Ron's View

Perhaps this post should be blank. That would pretty well exhaust the topic.

But actually, I’m not here to write about the joys of grading. Rather, I bring you the explanation of why Ron’s View has gone dark in recent days: I have exams to grade. The peculiar logic of the situation dictates that if I’m not grading, I better be doing something important. Like eating. Or sleeping. Or maybe watching CBS’s closing coverage of golf at Pebble Beach, as Phil charged to victory. But not blogging. At least not until I’m too tired to grade fairly. And that time has arrived for the day, so even as I think of sleep, I’ve turned on the lights at Ron’s View for a moment.

I have several topics I’m hoping to write about once grading is done:

1. Reading. I finished Mat Johnson’s novel Pym yesterday. (I know, I should have been grading.) I thought that what initially seemed like cleverness began to veer towards silliness. Not that that is necessarily bad, but the book didn’t fulfill its early promise, for me anyway. Next up, Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author,Who Went in Search of Them, which I downloaded and began last night (but haven’t touched today because, you know, I’m grading).

2. Copyediting: the lost art. As evidenced by the opening paragraph of the feature article in today’s NYT travel section. (See for yourself.)

3. Foldit. I went to a lecture Friday afternoon by UW biochemist David Baker in which he talked about protein folding. One of the most intriguing aspect of his research is the game he and UW computer scientist Zoran Popović have created — Foldit — that allows amateur gamers world-wide with no knowledge of biochemistry to participate in determining the low-energy positions of proteins. Their efforts can contribute to the discovery of medical treatments for diseases. It’s really quite a story. And a day later, yesterday, the work was featured in a short piece by Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal.

4. Madison Square Garden: Going to the dogs. This topic has several strands, and I’ve been wanting to write the appropriate post for days. I hope to get to it.

That’s all for now.

Two days ago, I wrote about the death earlier that day in Afghanistan of my friend’s son Will. The theme of the post was the senselessness of the war and of such deaths. Today I celebrate Will’s purposeful life.

Lawrence Dabney, a war correspondent, wrote about Will two months ago in The Faster Times, describing him as

the sort of Marine that war films are made about. Unflappable, assured, and grimly competent, he is charismatic in spite of the ridiculous mustache that he and half the Corps seem to sport (not, as I first thought, a Movember thing—these last the whole deployment). At 23, he is young for a Sergeant. Both his parents are history professors.

Sgt. Stacey joined the Marines five years ago. He hesitates before answering why. “Saying I came in for the war makes it sound like for some reason I like it, which isn’t true,” he says, squinting a little in the desert sun. “But I came in because I felt like it was important. Now that it’s winding down, I feel like there’s other things I want to do.” When his contract expires, he plans to go back to school to study history.

Tuesday, Dabney wrote again. I hope you don’t mind if I quote at length from the piece.

[Will] commanded the squad I was embedded with when I ended up in my first firefight, and it was plainer than anything that he kept the men under his command alive. I’ve already written about him, his confidence and charisma and strangely rugged wisdom for a young man of twenty-three, his ridiculous mustache, but now there is more to say because Will is dead.

Will was killed this morning by an IED blast somewhere in Now Zad district of Helmand province. He was the only casualty, though another marine was injured by a second IED. He was on a dismounted foot patrol and some halfwit insurgent managed to cram enough explosive material into the bomb that it killed him. He’ll be buried in Arlington, I hear. Today was his mother’s birthday.

… No-one wants another Marine to die either but there are those who are special, whose loss hurts more than others, and Sgt. Stacey was as special as they come. He had a bright and concentrated flame within him that could cut through stone. It spelled death and failure for his enemies and gave life to his comrades. Quite literally gave life—there is no doubt in my mind that his cold competence, his charisma and cool under fire, his wisdom so far beyond his years that I wonder just what it is that old people are supposed to be so wise about, kept the men under his command alive.

[snip]

There are people like that in the world, and you know within seconds when you meet one. Their madness bends them to different winds but ours took us both to war. In it there is the potential, sometimes, most certainly in Will, for incredible things. To change the universe we live in, the course of humanity itself and the prisms through which we understand the world. But it comes at a price, and—most unfairly of all—that price is only borne by those who through dumb luck do not live to see their madness bloom.

They die. They must pass through the fire to become who they need to be—they are drawn to it like moths—and it not a test of fortitude or courage but only of chance to determine whether they emerge from the other side alive. If they do, the world awaits. But most do not. Many die in the first moments of their descent; Will was so close to emergence that he could feel the daylight warming on his skin.

