This is a classic movie by the Coen brothers that came out after Fargo. Fargo was considered the most accessible of the Coen brothers. The story was fairly straight-forward, involving a guy (William Macy) who wants to have his wife kidnapped so he can get money from her father. The kidnapping goes awry. Frances McDormand plays a sheriff who investigates the crime. The quirky characters, the mildly grisly violence, the Minnesotan accents all lead to a fairly enjoyable experience.
The Coen brothers don't try to be too accessible. You figure they're up to something, but not sure what.
They followed up Fargo with The Big Lebowski. Ostensibly, a film about bowling, it's more about the weirdness in Jeff Lebowski's life. He's not the titular "Big Lebowski". That would be a wealthy man in a wheelchair. This Lebowski is unemployed, mostly drunk, loves to bowl, and prefers to go by "The Dude".
The film is really well shot. The director of photography, Roger Deakins, does a great job with the look of the film.
"The Dude" is a pretty chill guy. He's probably meant to represent Jesus, despite another character in the film named Jesus. He contrasts with the short tempered John Goodman.
Watching the film, two things come to mind. One, David Lynch. Lynch's films are usually strange, but not terribly humorous. The Coen brothers are similarly strange, but usually, there's a sense of humor, as odd as it may be. Two, that there is a lot references going on that I'm missing.
For example, let's go with "The Dude" as Jesus idea. I can't say I know the Bible well enough to point out what certain scenes mean. Indeed, I know I can't do that.
Here are things that are puzzling. There's the rug. Clearly, the Dude likes his rug, but he doesn't mind having a rug from "The Big Lebowski" instead of his own. Why is the rug important?
What's the deal with Maude? She eventually reveals the details of "The Big Lebowski" and whether he's really as rich as he pretends to be. Is she Mary Magdalene?
What is the meaning of bowling in their lives?
"The Dude" doesn't have followers. He doesn't seem to minister to anyone. Indeed, he seems to be in a stupor. His lack of employment is mentioned quite a lot. Unlike his buddy, he doesn't seem to need money, and yet appears to have enough money to live on.
Why does he drink white Russians? He drinks it quite a lot. He smokes joints. He doesn't seem to care for sex, but doesn't mind getting into it. Doesn't seem to want a real relationship. Why does Maude want "The Dude" to be the father of her child?
Despite the weird things that happen to "The Dude", he takes everything in stride. He's not above lying here and there if it suits his needs, although he's a generally positive character.
Is the setting of Los Angeles important? It means "The Angels" and there have been films using "Lost Angels" as a variation.
There is the notion that Jesus went to h*ll after being crucified. Does the story chronicle a version of this story? Is bowling used because the Coens consider it a sport that someone might be punished to play?
Why is "The Dude" always sniffing the milk? He seems concerned that it will go bad, and is always checking for it.
Does everything have a meaning, or are their quirks thrown in, for quirks sake? The Coens are rather literary. They refer to all sorts of things, then tell a strange story taking elements from all over.
Despite the strangeness of the film, if you get into it, it's eminently watchable. If you don't care that the movie has to be about something that makes total sense, then it's enjoyable. I mean, if you can believe that a guy would get into all these weird situations and love bowling, then you can derive pleasure from the film.
By the way, does "The Dude" ever bowl in the film? I seem to recall everyone else bowling, but I don't seem to recall him bowling.
If you have to pick an area of news reporting with the least integrity, what would it be? Sports reporting, for the most part, is pretty good. The biggest problem with sports reporting is the fact that sports reporters are, at the very heart of it, fans of the sports. They are wow'ed by the best players, and like to hob-nob with the celebrity athlete.
The worst news reporting is entertainment news. Where a good sports reporter might get fame for their quality of writing or sports shows, figures like Bob Ryan or Tony Kornheiser or Michael Wilbon, there's hardly any reputable entertainment news reporters. The ones with the best reputations are most likely film critics. Other than that, the majority of them seem like air-headed suck-ups who fear that a critical word would lead to instant denial of access, and thus, instant death in the industry.
At the very least, athletes are generally compelled to talk to reporters. Actors and actresses are under no such obligations.
That leads to the latest Star Trek film. Rather than continue along the Next Generation route, which has lead to several less than memorable films, J. J. Abrams, who created hit TV series, Lost and Alias and directed the third Mission Impossible film and the less than successful, Cloverfield.
In several interviews, he's already pointed out that he's not a huge Star Trek fan, and has taken liberties with the original show. He worked with non-fans of the show as well as huge fans of the show to create a story that would work well for those who loved the series, and those who knew little about Spock and Kirk.
Nearly every report has said that he is "rebooting" the series, that he is reviving a moribund franchise. This has to be sucking up to a major degree. To be fair, the TNG movies have not been very good, partly because they relied on the same creative team that made the series, and that series often succeed where their films do not. The reason is familiarity. You get familiar with the characters, but then they seem more like friends rather than exceptional people, and you see their warts and all, and there's a great degree of history that needs to be respected.
The fact of the matter is the series had done quite well. The original series lead to 6 TOS films and a handful of follow-up TNG films. The TNG films have not done well, and there was a huge gap between the last and penultimate TNG film. However, Star Trek spawned four series, including the original, TNG, DS9, and Enterprise. That's pretty successful. True, there has been no Star Trek series since then, but it's had a pretty good run.
Was the so-called reboot necessary? Well, there's still a built-in audience that likes Star Trek. To recast the original group with younger actors, and to have some other creative talent take over, sure, that can help. Some might argue Star Wars would have been better if the Lucas would let go of the reins and let other directors work in the Star Wars universe.
In any case, entertainment reporting on Star Trek is still lazy, lazy writing.
Still, people are more excited then ever. I didn't care about any of the TNG films, but this one sounds like it's worth watching.
Here's an thought puzzle for you. Why do men use wallets and why do women use purses or handbags?
I was thinking about this. Do women really have to carry a lot more stuff than men? If a guy thinks about what a woman carries, he probably thinks about lipstick, mascara, mirrors, etc. In other words, cosmetics, things to make women look more attractive.
Women are generally held to a higher standard of attractiveness than men, and in ways that can be controlled by spending money. Better clothing, nicer makeup, etc. Guys can be far lazier in that front.
Women have greater freedom with what to wear, but with that freedom comes a bit of responsibility to use that freedom.
I was attending a wedding this past weekend and saw many women wearing strapless dresses, basically leaving the entire shoulder exposed. Other women that were not part of the bridal party wore differing styles. I thought there's no way a man could reveal his shoulders in the same way, even accounting for women's breasts making some of these costuming choices possible.
