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Federer’s Bad Clay Dream

Tadhg — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:46:44 +0000

Imagine that you are the best tennis player of your time, perhaps the best tennis player of all time. You’ve been number one in the world for an unprecedented 228 consecutive weeks. You’ve reached the semifinals or better of the last sixteen Grand Slams. You’ve won three slams in a year three times, two of those in consecutive years, and in those consecutive years you were in all eight Grand Slam finals. Unlike other historic greats with prodigious talent and great success on grass, you’re excellent on clay and have been improving on that surface. Only one Slam trophy is missing from your cabinet: the French. As possibly the greatest player of all time, what could stop you from winning it?

It would take something extraordinary, like running into the greatest clay court player of all time. Repeatedly. Said player would have to come into their prime just as you were coming into yours on that surface, and their consistency would have to be phenomenal.

This is, in fact, exactly what’s happened to Roger Federer. I begin to wonder whether or not Federer’s best chance to win the French Open was actually in 2004, when he went out to Kuerten in the third round, because that year he didn’t have to face Nadal. Since then, Nadal has knocked him out in the semifinals (2005) and then the finals three consecutive years in a row.

Nadal is a clay court player of historic achievements. Four Roland Garros wins in a row, a feat only matched by Borg. Since early 2005, Nadal has won 102 of 103 matches on clay, 20 of 21 clay court tournaments—with his only loss coming to Federer in Hamburg in 2007, a loss which broke Nadal’s unbelievable 81-match winning streak. (None of those numbers are typos.)

So, as Federer, you’ve improved on clay, you’re considered the best player of all time by many, and you’re a truly excellent clay court player in your own right, exceeded only by one person. It’s time for the French Open final, can you get over the hump and break through as greatest-ever versus greatest-on-clay-ever?

No.

Instead, you lose in aboslutely dispiriting, humbling, truly unbelievable fashion: 1-6, 3-6, 0-6. The best player ever, and you lose a Grand Slam final (where you have a winning percentage of eighty) while taking only four games from your opponent?

Nadal was never in danger. The only challenge in the match came in the second set, where Federer came back from 0-2 down to level at 3-3 with a break point on Nadal’s serve. He couldn’t convert, and Nadal went on to win that game and the next nine to take the match.

Now, again, Federer enters Wimbledon as the favorite, as the five-time champion, but with Nadal, the world number two, full of confidence after another phenomenal clay court season.

Both players are all-time greats, no question. I have a great deal of respect for both of them, especially in that they are both extremely sporting. I’m going to be rooting for Federer at Wimbledon, because I’d like to see him break the Borg/Sampras record of five in a row, and because I really want him to overtake Sampras for the most Grand Slam titles. If Nadal makes it to the final, it will certainly be interesting, and perhaps as good a match as last year’s final.

I certainly hope it’s better than today’s final.

Tags: sports, tennis

Bye-Bye Bertie

Tadhg — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 07:56:54 +0000

I was surprised by the news that Bertie Ahern, the Teflon Taoiseach, is resigning. Fittingly, I received this news via a text from a friend.

I knew that Ahern was under investigation for various alleged improprieties, and that things looked rather bad—he’d long since admitted signing blank checks for Charlie Haughey, he’d accepted a number of “gifts” from business figures, and he claimed not to have had a bank account while he was Minister for Finance.

However, these revelations did nothing to his popularity. In fact his approval numbers might have gone up. Apparently a great deal of the Irish population felt that he was just doing what anyone’d do in the same circumstances, and so he charges actually aided his “everyman” appeal.

Nevertheless, it looks like he’s hit the end of the road. I’m not sure what will happen to him from here, and I’m curious as to whether he’ll be able to fade into the background (if that’s even what he wants/intends).

I’m not sad to see him go, but I never loathed him the way I loathed some of his predecessors—Haughey, for example. And Albert Reynolds was somehow more objectionable than Bertie, even if a review of their actual deeds might not support that claim.

I’d be happier about his departure if I felt that it had meaning, that it meant something significant in the fight against corruption in Ireland. But I’m not sure that it does, I think graft is endemic, and thoroughly baked into the culture of Fianna F´il (and many of the other parties too), and that none ofthat will be significantly changed by this development. I’d love to be wrong.

Tags: ireland, politics

Techno-Nostalgia

Tadhg — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:23:58 +0000

I didn’t really take part, but apparently today was Run Some Old Web Browsers Day. I think my first exposure to a Web browser would have been around 1994, although the first time I could really play around with one was in a Humboldt University computer lab, I think, and that would have been 1995. Before that I was restricted to ftp and gopher, but was never that into either of them. I think I have some email from a little earlier than that.

I’m pretty sure that the HU lab machine was running HP-UX, and that the browser was Netscape Navigator 2. Things have obviously come a long way since then, but I don’t really feel there’s been an exponential leap, just lots of people taking advantage of what the Internet offers conceptually.