Will was a rarity among service members. Young and wise is nothing new to the military, but his intelligence and charisma made him something special. Had it come to it I do not doubt that the Corps would have done everything in their power to convince him to stay. He is the sort of man you would want commanding your troops, analyzing a million pieces of data to save a few extra lives, beloved by every man beneath him though none truly knows him.

[snip]

He brought something human to the world, an attribute in remarkably short supply for all the humans there are. His soft-sandpaper, young Clint Eastwood voice doled out insight and kindness to the men he led and the people he met. Among all that, he was an ordinary and relatable human being who gave me a sharpie to ‘fix’ my smiley-face patch and whose Facebook picture is just him, standing in a crowd, holding a can of beer. His life ended in tragedy, but it was lived in grace.

Amen.

Fenway Park, set up for Boston Patriots football

[From the NYT, with credit to Boston Public Library, Sports Temples of Boston collection]

Bill Pennington had a great piece in yesterday’s NYT about the early vagabond years of the Patriots football team, when they were the Boston Patriots and moved from stadium to stadium. For the first decade, they were members of the American Football League. With the AFL-NFL merger, they joined the National Football League in 1970. A year later, they settled into their new stadium in Foxborough, in the remote (at least from my point of view, living in Cambridge then) southern suburbs, half the way to Providence, and re-branded themselves as the New England Patriots, after which things began to improve.

That first decade-plus was something special, as Pennington recalls. They bounced from BU’s athletic field, the one-time home of the Boston Braves baseball team, to Fenway Park to BC’s stadium to Harvard Stadium. Their one year in Harvard Stadium, that first year in the NFL, was my sophomore year. I could have taken a short walk from my room along the Charles to the Anderson Bridge, crossed over, and been at a game. I can’t believe I didn’t go. They won their home opener, against the Dolphins, and proceeded to lose all the remaining home games. OJ rushed for 123 yards when the Bills came; Johnny Unitas quarterbacked the Colts. Talk about missed opportunities!

Pennington tells one story from the 1970 season opener:

The former Notre Dame running back Bob Gladieux had been cut from the Patriots a few days earlier but decided to attend the season opener anyway with a friend.

Seated in the old concrete Harvard horseshoe before the start of the game, the two had already had a couple of beers when Gladieux’s friend agreed to get another round. Just after he left, the public address cackled: “Bob Gladieux, please report to the Patriots’ dressing room.”

Gladieux went downstairs and was told to suit up. Last-minute contract disputes had left the Patriots short. Gladieux, nicknamed Harpo for his flock of frizzy blond hair, hurriedly donned his pads and was soon running down the field on the opening kickoff against the Miami Dolphins.

Back in the stands, his friend wondered why he was alone. He looked up to see the Dolphins’ kick returner go down in the arms of No. 24 for the Patriots.

“Tackle by Bob Gladieux,” the public address announcer said.

Said St. Jean: “When we saw Harpo’s buddy later, he said: ‘I knew I was drinking, but not enough to be hearing things.’ ” The Patriots won the game, one of just two victories in another last-place season.

I was a Giants fan back then. (I could have seen them play at Harvard.) By 1975, I was a Patriots fan, and I suppose I still am. A little. Enough to know who I’ll be rooting for during next week’s Super Bowl. They’ve come a long way. Yet, some of the fun is gone.

When I was young, years divisible by 4 were the best. They brought a trio of terrific treats:

1. Olympics, both summer and winter.
2. Presidential elections.
3. A birthday.

Now, not so terrific:

1. The Winter Olympics shifted by two years. The Summer Olympics no longer feel special. I’ll watch, sure, but without the same excitement. I mean, if I really cared about swimming, and I don’t, I’d watch it more often. Or archery. I do care about rowing. Good luck finding coverage. And I care about track and field. But there’s the usual problem of having the coverage dragged out on tape delay. Then again, it should be a lot easier this time to watch more events live, online if not on air. I’ll give it a try.
2. Presidential elections. Can anything be more depressing? Enough said.
3. A birthday. I don’t get too many of these. They’re precious, and still a treat. I’ll enjoy this one. And I’ll be happy for the next four years to take their time. No hurry. I can wait for the next one.

I’ve fallen a bit behind. Sorry about that. I gave a final exam Wednesday morning. After writing two posts that evening, I have stopped posting on the general principle that if I have time to post, I should be using that time to grade instead. And until this afternoon I hadn’t been grading either. Hence, no posts.