Men end up in boring clothing because that's how it works. There's not a great deal variations in suits. They are generally dark: blue, black, brown, and occasionally gray or even tan. Tuxedos are similarly boring. But in this lack of originality, men don't have to do a lot.
Women, on the other hand, are given a great deal of freedom, and because of that, they are compelled to wear so many different outfits. Witness Michelle Obama, where the press scrutinized every inauguration outfit she wore. Husband Barack only had to wear the tux when it came to the various balls that first couple were obligated to attend.
But let's get to purses. Why do women not carry wallets? OK, so wallets would be carried in a pocket. One disadvantage, presumably, is that skirts don't generally have pockets, and skirts were what women wore until the 1970s when jeans took over and both men and women could wear them.
So J-Dog says my blog is false and that while IDEs and version control is important, universities aren't particularly good at teaching them so industry should teach it.
One could argue that industry doesn't even really teach, so they are at least as bad at it as anyone else.
I think it's agreed that you can classify the Stuff J-Dog Wants Taught as more fundamental, i.e., hasn't changed much in years (admittedly, algorithms and finite automata being relatively recent areas in computer science, some 50 years old) and Faddish Stuff, as in IDEs and version control.
Linear algebra, etc. all are rather "singular". There isn't X flavor of linear algebra and Y flavor of linear algebra, there's just linear algebra (feels like an Obama geek declaration). But there is a version of this IDE vs that IDE, and this version control vs. that version control, thus it has a faddish flavor, a technological contrivance, and to learn one might give you an overall flavor of all things in the class, but you may find yourself incompetent in a rival product.
And I can see that being distasteful to the university cognoscenti.
I've probably now attended a dozen weddings or so. I don't get invited to a lot of them, which is maybe all the better because I find them slightly stressful. Being a person who likes sameness a lot, getting ready to have to fly somewhere, get dressed up, go through the pomp and circumstance. It's a bit out of the ordinary.
The more weddings you attend, the more you start comparing and contrasting weddings. What did this wedding do well? What did it not do well? It's a touch petty, but it's not that different from watching a movie and wanting to rank it or listening to a song and asking if it's your new favorite.
I decided to keep this trip on the shorter side. I flew in the day of the wedding, merely 6 hour before the ceremony. I wasn't sure I would know more than the guy getting married (Phil), his best man (John), and maybe that's it.
Still, sometimes you go to a wedding, start talking to someone, and even though you'll probably not run into them again, it's a pleasant conversation. At Adam's wedding, I met some Asian guy who, I believe, went to high school with him, and had since moved to Connecticut. I think they figured since we came as "singles" it was best to put as at the same table.
I hadn't thought about that since just about now.
Hmm, so let me quickly get to Phil, and this post may have to continue at a later moment.
I don't quite recall how I met Phil. I used to be at the university all the time. I had a couch in my office, and used it all the time. I was lazy, so I'd teach, head to the couch to sleep, and start the next day. It wasn't typical, and indeed, in hindsight, a bit weird.
Because of this habit, I'd run into students in the evenings. The big project of the day was operating systems. It was a course I had taken (though we had a different project) and been a TA for. Most OS projects seem to be deliberately vague, as if revealing the details would be far too much, giving students no challenge at all.
Since this was post 2000, the web was in full swing, and previous incarnations of the course were also on the web. Clever students cobbled together pieces from the previous projects to get a grasp of what they really needed to do.
There were two PCs dedicated to the project. It wasn't much, and most students relied on developing it at home on a suitably ratty PC.
There were maybe 5-6 students who would work on the project, and usually Phil would figure out what the project was aiming at and explain it to the others several different times. As anyone who has taught knows, explaining something to someone is the best way to learn.
OS was a pretty intense course, and the bonding that came from it something that students often remember years after the course is over. Although I wasn't really part of the course, that is, not a TA, not an instructor, I came and helped out when I could being an unofficial TA, and that was one of the fonder memories.
I had Phil suggest to be some modern indie mix that I still have on my ITunes to this day. We went a few times out to the 9:30 club. One time, we went to listen to the Gabe Dixon band, who was the warm-up for the suddenly popular Norah Jones (and he'd marry someone named Nora--coincidence?). We had listened to Doves, Sigur Ros. I can't say I've been to the 9:30 club much since then, perhaps once or twice by myself, but being out there was memorable.
I remember getting a flat tire very close to campus and not knowing how to change it. I called up Phil since he was one of the few people I knew. He didn't much know how to change a tire either. A cop came by, but wasn't helpful. He refused to change the tire. Phil called up a tow truck, and perhaps he wouldn't come for free (he had AAA). Eventually, we got that guy to change the tire, and I was fine. But it was a nice thing for Phil to do, as I was stuck an hour or probably two until then.
I had visited Phil's place in southern Maryland a few times, and remember that he was trying to meet someone here and how he'd lament that it wasn't happening. Phil's a prototypical nice guy, willing to give the shirt off your back, feeling guilty if he hasn't emailed you. They say guys like that have problems meeting women who want their guys tougher and not always as nice. Edge, they say.
Phil also wanted a career change, wanted to go to music. His programming career was as much due to the booming times in software and his parents suggestion that he do something more rewarding, monetarily, than astronomy, which was his big interest of the day. Phil said he never had much talent musically, singing or playing, but he loved listening to music, and started classes in sound mixing.
This eventually lead him to Chicago, where he thought a change of scenery would improve his life. Although the music career never quite panned out, he did meet Nora in Chicago, and I think he'll take that as a positive change, one that he didn't originally plan for (does one plan such things?), but has worked out quite well indeed.
I was having a debate with a friend, which wasn't much of a debate to be honest, because we weren't really debating.
He felt that a computer science program should cover the fundamentals which, to him, meant math. You should know things like algorithms, linear algebra, statistics. He said things like IDEs and version control should not be taught. You have limited resources, and those things are fads that change. And since industry uses these things, then let industry teach it, or pick it up on the job.
He argued that no one is going to pick up linear algebra if they aren't taught it in classes, but people can always learn IDEs and version control.
At the time, while I disagreed, I didn't present any counterarguments.
So it made me think. Would a typical person actually pick up those things at work? There are fairly smart people that don't want to learn IDEs or version control because it is a fad. Could they learn it on their own? Perhaps, but there are so many mundane details to learn, much of which isn't that important to learn, that people often go in the other direction. They learn just enough to get by without fully understanding it.
To take this to an extreme, there are smart people that know math that don't even bother to learn to program properly. If you say IDEs and version control is unimportant because of its faddish nature, then you might as well say learning to program in any popular programming language is also faddish. It can take at least as long to really learn a language well as it does to learn the basics of stats or linear algebra (i.e., 3-4 months of focus) and it takes a certain personality to learn a language as well as possible.
