a salami or two, maybe a tongue, and a line of franks all curled up like a snake. For years I had the mistaken impression that Sonny was a Hebrew National employee. The idea that Hebrew National delivered straight to our home didn’t yet strike me as odd.

My childhood summers were spent at camp in the Berkshires, close to the Massachusetts-New York state line near West Stockbridge. When my parents came to visit, they would bring a Hebrew National salami. Maybe they brought three, one for each of us. I would share mine with my fellow campers and it would disappear pretty quickly. Camp food wasn’t the greatest. The salami sustained me. (Well, what was great at camp was the corn from the adjacent cornfields. Once a week it would be picked in the morning and we’d eat it at lunch. Just corn. Lots of it. Best corn I ever ate. I learned that corn and salami make for a complete diet, when supplemented by cookies and milk.)

In recent years, I’ve come to find Hebrew National salami a little on the sweet side. I wonder if it always was. What I’d really like to eat right now is some of Hobby’s 14-day-cured corned beef. Too bad I won’t be getting to Newark in the near future.

*I need to give credit to my cousin John for pointing out Sax’s blog in an email this morning before I stumbled on it in my own reading of the NYT.

Two Saturdays ago, I wrote a short post about the new graphic novel Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, right after reading Jim Holt’s review of it in the next day’s New York Times. Now that I’ve read it, I’ll say a little more.

As noted in my earlier post, the novel tells the story of Bertrand Russell‘s failed effort to build a logical foundation for mathematics. Why math? Well, there’s the obvious reason that it’s more interesting than anything else. But more to the point, one can imagine that if there’s any hope of building a foundation for some subject– a foundation allowing us to know the truth of its statements with certainty — then the subject most likely to yield to such a construction project is mathematics. The Russell depicted in the novel (and it is a novel, based on the real Russell and his compatriots, but not a genuine biography or history) is excited in his youth by the beauty of Euclidean geometry, thrilled that logic and reason can yield truths, but disturbed that there was something missing in the foundations of the subject. At Cambridge, his disquiet grows. He observes, while courting his future wife, that “At Cambridge, no one talks about the real issues of mathematics. Like what is the nature of mathematical truth?” He adds, “If only you knew how much depends on these questions. How crucial they are!”

And she married him! How about that? I had similar interests as an undergraduate. And I wasn’t as smart as Russell. But I did know that talking about the nature of mathematical truth wasn’t a promising approach to dating. (Then again, I didn’t exactly have a lot of success with other approaches. Maybe I should have tried it.)

The novel isn’t just about logic and math. Irrationality, madness, pacifism, the limits of reason, the Vienna Circle and Nazis all play major roles. Plus, of course, it’s a graphic novel, so there are all the drawings, which I didn’t give sufficient attention the first time around, since I was so eager to follow the story. I will need to re-read it with a closer look at the artwork. Along the way, the authors get to poke a little fun at those annoyingly logical people who make normal conversation difficult. For instance, there is the imagined visit Russell and his wife pay to the great logician Gottlieb Frege in Germany some time in the 1890s. They arrive at a home and ask the fellow who is seen in the yard, trimming the hedge, “Is this Professor Frege’s house?” “No,” he replies. “This is his garden. His house is in there.” Russell asks if the professor is at home. “No, he is in the garden.” Maddening. Which gets back to the recurring theme of the interplay between logic and madness.

An important character throughout the novel, inevitably, is Alfred North Whitehead, the co-author with Russell of Principia Mathematica, the three-volume work in which they lay out their logical foundations for mathematics. But the one who steals the show — for me — is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who appears about three-fourths of the way through the book (page 223) when he arrives at Russell’s door in his Cambridge University rooms, having been sent from Germany by Frege to learn logic from Russell. Seemingly an admirer, Wittgenstein soon becomes Russell’s most powerful critic. World War I intervenes, dramatically altering both Russell and Wittgenstein. Then, as the book nears its conclusion, Kurt Gödel inevitably arrives, demolishing the dream that a proper logical foundation for mathematics can assure the existence of a proof for every true mathematical statement. One of the amusing conceits of the novel is that Gödel, who laid waste to Russell’s program, may have been the only person who ever bothered to read the Principia Mathematica in full. Yet, perhaps only by building on the Russell and Whitehead’s development of logical foundations could Gödel have developed the methods that showed the limitations of logic as a foundation for mathematics. The book can only touch on this, one of the great intellectual discoveries of the twentieth century.

