America

The other night I played cards with some classmates and friends. Three Israelis, two Chileans, an Italian, an Aussie and me. We were drinking some Bud, and I was looking at the label. Started telling them to look out for the Bud ads during the Super Bowl. Then I got quiet as the cards went around, and deep inside, I got really proud of America. We think we're awesome, and there's a good reason for that, because we've contributed some awesome things to the world.

But I started getting depressed about the future and even about the present. What does our generation have to be proud of? The biggest growing industries seem to be healthcare, where innovation means higher costs (! FYI: in every other industry, innovation => better AND cheaper) and finance, which has consumed the brightest workers.

Since the majority of America spends the majority of our waking hours at a corporation, maybe it makes sense to take a stock of our country by her companies. This doesn't have the catch-all quality of measuring annual GDP growth, but perhaps you will find it more descriptive. (We could also take stock of America by its leadership, but that would be even more depressing.)

In particular, let's see who is innovating. I can be proud of that. Some companies out near San Francisco are creating cool stuff. Facebook is coating the globe, and there's more promise on the horizon. Google is ubiquitous. Apple is also predicting the future by creating it.

But what else? Microsoft got too big. Banks, well, I don't know what to say. Just because there's nothing tangible to point to, like a website or a phone, doesn't mean they haven't been improving our lives, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming that they have done more harm than good.

To round things out, here's the Fortune 10. Four members of big oil, Wal-Mart, GE, GM, Ford, AT&T, and HP. There's things to be hopeful about. Ford is showing some promise of finally producing the future instead of SUVs. Wal-Mart sells people really cheap stuff, perhaps they'll even teach the healthcare industry how to lower costs.

I don't enjoy going out so much anymore, not when every song suggests "party everyday" in the face of all this evidence that we stand at a crossroads. We can be a generation that worked hard like all of our ancestors. I want to be proud of my country when I'm an old man!

Accelerometer

Bar chart representation of a lazy Saturday, by DirectLife.

AL East

Some SI.com analysis of baseball teams' "output" per dollar of payroll has an interesting note on the Orioles.

"The Orioles stand as a reminder of why the worst mistake in baseball is to spend when you are not ready to win. Instead of trying to hang with the Yankees and Red Sox, Baltimore would have been better off to strip down its payroll. Payrolls are like undivided highways: the worst place to travel is the middle of the road."

(I put "output" in quotes because measuring performance of baseball teams is subjective.)

This suggests there might be a kink in the output per dollar of payroll for a team such as the Orioles. This graph attempts to give a picture. The intuition is that the Orioles' chances of increasing their output (making the playoffs and winning the WS) is only going to increase if their investment passes some threshold (dotted green line) to keep up with the Yankees and the Red Sox.

The only time in the 2000s that the AL East sent a team other than the Yankees or the Red Sox to the postseason (as division winner or as wildcard) was the D-Rays in 2008.

This brief analysis suggests that other divisions may fall into two-horse races.

For example, as of 2008, the AL Central was distributed as follows: Tigers #3, White Sox #5, and then $40 MM below, Indians #16, Twins #24, Royals #25. (Though in 2009, the Twins snuck into the playoffs when the Tigers and White Sox both slashed payrolls and then underperformed.)

Sleep

Trying out a phone app called SleepCycle, which promises to wake you up refreshed. Is it worth the effort?

Early results are promising. Here's last night's graph. It woke me during a dream, which it said it would. I felt decently refreshed* after 7 hours of sleep. And it woke me up 15 minutes earlier than my normal alarm would have woken me, thereby, in effect, paying for itself. (It took 5 minutes to set up, but it added 15 minutes to my day.) I may even start transcribing my dreams with those extra ten minutes, inspired by the Red Book, which is on exhibit after finally being published.

* Any good ideas on how to measure refreshment on a ten-point scale from prune juice up to cranberry-ginger sizzle?

We're here for our sister, Haiti

Politics

Obama's approval / disapproval ratings are now in a dead heat. Will the trend reverse course? Prediction based upon a non-random sampling of Fox TV and lefty blogs: the trend will continue during 2010, with disapproval surpassing approval ratings.

Dogs

Bark!

To apply to college, I wrote about four or five bad essays. They were all bad. I got accepted to one school, despite the essays, because I met some cutoffs on grades and standardized test score. (That essay, which I sent to dear old state, was about chaos theory, and the admissions lady told my guidance counselor the essay was also chaos.)

One of the essays became common knowledge among the underclassmen at my high school. I guess one of the english teachers showed it to them as an example of what not to do. But I was proud of my essay about being a dog.

Why the topic? A friend's dog had just had surgery and was wearing one of those white cones. Curious, I had taken the cone when the dog wasn't using it, and tried it on for a bit. This fifteen-second experience became a college essay. That school politely declined me.

But apparently, now there is a whole book called "Inside of a Dog." It's getting good reviews. I knew it was an interesting topic. "[W]e reside within our own umwelt, our own self-world bubble, which clouds our vision." So walk a mile in someone else's paws sometimes...