Well, we’re into the second half of the baseball season, now, and from the perspective of most of the folks in my immediate family, we’re still having a pretty good baseball summer around here. At least, it’s a good baseball summer in the sense that the teams that we like still seem to be doing okay; not in the sense that any of us have made it to many games. The Detroit Tigers are still in first, although after watching them play, it’s not entirely clear how that’s happened. They’ve got to get their offense together before anyone considers them to be a pretty good ball club, really. Over in the senior circuit, the Giants – my dad’s team – were second in their division up until just a few days ago. Although I don’t think anyone expects that they’ll be able to catch the Dodgers, they’ve got a pretty good shot at winning the wild card. We’ll see.
Archive for July, 2009
Reflections of a Nostalgic Baseball Fan
Thursday, July 30th, 2009Cause and Effect, Part 1
Sunday, July 19th, 2009One of the disadvantages encountered by those trying to understand society is due to the inability to perform experiments in a controlled environment. In the hard sciences – chemistry or physics, for example – this isn’t as much of a problem. The scientist in the lab can conduct experiments in which certain variables can be changed and others can be removed, making it possible to determine what factors cause specific results. Sociologists (and anyone else that’s trying to understand society) can’t do this, and as a result, reams of statistics are quoted, some of which do not tell us exactly what we would like to think that they mean. Even when the statistics themselves are properly understood, they’re frequently used in misguided attempts to imply that certain attributes cause others, when in fact they just happen to show up next to each other. Correlation doesn’t imply causation – i.e., just because two things happen at the same time (or one follows the other) doesn’t necessarily imply that one caused the other.
Dispatches from Yosemite
Monday, July 13th, 2009My job – which has had me working on the road quite a bit lately – has me in Sacramento for the end of this week and the beginning of next week. Rather than have my employer buy two round-trip plane tickets so I could be home for the weekend, I volunteered to stay out here in the greater Sacramento area.