The problem, in my mind, is that computer science, as it leads to a programming job, is faddish and fundamental. If you focus on the fundamentals, then you are telling graduating majors that everything else is a fad and is "easy" to pick up. These faddish things are in fact not easy to pick up and are difficult in completely unsatisfying ways.
At least, you can argue that if you learn linear algebra or stats and it's tough to figure out, then when you finally do figure it out, then you can feel you've understood something deep.
This isn't really the case with IDEs and version control. You learn a lot of mundane details and wonder why certain things even exist, and what their purpose is for. A typical industrial strength IDE has hundreds of options. There are ways to extend the IDE (say, for an open source IDE like Eclipse), ways to integrate it with a build system, with a bug-tracking system, etc.
So many details are there, and it takes a long time to master them, and it's not always that uniform from one product to another.
My thinking is that we need to teach how to deal with this because it is a survival skill in the industry, despite being so very ephemeral.
In other words, despite the fact that people may not choose to learn linear algebra once they go into industry, they may, for quite different reasons, not choose to learn an IDE particularly well when they arrive there either. To assume that they will is a bit of folly.
About a year ago, I bought a camcorder. I wasn't planning to make video of my kids since I don't have kids. I wasn't planning to make a movie, though the idea is certainly appealing. I wanted to record my tennis strokes.
Video isn't exactly new to tennis. Back in the 1970s, Vic Braden used to take high-speed videos of tennis players. He famously advocated that players use a very low toss for their serves much like Roscoe Tanner, the best server of his day. This was routinely ignored, especially in Europe, where the opposite occurred: extremely high ball tosses. Braden probably popularized the notion of wrist pronation vs. wrist snap, and that has been far more influential than the low ball toss.
But Braden had an expensive tennis facility and an expert making those videos, so it meant the average player couldn't look at his own strokes. You needed two things: low-cost camcorders and video software to slow down the action. Without being able to slow down your stroke, it's hard to notice where problems occur. While I don't have the benefit of high-speed high-def cameras, I don't really need them.
I use a mini-DV camera which is good enough (though not HD), and I use IMovie '09 to slow down the video. That is also good enough for me.
I first started modifying my forehand in probably October of 2007. At the time, I chose to model Novak Djokovic. I don't even recall why Djokovic, other than he was a rising star and that he was pretty funny. You have to understand that Djokovic had a huge breakout year in 2007. He literally came from nowhere and jumped to number 3. While people were distracted by epic Nadal-Federer finals, few noticed that, by Wimbledon, Djokovic had made his second consecutive semifinals, essentially matching Federer and Nadal, and made his first US Open final that same year.
The one problem with Djokovic's forehand, at least, at the time I decided to stop using his forehand as a model, was the following. Pause the above video. Notice that Novak's racquet face points behind him to the back "fence" (a wall, in pro events). He then lowers the racquet face down so it points down the the ground behind him (pause at 0:13), then turns the racquet face to the right tilted somewhat downwards (pause at 0:14), before pulling the racquet to contact.
To me, that seemed like a lot of excess motion, and I wanted a simpler model.
So I went to the forehand everyone said was the best, at least at the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008, and that was Roger Federer.
At the beginning of this video, Roger's racquet face points to his right. Contrast that with Djokovic, who brings the racquet behind him. In fact, this pointing to the right was something I had a hard time doing because my body awareness wasn't so good. By body awareness, I mean I would point my arm in one direction, but think it was pointing in some other direction. So I would probably think I was pointing to my right, and was actually pointing behind me.
How could I make such a huge mistake? One reason was simple. I wasn't looking. I was focusing on the ball, so when I stuck my racquet behind me, I didn't really know where it was. I could have asked someone, but it never occurred to me that my mental model of where my arm was and reality diverged so much.
Video really helped me see this.
Now, it turns out, Federer also has some motions that add some complexity to his forehand.
Pause at 0:04, and you see his racquet face pointed face down, and the tip of his racquet head pointed to his right. If you were take an overhead view, lined up so the baseline is "west-east" and Roger is hitting "south", then his racquet face initially points west, the moves north, and indeed a little north-east.
By the time it's pointing north-east, (pause at 0:08), the racquet face points right and slightly down. This is the common racquet orientation for pretty much every modern player, and occurs when they are about to accelerate the racquet head to contact. Up to that point, players do all sorts of things. I would say, at least for the better players I see on public courts, that the Djokovic model seems the most popular. Why? I don't know.
I discovered, after watching videos of myself, that I kept my racquet face down a lot, that is, almost the entire swing to contact. I only open the face right when I hit it, but otherwise, it stays closed.
There were several reasons, but one huge reason was because I feed the ball too close to my body. Feeding yourself the ball means to drop the ball and hit it. Most people drop it near their right foot, and that it simply too close to the body. It should be tossed maybe 3 feet to your right. You want your arm to be out far to the right so it gets more of a full extension.
The other reason was the way I oriented my wrist. It's taken maybe 10 months to begin to train myself not to close my racquet face and to know which orientation my wrist should be at.
Ultimately, that became the reason I abandoned the Federer forehand. Federer closes his racquet face, then points it to the right. Since I couldn't tell whether I was closing my racquet face or not (despite thinking I was pointing it to the right, often numerous times), I felt trying to imitate Federer that closely was going to confuse me.
At that point, I looked to a different model, which was probably the end of 2008, maybe around October or November. I had been trying the Federer forehand since probably March, or before I even started to video myself in May of 2008.
2008 turned out to be a big year for several players: Gilles Simon was ranked around 20 and moved to around 6 or 7 (but has slipped some since a big move to the top 10), Juan Martin del Potro's ascendancy has been more impressive, getting into the top 10 as well, and finally Andy Murray who started the year around 6, and moved up to a solid number 4, threatening to go to 3.
If you were to ask the experts looking at Murray's game what his best stroke was, well, they'd probably not point to his forehand. Indeed, his backhand is considered his stronger side. Still, that's just a relative comparison. That is, it treats his forehand and backhand separately. If you were to rank the top forehands, Murray's would be behind Federer, Djokovic, Verdasco, Gonzalez, probably Blake. It depends on what you think is important in a forehand. If you were to rank backhands, Murray might be 3 behind Nadal and Djokovic. Even so, most pros, have better forehands than backhands. One might argue this is true even for a player with as impressive a one-handed backhand as Richard Gasquet. Few people rip winners regularly from their backhands.
This is probably the best slow motion video of Andy Murray's forehand, despite the rather low quality of the video itself. It's about the only one that is shown from Andy's right, which you almost never see. Most videos are taken from the front, which is fine, but not to illustrate what I want to show.