The authors and artists themselves appear throughout the novel, along with a pet dog, in interludes in which they discuss the book’s issues while working or walking in Athens. All the ideas come together when they attend a local production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia Trilogy.

Math, logic, war, peace, theater, dogs. I haven’t even mentioned the failed marriages, crazed experiments in education, and messed-up children. Something for everyone.

A final note: I just noticed a link at the book’s website to a trailer, which is the youtube video I have inserted at the top of the post. Have a look. It includes an appearance by Barry Mazur, a fabulous mathematician from whom I learned algebra in my sophomore and junior years. He then became my senior thesis advisor.

Some day maybe I’ll figure out how to use career baseball stats to make the case for the greatness of one player or another. Back in 2004, when Mariner great Edgar Martinez was in his final season and his place in baseball history was being actively discussed — around here anyway — someone came up with a list of stats intended to prove that he was one of the greatest hitters ever. Which is true, of course, even if it’s not widely appreciated. I wish I remembered the details. Roughly speaking, the idea was to list all players who had a career batting average above .310, over 2200 career hits, over 300 career home runs, and so on, these numbers being carefully chosen to ensure that Edgar made the list but few others did. The upshot was that many of the all-time greats fell short in one category or another, so that only eight players were on it, including the likes of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. Case closed.

When Bobby Cox announced less than two weeks ago that he would retire after next season as the manager of the Atlanta Braves, one of the articles I was reading about him had a quote from Chipper Jones, and it made me think, gee, Chipper sure has had a good career. I wonder just how good. And off I went to baseball-reference.com to find out. I had never been a big Chipper fan. I used to have the impression that he was over-rated, perhaps because the Braves got so much coverage in his early years, what with always being in the playoffs, and it seemed like broadcasters went on and on about him beyond what he deserved. In retrospect, I was wrong. He has indeed been one of the great players of our time. (Stats here.) Yet, I didn’t now how to prove it.

Now, thanks to Joe Posnanski, I can. At Sports Illustrated last week, Pos had a piece on the sustained excellence of Chipper and Bobby Cox and the Braves. And he knew just what career stats to use to demonstrate that Chipper is among the all-time great hitters.

There is a very short list of players in baseball history who over long careers hit .300, own an on-base percentage of .400 and slug .500. There are more complete ways to judge a player’s hitting talents, of course, but there’s something beautifully well-rounded about the .300/.400/.500 hitter. He hits. He walks. He pounds the ball.

Some of the greatest in baseball history couldn’t quite pull it off. Mickey Mantle and Al Kaline did not quite hit .300. Willie Mays and Hank Aaron didn’t have .400 on-base percentages. Roberto Clemente and George Brett, playing their careers in sluggish hitters eras, did not slug .500. This does not detract from their greatness, but it just goes to show you how hard it is to pull off those round numbers: .300/.400/.500.

How hard? Only 14 men in baseball history have played 2,000 games and pulled it off.

Who are the fabulous fourteen? I’ll continue with Posnanski’s discussion, covering up one name.

These include many of the usual suspects — Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Tris Speaker, Mel Ott. Harry Heilmann is on the list. From more recent times, you have Frank Thomas and Manny Ramirez and, you may be surprised to know, Xxxxx Yyyyyyyy, who is one of the more underrated hitters in baseball history.

And then there’s one more … Chipper Jones.

Are you surprised to see Chipper on this list? I was. For some odd reason, whenever I think of the great players of this generation, I always seem to forget about Chipper Jones. I mean, yes, I know how great he is. I know he’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer. But other players just come more easily to mind.

Hard to argue. Chipper really is one of the great players of his generation.