The real “leap” was probably the crossover between networking machines over large distances (the classic Internet, in other words, that arose from ARPANet), and computing becoming so cheap that it was really easy for most Western households to have or get access to them. The meeting of those two things is what resulted in the ongoing march of the online world.

Bonus from the comments on jwz’s thread: 1968’s idea of the networked future.

Tags: tech, web-development, web-surfing

Lidl Spying on Retail Employees

Tadhg — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:38:12 +0000

From the what-were-they-thinking department: the German supermarket chain Lidl has been caught spying on their employees.

And by “spying”, I mean reporting on things like what low-level employees talk about during their breaks and who the friends of employees are, with information apparently gathered by private detectives and running to the hundreds of pages in documentation.

My first question was “why?”, given that it hardly seems worthwhile, in purely monetary terms, to expend the resources required to do surveillance on that many employees. I thought it might be management in the paranoid/authoritarian mold, which seems sadly common in large businesses, and that’s probably a big part of it, but in addition there are allegations that Lidl systematically abuses low-level workers, and the combination of these things suggests that Lidl are trying to enforce a rigid, fear-driven structure as a way of keeping workers malleable and more exploitable.

I hope there’s a significant backlash here, and that this backlash costs them a lot more money than they might have gained by using these tactics (which would probably be a lot of money). Of course, I also hope that their competitors aren’t pulling the same crap, because that makes activism on the purely consumer level less effective.

Tags: economics, law, politics, power

Fictional Agency

Tadhg — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:37:57 +0000

I came across a distinction in fiction recently that I don’t think I’ve paid much attention to before, and that I don’t know the word(s) (if extant) for: works in which the characters play a part in the major events that occur in their milieu during the narrative, and works in which they play no such part, but are caught up in those larger events.

It’s not fatalism: fatalist narratives can involve, for example, leaders working their plots and causing/influencing (even unintentionally) the major events.

The contrasting examples that brought this idea to mind were Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, both set in India, both during periods of major political upheaval (one historical, the other set in a fictional future). Mistry’s characters are profoundly affected by the political machinations going on at the time, but have no impact on them. McDonald’s characters cannot control the events, but do influence them and are also caught up in them. This strikes me as a rather important thematic difference, and I’m sure there are a ton of other stories where the fact that characters do or do not influence significant phenomena in those stories. I’ll have to look out for more examples. I suspect that the “influenceless” characters/stories are comparatively rare.

Tags: books, criticism

Wal-Mart Versus Brain-Damaged Accident Victim

Tadhg — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 03:52:24 +0000

Contrary to what you might expect, this post is not a rant against Wal-Mart per se. I was prompted to write it after reading this CNN article about Wal-Mart suing a disabled woman who was an ex-employee. The summary is that she was in a bad accident, was covered by Wal-Mart health insurance for her treatment, then successfully sued the person responsible for the accident—at which point Wal-Mart sued her to recover that money, because her employment contract entitled them to recoup the money they spent on health insurance in that fashion. The CNN article raises some questions about this, but I think they’re the wrong questions.

Wal-Mart won the case, although since a chunk of the money had been spent, they weren’t able to recover all of it.

The article asks why the corporation would pursue such a course:

In 2007, the retail giant reported net sales in the third quarter of $90 billion.

Legal or not, CNN asked Wal-Mart why the company pursued the money.

The juxtaposition of those two lines (which are indeed next to each other in the article) makes it clear where they’re coming from.

However, the question reveals a fundamental misapprehension of what corporations are: legal entities whose sole reason for existing is to accumulate wealth for their shareholders. That’s it. Anything else is either PR or regulation. So if a corporation can increase profit in some way, its officers are legally bound to do that unless they think it’ll be bad in the long run—”bad” meaning bad for future profits.

I’m not defending the individuals involved here. Their moral agency is still intact, and they choose between their obligation to the corporation, their desire to keep/do their jobs, and their qualms (or lack thereof) at extracting money from this woman and her family. But while any of the individuals can be criticized in moral terms, I do not think that the corporation per se can be. It has one goal, to make profit. It is a legal entity that has been created for that purpose. If we wish to rein in its rapacity, we need explicit laws/controls to do so.

(I also don’t naively believe that corporations really are these pure money-making devices whose officers only act in their interests. They’re controlled by humans, who have all the human failings, and who routinely further their own greed by screwing the corporation whose interests they are supposed protecting—CEOs with ridiculous compensation packages do this all the time, because the market for major corporate officers is ridden with biases and conflicts of influence.)

The question of why a corporation like Wal-Mart would act so greedily is one with an obvious answer: to make more money. Any discussion of this which involves morality must involve larger questions about how we structure our legal entities and our society, and certainly doesn’t come down to the idea that some companies are “evil” and others “good”, at least not in terms of their motivations. Some definitely do worse things than others, but this is not a question of character.

Tags: economics, law, politics

Shirky on Organizing Without Organizations

Tadhg — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:55:30 +0000

I haven’t finished all of it yet, but Clay Shirky’s talk on networking, organization, and the internet is quite good.