In particular, since this video is from Andy's right, then when his racquet face points right, then it points to the camera. Pay attention to the entire swing path.
Starting at 0:12 to 0:17, the racquet face points right (i.e. to the camera, i.e., to you, the viewer) which is pretty much the start of his motion to just the instant before contact where he then, out of necessity (like every pro), points the racquet face to the ball.
Nowhere in that stroke does Murray point his racquet face down, which, if you recall from the earlier on, was my problem. I would close my face until just before impact.
Despite knowing this, it took a long time to understand several things. First, I had a tendency to point the racquet face behind me, a la Djokovic. I also had a huge looping motion behind me. I noticed most pros don't loop that big. They have a much milder motion that, in particular, doesn't get behind them.
I should say most male pros. Women pros, by and large, do get their racquet behind them, and hit it like some folks hit a one-handed backhand. There's only one male pro I know of that hits like that, which is Frenchman, Jeremy Chardy.
Watch at 2:16 (it's sad how bad Youtube video quality is--you can't watch tennis at all unless it's at least high quality, which is why it's nice that Youtube finally allowed better quality video to be uploaded). Chardy takes his racquet so that it is behind him (racquet face points to back fence), but unlike Djokovic, who has the racquet tip pointed up, Chardy's racquet tip points to the left. Most women pros (Safina, Sharapova, Ivanovic, etc) do this, but most male pros don't.
Think of your chest as a large infinite plane, much like the ones they teach in you in geometry. A plane divides 3-space into "half", which can be loosely termed as the half-space in front of you, and the half-space behind you. Now imagine your chest points to the right fence, thus you are sideways, relative to the net. This is the position you'd be in setting up for a righty forehand.
Most male pros keep their racquet head in the front half. Women pros, on the other hand, let the racquet head get behind them. This is so they can get a longer swing path. It mimics a one-handed backhand where the racquet face also gets behind you, but applies the same idea to the forehand. Men, perhaps needing less time to hit because they are physically stronger, don't do this.
In particular, if you watch the wrist and arm, it tends to go roughly straight back and drop and then the whole body rotates counter-clockwise. This would be much easier to illustrate if I had a video, but I don't.
To illustrate, imagine you are doing jumping jacks. Focus on your right arm. Jumping jacks have you swing your right arm at the plane of your torso. Basically, your racquet goes from being in front of you as you prepare to hit, to being maybe 45 degress pointing up in a jumping jack motion, to dropping your arm so it is maybe waist height (this is the part of the jumping jack motion where the arm descends down).
Notice the arm stays in that plane. My tendency was to pull my arm behind this plane and make my wrist move behind this plane in a loop motion.
OK, I'm being highly technical here. Clearly, women hit something like that, so why don't I?
Several reasons. One is silly. I'm a guy, I want to hit like other guy pros. Two, male pros have shorter strokes and so I think that's important so I don't get caught too late. Male pros already set up much quicker than I do, so they can afford to have longish stroke paths. Women pros are also quicker than me.
Three, I want to make my body do what my mind is telling it to do. And that's really the biggest reason. The change I'm making may not improve my forehand much, but the process by which I get there will help me think about how I do things, how I get my body to make a certain motion. I didn't expect it to take me a year to master. It's still a work in progress, but I am slowly getting closer to what I want to do.
One key is that I can shadow-stroke the way I want to hit. Shadow-stroking is where you hit the ball without the ball. You would think that motion is enough. If I can shadow stroke, I can hit the ball that same way.
Untrue.
When I shadow-stroke, there's no ball. I don't react to a ball, so I can focus entirely on the swing. But once there's a ball, I have to react so I can hit the ball, and then muscle memory kicks in to try to adjust the swing to hit the ball, and that's where my problems come in. You just have to swing over and over to train the body not to do what it's been doing for a long time.
Now, a year is a pretty long time to obsess over hitting a forehand, especially since the motion isn't coming to me that quickly. But I enjoy the process of getting there. If it came easily, I would have missed too many other things, in particular, a better awareness of what my body is doing. That's been a weirdly valuable lesson.
Weird, only because it's not that critical for me to know what my body is doing when it hits a tennis ball, but valuable because I realize what I thought I was doing and what I do are different things, and that's an interesting lesson, that might apply to less physical activities.
Right now, the motion is kinda there, but I still take my racquet back too much, so I am trying to reduce that motion. If I were to have done this motion 6 months ago, I would have told you I am not even pointing my racquet behind me, but it's off to my right. I would have been wrong. That goes to show you how off my perception was.
So I still need to practice. I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that a month more and I'll have it close to where I want it, but then I've been trying this for many months already, so if it's longer, I won't be surprised.
Twitter has been out a few years now. It was considered the darling of the Ruby on Rails crowd since it was a big popular application. Since then, Twitter has blamed ROR for scalability issues, accusations they once said were not the fault of ROR, but now the claim are. Indeed, there is a push to rewrite Twitter in Scala, a competitor to Groovy, which is a functional language built on the JVM. I had heard of Scala even before Twitter (or Groovy), but I digress.
For a long time, I did nothing with my Twitter account. I didn't get microblogging. I didn't have anything I wanted to post that frequently. I had no big reason to use it.
But that changed a few months ago, when Twitter hit a tipping point. Some people point to, oh, maybe 2005 SXSW, the music, technology, who-knows-what event that's held in Austin, TX (the city that is weird and wants to stay that way) when numerous attendees jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and brought Twitter to a screeching halt until they figured out how to deal with so many new Twits (TM).
That wasn't it. Twitter really took off when athletes and celebrities started using Twitter. Most surprisingly (but probably not), Shaquille O'Neal started tweeting. Indeed, he once announced he was at a restaurant and some nearby geeks saw him online and asked if they could come by, and he said yes. They got a picture with him.
Shaq is such a ham.
He's not the only athlete. In tennis, world number 4 player (and possibly going to be world number 3) Andy Murray is on Twitter. He shows a playful side. He and his "Team Murray" play footy-tennis, some combination of soccer and tennis and losers of the challenge often wear clothes inside out or women's clothing to public places such as dinner. He'll mention his tickets to see the Miami Heat, or practicing with a fellow pro, or a recent tennis result, or playing a "brain game". Not something you imagine Roger Federer (too classy) or Rafael Nadal (English not good enough) to do.
Of course, the Internet has always spawned its own lesser-known celebrities, thus, a Gabe Rivera of TechMeme fame might tweet with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch fame. Although Twitter didn't originally support "chatting" with someone else, people refer to one another by their Twitter name prefaced with an "@" sign, as in @gaberivera.