So who is Xxxxx Yyyyyyyy? Edgar Martinez, of course. And that made me appreciate all the more Pos’s statistical insight. Let’s keep Edgar’s credentials in mind as the 2010 Hall of Fame balloting approaches. It will be Edgar’s first year of eligibility. (By the way, see here for Edgar’s stats.)

Joe Mauer, Minnesota Twin

Ten days ago I complained about the overwhelming amount of football coverage. This happens every year, and every year it drives me mad. Here we are enjoying baseball and suddenly, with the start of the college and professional football seasons, we are expected to put aside a sport worthy of our love in favor of one that seems to expect slavish devotion. It’s bad enough that the TV networks fight with each other to throw money at the NFL and the college conferences in order to fill every minute of weekend programming with football, as well as Thursday nights, Monday nights, and sometimes it seems every other night too. But why must newspapers be complicit in this cacophony as well?

Which brings me to this past weekend. I gave football its due on Saturday. I watched portions of the UW-Notre Dame football game. Large portions near the end. That was more than enough. In return, I thought I earned the right to watch baseball yesterday. Okay, so maybe the race for the American League central division title isn’t the most exciting one in years, but going into the weekend, it was the only one we had. And when the Twins beat the Royals Saturday, despite facing the stupendous Zach Greinke, while the Tigers lost to the White Sox, they were suddenly tied with a day to go. If both won or both lost on Sunday, they would have a one-game playoff Tuesday to decide the division champ. If one won and the other lost, the winner would claim the prize. Whichever one it was would limp into the postseason with the worst record of any of the playoff teams, and with an exhausted pitching staff, likely to lose their opening series to the Yankees quickly. Nonetheless, a great story was in the making — a resilient Twins team riding a September surge to the playoffs, or a toughened Tiger team giving its gloomy city some cheer.

The Twins game yesterday started about an hour after the Tiger game. I figured someone would be broadcasting one of them. Someone. Around 12:30, with both games in progress, I turned on the TV and started looking. Football. NASCAR. Pool. Yes, pool! But no baseball. No baseball!! Come on. I was reduced to following the games online. Had I bought the MLB cable package, I could see every game all season. Maybe I need to do that next year.

In case you’re wondering, both teams won. Minnesota hosts their one-game playoff tomorrow.

Why tomorrow, you ask? Why indeed? Wouldn’t it be better to get the title settled today so the winner can get ready for the playoffs? In fact, isn’t that how it’s usually done? Well, of course. But you’re forgetting something. Let’s work this out. What sport do we worship? Football. And what happens on Mondays? Oh, yes, Monday Night Football. Okay, so here’s the good part. Who’s playing tonight in the MNF game? Yes, of course. Minnesota. The Brett-Favre-led Minnesota Vikings. Against the formerly-Brett-Favre-led Green Bay Packers. The game we have been waiting for since it looked like Favre would sign with the Vikings a year and a half ago. Nothing in baseball can compete with that. Not even the World Series. The Twins don’t get to use their stadium today. They have to wait a day. So it goes.

[Alan S. Weiner for The New York Times]

I just realized that I haven’t written a post yet this month. Sorry about that. I’ve spent most of my free computer time the last few days on trip planning. With me on sabbatical, and with Joel in Grenoble until just before Christmas, it’s obvious that we should get over there, and so we will. The pieces are now mostly in place — and just in time — for what will be our longest trip in a decade. We have flights and hotel reservations. Next up is train reservations. Three weeks from this moment we’ll be over the Atlantic, making our way to Paris to see my sister after a short stop in New York. Then on to Grenoble, Venice, Rome, Florence, Milan, back to Paris, back to New York, and finally Chicago overnight for a meeting before returning here.

I have a few items I had thought of writing about that I will instead just list here, with minimal comment. Then I’ll get on to other issues in separate posts.

1. In case you missed the coverage of the October 1 ceremony for the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize winners, be sure to review the list here. Some are pretty good. Not so the Math prize, alas, as the choice and accompanying citation only serve to reinforce the stereotype that mathematicians spend their time dealing with really big numbers. But maybe people in other fields feel similarly. Here, as one example, is the Physics prize citation:

PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over.