Now that I’ve done half my grading, I am putting the rest aside for tomorrow, freeing up posting time. But not posting energy. I’ll content myself with a partial list of coming attractions.

1. A description of a week-old language log post by Geoff Pullum with a scathing attack on a piece in the NYT. I happened to be the language log correspondent who passed the NYT article on to him (and was duly credited). Thus, it seems appropriate to bring the item to your attention.

2. Yet another Rover’s lunch report. Or maybe I should let this topic go, having written several times about lunches at Rover’s. Rover’s serves lunch on Fridays only and I’m usually not free for lunch on Fridays, so we don’t get there too often. The last time was in September, the Friday before classes started, when we joined Russ. With Joel home and no free Friday in the upcoming months, we went while we could.

3. Sebastian Rotella’s novel Triple Crossing (with the moronic subtitle “A Novel”). I’m about 290 pages into it. Another 110 to go, and another reason not to blog. I have recently written about several other books. My starting this might suggest I’ve finished them. Not yet. I put them aside temporarily.

4. Change You Can Believe In. Time for another installment. In this one, Obama continues to trample on civil rights by signing into law the right to detain US citizens indefinitely. Gotta love the guy. We voted for change; we got it.

I had imagined that the holiday break would provide me with the leisure to turn to some long-deferred (and not particularly urgent) topics. However, I’m not seeing a lot of leisure on the horizon. It would be good to knock off a few old items, such as assorted golf posts. I know golf isn’t what brings people in the Ron’s View door. That’s one reason those posts don’t get written. First up: my primer on how to be a golf fan. Soon, perhaps.

But now, back to Triple Crossing. And tomorrow, grading.

[Dan Grayson, Tokyo, December 10, 2011]

Those of us on the west coast enjoyed a total lunar eclipse just before moonset yesterday morning, the last one until April 2014.

The entire lunar eclipse will be visible in East Asia, Australia, and the far western portion of North America that includes Alaska and Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories. The spectacle will last nearly three and a half hours, starting on Saturday at 4:45 a.m. Pacific Time.

Totality—when the full moon will be completely blocked from direct sunlight—will start at 6:05 a.m. PT and last until 6:57 a.m. PT.

We were discussing the eclipse at dinner with friends Friday evening. Would we wake up for it? Would we be able to see it without trees in the way? Jean mentioned that she would be up anyway, as she would be rowing. Plus, her location out on the water would provide unobstructed viewing. I imagined waking up and walking out to a clear area at the edge of the backyard with a good view to the southwest, but when the time came to set the alarm, I decided not to bother. I would either arise naturally or miss it.

At 5:55 a.m., I arose naturally. I looked at the clock, then noticed that the early morning moonlight that a full moon usually brings into the bedroom was missing. The eclipse was underway, on schedule, with totality ten minutes away. I couldn’t believe my luck. I got out of bed, got dressed, went down to the garage to get my coat and hat out of the car, got gloves from the closet, opened the backdoor, and headed out for total eclipse viewing.

Something didn’t seem right. I could see a faint glow to the southwest where the full moon must be. I couldn’t see the moon, which of course was the whole point. Then I realized what the problem was. I couldn’t see much else either, because it was cloudy.

Boy did I feel stupid. I completely forgot to look out the window to check for clouds before getting dressed. I could have done that and gone back to sleep.

Or maybe not. It was well before sunrise after all. Because of the darkness, I might not have been able to assess the nature of the cloud cover without going outside.

I went out again about 15 minutes later and then 30 minutes later, in case there was a break in the clouds, but there wasn’t. I had to content myself with my old friend Dan’s posting on Facebook at 5:34 a.m. PT of an eclipse photo he took from Tokyo. (See above.)

I’ll try again in a couple of years.

[National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, via NYT]

The NYT had an article Wednesday, the morning of this year’s opening World Series game, on the history of World Series programs. And there’s a pretty good accompanying slide show, too, with programs going back to 1911 (Giants-Athletics). But what caught my eye instantly was the program used as a graphic at the article’s head. The one above.

That’s not just any program. I have that program! It’s the program my father bought for me 51 years ago when he took my brother and me to game 3, the first Yankees home game of that famous series between the Yankees and the Pirates. You know the Series. The one where the Yankees beat up on the Pirates in three of the first six games (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), with the Pirates squeezing in three close wins (6-4, 3-2, 5-2) in-between. Add it up: that’s a 46-17 run margin over six games.