But certainly, it was enough to push it into national consciousness when Mike and Mike in the morning refer to Facebook and Twitter and when the venerable Diane Rehm now has people contacting her via Twitter. She probably doesn't exactly get it either, but her producers, I'm sure, help her through this technological wonderland.
So where I used to use Twitter sparingly, I now check into it daily. I have the every garrulous Wil Wheaton that I follow who posts like 10 tweets a day (most people manage 1-2 a day) or more. Brent Spiner is also on that list. I haven't yet added Levar Burton.
I follow Carl Lerche, a guy I saw at RubyRx. I probably should add Jared Richardson, but I don't have his tweety address.
And there you have it. When did it happen? Maybe 6 months ago? It's interesting how the NBA has probably encouraged its leading stars to embrace technology. Most players already have smartphones and laptops they bring everywhere to keep them connected to their fans. Gilbert Arenas had his blog and now Shaq twitters.
I was a little surprised that Mad World was written by British band, Tears for Fears. Best known for Everyone Wants To Rule The World, this band produced 3-4 hits.
I first heard about Mad World from the indie SF thriller (only, it isn't), Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko is an early role by Jake Gyllenhaal who plays the titular character Donnie.
The film is basically about growing up in the 1980s. The SF elements are so strong that it's easy to miss the nostalgia for that period of time, which include the rise of evangelical Christians on mainstream TV, the popularity of Members Only and Ocean Pacific clothing, the trend from traditional cheerleading to a dance-style, and the medicating of the youth to deal with psychological issues, real or imagined.
Donnie Darko chronicles the troubled teenage life of Donnie who is a bit of an outcast and is, I believe, on medication to treat this. Of course, he falls for a girl, and then there is the requisite weirdness involved a very large, not terribly realistic bunny called Frank. Is Donnie insane?
If you listen to the version of Mad World by Tears for Fears, the first link I have above, you'll see that it sounds a bit techno, and doesn't even seem like a very good song given that arrangement. Gary Jules (in the second link above) creates a more melancholy version and it's the one that appears in Donnie Darko.
Last night was "songs from the year you were born" on American Idol, where the eight remaining performers pick songs, primarily from the 80s. Adam Lambert, the prohibitive favorite to win American Idol, sang Mad World opting for more of Gary Jules approach. Lambert is the emo guy who normally yells out parts of the song because his vocals are so strong. However, he's been dialing it down some because it's been seen as a bit too intense and over the top for most.
Interestingly enough, as blogs started covering last night's show, a weird phenomenon occurred. Eight people is tough to fit in a one hour live show. This year, they added a new judge, Kara, because Paula Abdul is so gushingly positive that they wanted someone who might have a negative opinion once in a while. This forced the show to conclude 5 minutes after it was supposed to end.
In particular, Adam Lambert, being the last to perform, was on from 9:00 to 9:05 (the song lasted 2-3 minutes as it's usually truncated to get everyone in). Apparently, and here's the fascinating part, many people prefer to watch American Idol on DVR, so they record it, then watch it about half way, and skip over the commercials.
The problem? The program was supposed to have ended at 9 PM, so the DVRs failed to record this. Now it seems like enough people had this problem that people were blogging about this.
Now that I write this, I wonder if this was done deliberately. Those who DVR'ed it will have to go find a version of it quickly. Does it hurt Lambert's chances or will they vote for him "blind"? Although samples of the song were up within an hour of the show, was that enough time?
I happened to see it live, so I didn't miss anything, but it's an interesting phenomenon.
Weather reporting has only gotten marginally better over the years. The biggest innovation probably occurred 20 years ago when Doppler radar became widely used by meteorologists.
For someone who cares when the rain is, I want to see live and time-lapsed Doppler radar. Problem? I'm forced to use map resolutions I don't control.
Now who has maps that are draggable, zoomable and has innovative folks?
Google.
So where's Google Weather? Add it as an extension to Google Maps. Perhaps it might allow users to enter in weather data, most importantly, rain.
Of course, they could add more to it than that.
For example, with weather prediction, I want to see a time-lapse of how the weather for Thursday (say) has changed as the time approaches Thursday. How often is this data being updated? When did that prediction of sunny weather become rain?
And how far is the prediction for right now differing from now. I'll see predicted temperatures for 40s, when it's currently 48, which means the next few hours should be warmer than that. Shouldn't that be auto-updated?
Every year, mid March, the basketball stat-loving fans are knee-deep into "bracketology". This is the pseudo-science that tries to guess who will play in March Madness.
I should back up some. The NCAA is a governing body of college sports in the United States. Each college/university is placed in a "division" based on the size of their school and on their level of athletic prowess. In particular, there is Division 1, 2, and 3. Division 1 is where the best athletes tend to go.
March Madness is the NCAA Division 1 Men's Basketball Championships.
The tournament is in mid to late March and has 65 teams. Each college/university in Division 1 belongs to a conference. Each conference has a way of determining a winner. Sometimes they have a tournament at the end of the season. Most major conferences do this, e.g. the ACC, which stands for the Atlantic Coast Conference had a year-end championship that concluded yesterday, March 15 (Duke beat Florida State).
Duke, for example, got an automatic bid into the tournament by winning the ACC championships and represents the ACC.
The Ivy League looks at the team with the best regular season record (I believe, only against other Ivy League teams). This year, it's Cornell.
There are 31 conferences, each with an automatic bid based on how that conference decides to pick a representative. Why automatic? Many of these conferences are very weak and would not otherwise qualify for March Madness if it weren't for the automatic bid. Fans of basketball often enjoy these smaller (called "mid-major") conferences because the upset, while rare, is entertaining.
There are 34 at-large bids. A committee decides which 34 teams that didn't get an automatic bid qualify. The committee decides, based on a body of work, which teams get an at-large bid. It is the source of nervous anticipation when teams on the "bubble", that is on the verge of making it in or not, wait to find if the committee picked them or not. St. Mary's didn't get in. Arizona did. These two were on the bubble.
In the weeks leading up to Selection Sunday (which was March 15 this year), experts called "bracketologists" (a made up name to sound a bit scientific) try to guess which teams will make the 34 at-large bids.
Now if you add the two numbers: 31 automatic and 34 at-large, you get 65. This is not a power of two. A single elimination tournament should add to 64.
65 came about because a new conference was added to go from 30 to 31. No one wanted the number of at-large bids to go down by 1 especially since the new conference was likely to be very weak.
Usually, March Madness is played over three long weekends. By long weekend, I mean Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If a given team is not eliminated, they play two games during this long weekend. 6 wins gives you a national title.
How to deal with 65 then? Two teams play in a play-in game and that is played on the Tuesday (2 days before the first "official" day). The winner usually has the honor of playing a number 1 seed.