REFERENCE: “Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins,” Katherine K. Whitcome, Liza J. Shapiro & Daniel E. Lieberman, Nature, vol. 450, 1075-1078 (December 13, 2007). DOI:10.1038/nature06342.

WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Katherine Whitcome and Daniel Lieberman

2. The lead story in yesterday’s NYT travel section had some local interest. It was an amusing account by NYT Styles reporter Eric Wilson of his failed effort to hike the Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier this past summer. He had the misfortune of starting his journey on the day we all remember well, when the temperature was 103 degrees here in Seattle and apparently no different down there. Here’s one brief excerpt from his experience that day:

When we came upon an eerily blue lake, bluer than the Mediterranean, clear-looking enough to be a mirage or a mirror, I could not resist a quick dip, and so I ran headlong into the water as Chris and Rosemary were still taking off their shoes. As I broke through the still surface of water, the sensation I felt was that I would not be coming back up. My legs and arms felt disconnected from my body, collectively numb, but I could sense every hair on my head stand up in unison, and then, in the same millisecond, a piercing stab through my chest. I jerked my head up and gasped. It had not occurred to me that a lake halfway up the highest summit in the Cascade Range (14,410 feet) and one of the highest points in the lower 48 states, and not a mile from the edge of a glacier (ironically named Fryingpan) might be, well, as cold as ice. My feet touched bottom, and I sloshed out of the water, frightened by the intensity of the pain, but surely invigorated.

3. A week ago I had anticipated writing a post about Afghanistan, but it never happened. As a substitute for my own uneducated thoughts on the subject, I’ll just point to two of the several articles I read a week ago: George Packer’s article on Richard Holbrooke in the September 28 issue of the New Yorker and Ahmed Rashid’s article in the October 8 issue of the New York Review of Books on the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I should add to this yesterday’s Washington Post op-ed piece by Peter Galbraith, written in the wake of his firing as deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan. (It turns out that I know Peter, sort of. He was a college classmate. We were in the same residential house. Just two Junes ago, during our 35th reunion, we sat together at lunch one day and chatted.) Galbraith writes about the recent Afghan election, for which he supervised the UN support:

Afghanistan’s presidential election, held Aug. 20, should have been a milestone in the country’s transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai’s votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.

The election was a foreseeable train wreck. Unlike the United Nations-run elections in 2004, this balloting was managed by Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC). Despite its name, the commission is subservient to Karzai, who appointed its seven members. Even so, the international role was extensive. The United States and other Western nations paid the more than $300 million to hold the vote, and U.N. technical staff took the lead in organizing much of the process, including printing ballot papers, distributing election materials and designing safeguards against fraud.

…

President Obama needs a legitimate Afghan partner to make any new strategy for the country work. However, the extensive fraud that took place on Aug. 20 virtually guarantees that a government emerging from the tainted vote will not be credible with many Afghans.

I can’t imagine any US mission in Afghanistan having much chance of success. But again, what do I know? On the other hand, Rory Stewart knows a lot, and he doesn’t seem to see things much differently. (See a post of mine from two months ago.)

4. I try to keep my references to Glenn Greenwald’s blog within reasonable bounds, but here I go again. In a post yesterday, he has a passage that aptly describes the state of the nation:

Reviewing the Sunday news shows and newspapers creates the most intense cognitive dissonance: a nation crippled by staggering debt, exploding unemployment, an ever-expanding rich-poor gap, and dependence on foreign government financing can’t stop debating how much more resources we should devote to our various military occupations, which countries we should bomb next, which parts of the world we should bring into compliance with our dictates using threats of military force. It’s like listening to an individual about to declare personal bankruptcy talking about all the new houses and jewels he plans on buying next week and all the extravagant trips he’s planning, in between lamenting how important it is that he stop spending so much. That would sound insane. And that’s exactly how our political discourse sounds.

Where is the change we can believe in?