As for game 3, the one we went to, that’s the 10-0 Yankee win. Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson hit a grand slam in the first inning that landed three rows in front of us, one of the thrills of my childhood, driving in Bill Skowron, Gil McDougald, and Elston Howard. Three innings later, he hit a single with the bases loaded that brought Skowron and McDougald in again and sent Howard to second. Six RBIs, still the world series single-game record, tied only two years ago by fellow Yankee Hideki Matsui.

Whitey Ford was on the mound that day, throwing a four-hit shutout. Richardson would go on to win the World Series MVP award. What a team! Maris in his first year as a Yankee. Mantle. Howard and Berra both available to catch, with yet another pretty darn good catcher, Johnny Blanchard, in reserve. Kubek sharing middle-infield duties with Richardson. Gosh, I worshiped them.

Well, anyway, that was that. I won’t talk about game 7. A little too much pain for a young boy. I know exactly where I was when Mazeroski hit that home run, just as I know where I was three years later when I learned that Kennedy was shot. For today, let’s just admire that program. My copy is in a box somewhere. I should go find it.

I suppose this post may have limited interest, but I just want to comment on four improvements the last ten days have brought to my iPad life.

1. OmniOutliner for iPad. Two Thursdays ago, The Omni Group brought its indispensable OmniOutliner program to the iPad. OmniOutliner for iPad was originally due to come out last summer. Those of us whose lives depend on OmniOutliner and who use iPads have been desperately waiting for months. There are workarounds, like converting outlines on the Mac to opml format, then using some other program, such as Carbon Fin, to upload the outline to their server and then pull it down to one’s iPad or iPhone. Doing this means sacrificing a lot of OmniOutliner’s formatting options, but it works for simple outlines. Now there’s no longer a need for these workarounds. Hooray!

I have to confess, though, that I haven’t yet integrated OmniOutliner for iPad into (what I’ve learned to call) my workflow. I love having it. I’m just not using it much. Part of the problem is that although there’s no need to change the format of an outline, one still has to upload it somewhere, to one’s iDisk account for instance, then import it into OmniOutliner for iPad. This is an impediment.

2. The New Yorker. The iPad implementation of The New Yorker was supposed to be well done, a sign of things to come, both for other Condé Nast magazines and for magazines in general. But I wasn’t going to pay $6 to find out. I mean, I already subscribe to the print edition, I can read it online in a browser, so why pay again for the iPad version? The broader issue was the Apple Store’s lack of a magazine subscription option, so that one had to buy each issue of the New Yorker for the iPad separately. That changed last week. I awoke Monday morning to news from The New Yorker that iPad subscriptions were now available, and that moreover print subscribers were eligible to get iPad subscriptions for free. I downloaded the New Yorker iPad app, opened it up, and signed up immediately. This was a bit cumbersome. One needs to enter one’s address, the subscription number off a magazine label, and one’s online login name and password. Then, once eligibility was verified, I had to log in again using the login name and password. I didn’t realize at first that this last step was needed, so I was confused about why I couldn’t download any issues. But once I figured that out, I downloaded the still-current issue.

In the past, I wasn’t too thrilled about the online availability on a Monday morning of the New Yorker issue dated the following Monday, the print version of which typically wouldn’t arrive until Thursday or Friday. What was annoying was that by mid-morning on Mondays, I’d be reading on various blogs about some article or another, and I could either find it on my computer and read it on the big screen — not my idea of how to enjoy The New Yorker — or wait until later in the week, ignoring all the online discussion of the article in the meantime. Well, now I can just download the latest issue Monday morning and start reading on my iPad, a much more pleasant experience than reading at my computer. And sure enough, last week there was an article that made a lot of news, Jane Mayer’s piece on Obama’s war against whistleblowers. I could read it right away.

As it turns out, I decided to wait on reading Mayer’s article until the print issue came. And then when it did, I went ahead and read the article on my iPad, which made no sense at all.

I should add that being able to download and read new New Yorker issues on Monday mornings is a mixed blessing. it kind of gets in the way of getting on with the week.

3. OmniFocus for iPad. When it comes to workflow, OmniFocus is the center of my life. I won’t try to explain why. See my post on The Toad from almost a year ago to learn why. Suffice to say that all the facets of my life are organized on it. And what really makes it work is how the data syncs across all platforms — my iMac at home, my iMac at school, my MacBook Air, my iPhone, and my iPad. I always know what I need to be doing, wherever I am.