Ah, so seeding. Once we get to 64, each team is placed in one of four groups of 16. They are called East, West, Midwest, and South. Within each group, the teams are ranked (or seeded) 1 to 16. They play each other so that 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, 3 plays 14, and so forth. In other words, the highest seed always plays the lowest seed at each possible round, making their chances better (though not guaranteed) that they will make it to the finals.
Once each of the groups has eliminated down to 1, there are 4 teams remaining, and this is called the "Final Four". In the final weekend, they go from 4 to 2, then 2 to 1 to determine a champion.
For many universities, a good sign of success is making it past the first long weekend. If they win 2 games, they are in the final 16, which is called the "Sweet 16". A measure of how good a basketball program is is how many times they have made the Sweet 16 ever and in the last few years.
Bracketology is interesting because people spend lots of time trying to guess who will make it, and for the most part, they are correct, plus or minus 5-6 picks. The exact seeding is a bit challenging as other factors are put into play.
In particular, high seeds are often placed at a tournament site (picked long before March Madness) near their university so their fans can come and support them. This may seem unfair (it's common wisdom that the more fans that come and cheer, the better a team does), but in the past, lower seeded teams have sometimes been placed closed to home, while the higher seeded opponent is far away and fewer fans attend, thus giving a "home court advantage" to the lower seeded team.
The committee created something called "pods" a few years ago, so they could mix and match teams from different regions (the East, West, Midwest, South from earlier) at the same tournament site so they could help teams stay close to home. This is a tough job, and it affects seeding too.
It's amazing but people spend the last weeks of February and the first weeks of March trying to predict which teams will make it. Time and fastidious attention are critical, and yet it is merely a game.
Oh yeah, betting. This is perhaps the hugest betting that occurs on any event in the US. Most of it is done in small office pools where each person puts in a small amount, between 5 and 20 dollars. It keeps interest up especially in upsets and tiny teams and people who play but know nothing of the sport and do well nonetheless because those that know better pick more upsets than they should.
Many years ago, probably at least 15, I stumbled on a conversation that was a bit of an epiphany. Epiphany is too strong a word, but nevertheless, I like the sound of that word over "eye opener".
The discussion centered around the notion of "what is a city". Of course, I had the rather naive view that it was anything above a certain population. Something big enough to make it bigger than a town, bigger than a suburb. A metropolis, such as it was, would be a big city.
However, the two people debating the issue, and it could hardly have been a debate, because they agreed to same principles, but were simply niggling on details of what were proper examples of cities.
A city, they had agreed, was not only a large metropolitan area, but some place that had a distinctive personality. So New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago fit the bill. New Orleans and Philadelphia would be considered cities, but places like Tampa or Rochester or Jacksonville might be suitably non-descript to count as a city.
Would Portland and Seattle be cities? Places like Nashville and Atlanta maybe yes. Places like Charlotte, not so much.
Why use this definition? It's been said many people who live in the city like the city. It has museums and plays and concerts and sports teams. Its very size generally means a diversity in things to do, and people that live there, as ethnic groups of all sorts will find more familiar faces in a big city than in a rural countryside.
If the city lacks personality, maybe Buffalo or Des Moines, then it becomes just a large place that isn't particularly distinctive, an overcrowded place without the kind of personality one wants.
The city seems antithetical to the car. Not to say certain cities don't practically require the use of a car (think Los Angeles), but that the convenience of cities should be nearby places to go that is walkable or certainly accessible via public transport. It's difficult for a city to be walkable and have cars. But to be walkable means you need to distribute restaurants, stores, museums, etc. all in the same area and not segregate homes on one end, and shopping on the other.
I happen to like the car, but there are plenty of times where the sheer amount of time, compounded by the incessant number of traffic lights, makes the journey so very arduous and therefore tedious. The city fights this because the parameters are so much bigger. The number of lanes, the tall building, the taxis jockeying for positions, the rules that seem to only appear in cities, one way streets, and so forth. What a pain.
If you like the car, then you want tiny towns and wide open spaces where the congestion of a city populace isn't there. It is an urban fantasy that a city be desolate of drivers except for the one person, free to roam down streets with towers that pierce the sky, and with the roof pulled down, the music blaring loudly, the wind rushing like waterless currents through one's hair, and equate this rush of exhilarating movement and equate this with freedom.
Watchmen, so I've learned from reading several articles, is based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore, the same guy who penned V is for Vendetta. Moore has generally been viscerally opposed to any film adaptation of his work. However, fans of his work--and they are numerous are curious, at the very least, how it would turn out.
Given the big budget affair that most superhero movies have turned out to be, an action that generally attracts many well-named actors to roles, think Tobey Maguire in Spiderman or Robert Downey Junior in Iron Man or many of the cast of Batman, it's quite amazing to have a film where you struggle to recognize the actors. If you're the casual filmwatcher (no pun intended), you might not recognize any of the actors.
I recognized two, and even then, only barely. Billy Crudup, who shares the same birthday as me, plays the CGI-ed up Dr. Manhattan who is mostly very blue, very naked, and very unemotional. I also knew, somewhat of Patrick Wilson, who plays Nite Owl, the awkwardly straight-laced superhero who generally admonishes the crowd to behave themselves.
Contrast this with Batman, where there are, at least, tons of famous character actors from Gary Oldman to Michael Caine to Morgan Freeman to Christian Bale. In the latest, Dark Knight, you get to see the incredible Heath Ledger playing a demented Joker. But Ledger is so famous, even before his untimely death, that you would know "that's Heath Ledger, wow he's good".
In Watchman, you're so engaged with these actors as the roles they play, you don't even think "that's so and so". So many films are scared to cast relative unknowns to play roles. I understand these aren't hacks. These are actors with reasonable resumes who've done well in much smaller parts. But it really helps to be engaged in the storyline when you don't think of the people playing these roles.
The mainstream comics, Marvel and DC, have defined the modern superhero. Usually, though not always (Batman being an exception), the superhero is imbued with superpowers, in someway. They can climb walls, or have adamantium claws, or can have flames emanating from their body. There's usually an origin story. There's usually some maniacal bad guy who is just as powerful, or, at the very least, a mad genius. Think Lex Luthor.
Oddly enough, in a world of superheroes, the government never seems to think it's too weird or feels too threatened that they cower to the might of the superheroes. They simply pass laws and such restricting behavior and the superheroes sometimes listen. Although the film isn't a traditional superhero movie, The Incredibles has this theme where the government has told superheroes to clamp down and stop being super. And oddly enough, they listen.
OK, to be fair, that film really explores Bird's thesis that there are hugely talented people out there (artists, in his world) and the PC attitude that everyone is good is doing a disservice to the geniuses. But beyond the subtext, the film is still a superhero film and takes its cues from comics.
People have claimed that Watchmen is a dark movie, and perhaps it is. But I thought The Dark Knight was darker. The Dark Knight is not so much about Joker vs. Batman, at least in any conventional sense of bad guy vs. good guy.
It's more like real-world ethics where Joker is presenting one real-world ethical dilemma after another. He poses questions that Batman needs to answer. Does Batman want to save the woman he loves, or the man that could save Gotham. That Batman picks the woman, and ends up realizing he's been tricked, well, that doesn't matter. Joker, ultimately, isn't about anything. He's not a character that has his own goals and motivations. He's a teacher, a tester, a challenger. He is the foil for Batman, making him deal with his personal demons.
It helps the second film is not an origin film. That was the first film.
If Watchmen draws analogies to Batman, at least, the Christopher Nolan version (though any would do), it makes sense. Batman is really the wealthy Bruce Wayne. In such a world, the wealthy have access to genius engineers who build special cars and special suits. They are superior fighters and movers, but otherwise, lack any other special powers. They're just superhuman enough to win any fight, but not so superhuman to fly or have any particular power.
Except for Dr. Manhattan. We'll get back to him later.
The origin story of Batman also serves as some inspiration to Watchmen. Batman wasn't a do-gooder. He had a traumatic childhood event, and spends his life as a vigilante. He's not the "dark knight" for no reason. He's not a paragon of virtue like, say, Superman is.
Watchmen tackles several themes that superhero movies don't usually deal with. First and foremost is politics. The films generally have the worldview of commies and pinkos and liberals on the one side, and the righteous conservative view on the other. And most of the Watchmen lean on this end. They feel they need to be just outside the law to do what they need to do.
Many of the superheroes, perhaps The Comedian, most notably, are deeply flawed heroes. They don't take responsibility. They revel in power like renegade cops. Even the heroes that are close to wholesome, namely Nite Owl, have to deal with other heroes that are less than wholesome. Nite Owl serves as our protagonist.
In real life, he's much like Clark Kent. Meek, shy. His superhero persona is merely a rigid reflection of his more timid self. Constantly cleaning his glasses, he's repressed. He's Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark without the confidence. The film never quite establishes how or why he gets along with Rorschach who is the resident psychopath/detective.
The film, set in the 1980s, also pays homage to heroes that preceded them. This is one idea that really never gets explored in superhero films. Nite Owl is really the second of two Nite Owl's, the original already too old to fight crime. The younger, lacking the bravery to ask Silk Spectre out on a proper date, at least goes to cheer up the older Nite Owl, drinking and talking about the good old days.
Indeed, each hero, especially the male heroes, are different reactions to power. The Comedian is like bad cop, who does whatever he wants, because he's got power. Rorschach believes in vigilante justice. He's got a code, but once he decides you're the bad guy, he's not above any method to deal his brand of justice. (Maybe like The Punisher). Nite Owl is the closest to a straight-laced superhero, but who puts up with the shenanigans of other heroes. He's a bit helpless to stop their bad behavior.
Ozymandias is the smart one, who uses his brain to become, well, Tony Stark? He's successful in business. He's revealed his identity so he can use his talent and wealth to help the world in some way.
Dr. Manhattan is also a genius, in his way, but an otherworldly one. One who gets increasingly detached as the film goes on. Despite practically godlike powers, the early parts of the film shows that he isn't above manipulation, nor above being in relationships. Superheroes often are considered super-moral. Because Crudup plays him so detached, and because he's, well, distracting as a hero (they once claimed Hulk would be naked in the film), it's easy to overlook that he's not particularly moral himself, partly because he is so detached. There's a key scene where The Comedian does something particularly awful and he points out to Dr. Manhattan, much like he points out to Nite Owl (really Nite Owl 2), that he has the power to stop him, but doesn't.
Indeed, the characters that are considered "good" often lack the strength to do good, even as those that prefer "by any means necessary" choose less than savory means to achieve their objectives.
This is far from a traditional superhero film. The Dark Knight for all its ethical quandaries is still about a good (well, kinda good) guy against a bad guy, and their confrontation with each other, although it's really about a split identity. A key scene in The Dark Knight has Joker asking what Batman believes in and what is he prepared to do when push comes to shove. But despite pushing the traditional boundaries of how good and bad guys behave, it is, more or less, structured in this framework.
Watchmen doesn't have a traditional bad guy. The bad guys resemble some of the faceless henchman in some of the Timothy Burton Batmans who have superior fighting skills but zero personalities (at least, in the Watchmen, there is minimal personalities for the bad guys that appear in the middle of the film).
The Watchmen explores what happens if ordinary people became superheroes. The special effects have a strongly retro feel to it. There's a certain realness to the Nite Owl flyer that, like Batman's vehicles, mimics his character. Despite it's obvious large windows that look like eyes, it pays homage to heroes like Batman, but because Nite Owl is not burned into the collective psyche like Batman (another thing in the film's favor, I'd say), the craft is somewhat charming.
Finally, this is a world that is about the real people behind the masks and spends as much of its time there as it does in the superhero mode. Even in real identities, these characters spend little time dealing with real people. They hang out with one another. It's not like Clark Kent hanging out at the Daily Planet where he interacts with Perry White, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen.
The Watchmen lacks the intensity of the recent Batman films, but it poses a lot of heady ideas. The world depicted in the film isn't fully realized, but it is full enough to keep the audience thinking about what it means to be a hero and what it means to have a life outside of being a hero.
Most weather sites kinda suck. What I want, and it's simply really. Combine Google Maps with a weather overlay. I want zoom-in and zoom-out. I want to know if rain is on the way, etc. I don't even need weather predictions if the cloud cover is right.
When folks move, they are taking advantage of something people are willing to do as a favor. Expend a few hours to do a large amount of work. The tradeoff is this. The person who is packing expends a lot of hours packing so the movers don't have to. It's hard to get help if the things drags on and on.
There's something that could be done similarly, I think, but for some reason is social taboo. A cleaning party.
How many people do you know are a perpetual mess? Their homes look like a tornado went through it. I have to admit, I'm one of those folks. I'd love to have people over to help clean, but the problem is deciding what to keep and what to get rid of. I wouldn't be able to make that decision.
Ideally, what I need is someone to come for about an hour at a time and give me an assignment. Do this by the next time I see you. For some reason, external motivation works better on me than my own motivation which is simply to do nothing.
Instead, people feel awkward about helping others clean, even if the effort is a lot less than actually helping people move. They feel that the person should take care of their place themselves since it's possible to do it.