And last week The Omni Group brought us a major update to OmniFocus for iPad, for free. It has some wonderful new features. Organizing my life was never more fun. Indeed, the real danger of OmniFocus is that you fall in love with organizing life rather than living it. But that’s a problem I had long before OmniFocus showed up.

4. iPad 2. To top off an exciting week of iPad developments, last Thursday morning Gail and I received our new iPad 2s. (We’ve passed our iPads on to the kids.) I got mine synced and ready to go right away. I chose the white one. Gail got a traditional black one. Has this changed our lives? Well, I have to admit, not much. Yet. They are noticeably thinner and lighter. They have built-in cameras. But for the most part, I do with the new one what I did with the old one. It’s still a little too large to hold comfortably in one hand when I’m lying in bed, which I mention only because this means I still prefer reading books on my Kindle.

Okay, that’s the news.

Ian Frazier reviews John Darnton’s Almost a Family: A Memoir in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Ron’s View readers will know that I’m a big fan of Frazier. I read all his books, his short pieces in The New Yorker, and his New York Review pieces. But Joel got to this one before I did. He was thus able to pass on to me the warning contained in the review’s opening sentences:

An important thing to know about memoirs is that although there are a lot of them already, there will soon be more. Seventy-six million baby boomers are reaching retirement age. Many of us own computers, and we find ourselves fascinating.

Joel didn’t have to explain why he thought this passage was relevant. He recognized me, I knew he recognized me, and he knew I would recognize myself. At least he was reassuring. When I rued that I was too late, he urged me to hurry up and get in ahead of the tide.

As for Frazier, he saw this coming long ago. He’s my age. We were college classmates. And he had the prescience to publish his memoir in 1994.

Now what will I do when I retire?

Thanks to a post two days ago Geoff Shackelford’s golf blog , I learned two days ago about Golfer in Training Dan McLaughlin and The Dan Plan. Shackelford linked to an article by Michael Kruse three weeks ago in the St. Petersburg Times. As Kruse explains:

On his 30th birthday, June 27, 2009, Dan had decided to quit his job to become a professional golfer.

He had almost no experience and even less interest in the sport.

What he really wanted to do was test the 10,000-hour theory he read about in the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller Outliers. That, Gladwell wrote, is the amount of time it takes to get really good at anything — “the magic number of greatness.”

The idea appealed to Dan. His 9-to-5 job as a commercial photographer had become unfulfilling. He didn’t want just to pay his bills. He wanted to make a change.

Could he stop being one thing and start being another? Could he, an average man, 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds, become a pro golfer, just by trying? Dan’s not doing an experiment. He is the experiment.

The Dan Plan will take six hours a day, six days a week, for six years. He is keeping diligent records of his practice and progress. People who study expertise say no one has done quite what Dan is doing right now.

Dan spent last month in St. Petersburg because winters are winters in the Pacific Northwest. “If I could become a professional golfer,” he said one afternoon, “the world is literally open to any options for anybody.”

According to Dan, “talent has little to do with success.” He elaborates at his website:

According to research conducted by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, “Elite performers engage in ‘deliberate practice’–an effortful activity designed to improve target performance.” Dr. Ericsson’s studies, made popular through Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, have found that in order to excel in a field, roughly 10,000 hours of “stretching yourself beyond what you can currently do” is required. “I think you’re the right astronaut for this mission,” Dr. Ericsson said about The Dan Plan.

I once enjoyed Gladwell’s articles in The New Yorker. He is, after all, such a talented writer. But I’ve tired more recently of his continuing quest to find explanations for assorted phenomena that are simultaneously novel and all-encompassing. I haven’t read Ericsson’s work, but I can’t imagine he intended for it to be applied, as Gladwell does, to explain Bill Gates’ success as resulting from the 10,000 hours he spent programming computers while in high school.

Nonetheless, I love the Dan Plan. Dan expects to “hit the 10,000 hour milestone by November of 2015. During this time, Dan plans to develop his skills through deliberate practice, eventually winning amateur events and obtaining his PGA Tour card through a successful appearance in the PGA Tour’s Qualifying School, or ‘Q-School’. I’ll be watching.

In the meantime, I have my own plan to attend to. This is blog post number 792. Just 9208 more before I hit my own 10,000 milestone and become a professional writer. Watch out, Malcolm. The New Yorker may not have room for both of us.