Cosmos was a series that showed up on PBS in, hmm, 1980, I think. It was a 12 part series hosted by astronomer, Carl Sagan. At the time, science shows like this seemed cool. I caught an episode again in college a few years later, and it seemed laughably optimistic.
In the series, Sagan would travel around in an imaginary spaceship that resembled a dandelion.
What was rather notable about the show was the music. Vangelis composed many of the memorable music. This is something that is unusual. Rarely is a science program noted for its music.
I was looking at some slow motion video of Andy Murray, world number 4 ranked player.
Slow motion video has to be the biggest aid to analyzing the way the pros hit. It's really changed how I look at strokes. Without slowmo, you can't see what's going on. It's too fast.
In tennis, there are two main theories of hitting a forehand. One is called the straight arm forehand. Federer and Nadal use this as does Fernando Verdasco. The idea is you hit the ball with a straight arm. To get the correct angle, however, your arm sticks out significantly to the right and in front of you.
The alternative is the double-bend forehand. Basically, your elbow is closer to your body, and there is a 120 degree bend between the upper arm and the forearm. This allows the forearm to be mostly parallel to the ground. To get a similar effect with the straight arm, you need to have your arm way, way out.
Here's the insight. It's much easier to get the racquet face to point right if the arm is parallel to the ground as opposed to being nearly perpendicular. The double bend facilitates this. The forearm is nearly parallel to the ground, and keeping the racquet face pointed correct is not so bad.
Now all I have to do is try this out on the court.
I was thinking about this a day ago at 5 AM eating at an IHOP waiting for food.
Although people will tell you that faith, and I mean Christian faith in general, is about, well, faith. It is about community too. Many "good" people like the church because it provides community. Without community, I wonder how faithful many people would be.
Consider how Christians perceive various fringe groups that claim to be Christians, e.g. Mormons. The more fringe it is, and the more it doesn't involve Christ, the more likely the average Christian says it's all fake, without seeing the irony of that statement.
If anything, Christians point to a long long history of the faith, that it didn't just come about last week. But they can also point to the large numbers of active believers. After all, Greek worship of their own gods predates Christianity by a fair bit.
Without community, you are isolated. You have no other people that confirm the beliefs you have. Despite the statement that one should place their faith in a higher being, the fact is, people place their faith in other people. It is because of the community sharing this belief that they feel good about faith. If they were the only ones who believed something and no one else did, they would be far less sure of their faith.
But beyond that, the community provides a sense of belonging. The faith creates a common kind of culture. Some people wonder why African Americans choose to live near other African Americans. One reason is community. There is a shared background and then there is a community that understands where you came from and helps shape that view.
I'm not saying that you couldn't live without the community but Christians place a strong emphasis on going to church. They want you to be part of the community and some take reassurance from that. The community is one reason many ethnic groups have banded together.
Now one reason some people aren't atheists is the loss of community. It can be made up through secular means, such as Habitat for Humanity or various non-denominational charities. Is the sermon important to community? Charities don't have the equivalent of services, but should they?
This is one of those blog entries that you should skip if you don't play tennis. I'll try to make it readable if you don't, but I won't try that hard. Expect to be bored. Even if you do play, you may or may not want to read.
Today, I thought I made a breakthrough. Let me explain what's going on. I've been trying to redo my forehand for about 9 months. It's taken a very long time because it requires me to adjust my wrist and arm at an angle so that it resembles the way the pros hit. I have a camcorder with a tiny playback. It's so tiny that I can't quite tell if I'm hitting the ball the way I want.
I have to take that video, upload it to my computer, where I can then slow it down and see if I've hit it right. That feedback loop is awful. That means, rather than fix my shot then and there, I have to wait until I get home and then, usually, realize I've hit it wrong. That can be depressing.
OK, so let me tell you what I'm trying to do. To explain this, I'll use a touch of physics. Imagine you had a frying pan. The surface you cook on has a "normal". To understand the normal, imagine you have a pencil. You put it on edge so the eraser is on the pan bottom and the point of the pencil points straight to the ceiling.
The pencil is perpendicular to the entire surface of the pan.
Now replace the pan with a tennis racquet, and the idea is the same. When you say a racquet face is "pointed" to a certain direction, it is the normal of the racquet face that points in that direction. That is, if you had that pencil, it's the direction the pencil points.
When you hit a forehand, you are hitting on the right side of your body. This is the power shot for most players.
If you watch pros hit, the forehand can be broken down into three parts. There is the takeback, where the player moves the racquet so it points to the back fence (the player faces the net). Then, there is the swing to contact, where the racquet moves forward until the racquet hits the ball. Finally, there is the follow-through. That's the part after hitting the ball until you finish.
While there's quite a bit of variation among the pros in the takeback, the swing forward has a lot of common attributes.
In particular, most pros have their racquet face pointing right. Now, when I looked at myself hitting a ball, I found that my racquet face pointed down. That is, to the ground. And occasionally, to the left.
I thought it would be easy to fix. Just rotate the wrist. But it isn't that easy. Small changes in the wrist cause huge orientations of the racquet face.
After many months, I realized a few things. First, the closer you swing the racquet to your body, the more likely it is to be closed, especially if you bend your wrist. I found that I generally bend my wrist a lot to hit the ball. The combination of bending the wrist a lot and swinging close to the body means the racquet face is closed.
It points down.
And I've spent months trying to figure out why I do that.
Part of it is muscle memory. When I swing, I stop thinking about how my wrist is oriented. My body just wants to do what it wants to do. I've thought about using various devices, but I'm just not that clever to do that. I know I need to bend my wrist less and I also need to move my arm further to my right.
I thought I had figured out a way to swing so that I don't get too closed. But, alas, it's not what I do.
This is why video is important. It shows me what I think I'm doing and what I'm doing is different.
Right now, the most successful thing I do is to think about one spot when I hit. That is, the racquet when it is right by my side. I make sure that is correct, and that seems to help the most. If I don't think of this reference point, then I end up closing the racquet.
The sad thing is, I can shadow swing, and do it the way I want to time and again. And then when I do it for real? I mess up. It's infuriating. The body just refuses to listen.
But I still try it and at least, there are things closer to where I want to be, but it's easy to make mistakes and slip to old habits.
Too easy.
I have an idea that I may give a whirl. I have a wrist brace. I can use that an a butter knife to make my wrist a bit more rigid. I should see if that helps or not.
I prefer having many open tabs in a browser to remember sites rather than bookmarks or del.icio.us. Second choice is to stuff it into a blog entry just in case the number of open tabs gets too unwieldy or I get concerned I'll lose my tabs.
Three opinions on theorems
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1. Think of theorem statements like an API. Some people feel intimidated by
the prospect of putting a “theorem” into their papers. They feel that their
res...