The world with the internet is a different world than the world without it, as Shirky says. It is a huge revolution, and the key question is what use we will, ultimately, put it to. Does its nature intrinsically push towards a certain political structure? I don’t know, although I like to think so.

Incidentally, I hotlinked the video in this page using the easy setup page for the JW FLV Media Player, which seems quite useful (video being one of the things that Flash is actually good at). The original is at Harvard’s CyberLaw site.

Tags: philosophy, politics, society, tech

Please Let Us Not Attack Iran

Tadhg — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:57:09 +0000

Yeah, I don’t usually like to sound like I’m begging in my blog posts, especially when it’s not clear to entity what my request could be made. But I am, not for the first time, awash in dread that the United States is going to launch an attack on Iran.

Chris Floyd has the bad signs covered, here, here, and here. Either the US is planning an attack, or planning an extremely risky kind of brinksmanship, which could easily slide over into an attack. Obviously, I don’t know whether it’ll happen or not. I’m just frightened that it will, especially since the Bush administration have no sense when it comes to this shit, and I’m also frightened because Bush and his cronies are talking as if they’re seriously considering the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.

Which is just insane. That would mean untold deaths, massive harm to the entire region, and, of course, a corresponding drop in stability (in the true sense of the word) worldwide. The winners would be the warmongers, because cries for violence would come from almost all sides.

It’s really horrifying to contemplate, and I just don’t see what to do about it. I mean, it seems so unreal as an option to me, yet the signs are that it’s quite frighteningly real.

Tags: politics, power, war

This Modern World on Neocon Regrets

Tadhg — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:55:07 +0000

Tom Tomorrow is one of my favorite short-comic artists, and he really nailed it with today’s strip, “Five Years Later, Neocons Discuss Their Regrets”. The attitudes expressed by the characters in the strip are caricatures… but some of them are just stripped-down versions of obfuscatory statements major neoconservative figures have made, and one or two appear to be exactly what they are saying.

Especially the third one, “I regret that we have not yet attacked Iran.”

I’ll probably post more about this tomorrow, but it appears that, despite a lack of discussion about this in the mainstream, the US is still moving closer to some kind of military assault on Iran. I write that, and it just strikes me as so ridiculous and unbelievable—clearly I haven’t yet divested myself of naive optimism about the world. Invading Iraq was of course wrong, and hideously so (made all the more clear by the utter absence of “weapons of mass destruction”, but even if Iraq had had them, it would still have been wrong), but this? The same script all over again?

Enough. I’ll put off thinking about that until tomorrow. In the meantime, consider the fact that the figures so accurately lampooned by Tom Tomorrow in that strip are, by and large, the same fuckers who are going to either cheer the attack on Iran or condescendingly explain why opposing it is “unserious” and “immature”.

Tags: humor, politics, power

Information is Power, Government is Control

Tadhg — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:55:26 +0000

The recent revelations that State Department contractors have been snooping through the passport records of presidential candidates, not to mention the fact that Eliot Spitzer’s purchases of sex were uncovered first by his bank and then the IRS, have highlighted the reach of the surveillance state, particularly the sheer amount of information that the government actively tracks. A recent LA Times editorial points out that purely personal privacy isn’t the real key, but rather the ability to use surveillance for political advantage—which should be pretty obvious, even more obvious given its blatant presence in the not-very-distant past.

Anyone who doesn’t understand that information is power just hasn’t thought it through. The people who aim to rule, which is what the vast majority of politicians and other political players desire, and those who do rule, are engaged in a struggle with other ruling factions and with the ruled, who might think to upset the order of things. Other factions, and the peons, are essentially enemy players in this game. As with any game, the more you know about the plans, movements, and dispositions of your enemies, the better. More information means more of an edge, an edge means greater influence—information is power.

Those who have power are going to use it if they can, and those who want to use power are going to grab whatever information is available. Unless the penalties are significant, this means that all of the surveillance powers of the state will inevitably be used for political purposes (of course, all purposes of the state and its component players are political, but that’s another story).

That government is control should similarly be uncontroversial, but this isn’t the case in mainstream discourse (whose purpose is probably to make the state of things seem palatable, rather than to examine closely that state, or the state). But government is all about governing others. Most people in a democratic society seem to believe that its presence is both necessary and justified due to the fact that other people can’t be trusted—and it is always other people, not you, who need to be controlled so that they don’t behave irresponsibly, who need to be threatened with punishment to ensure that they don’t engage in murder and plunder. Those others need a firm hand to make sure they don’t run amok. The government is what applies the controls, and, well, such controls need protections of their own, to make sure that do-gooders, external agents, and/or immature revolutionaries don’t gum up the works. Put another way: those in power are going got want to keep that power, whether they’re elected representatives or not. Once they have it, they’ll use what they have to protect and expand it. The only way to stop this is if the penalties for abuses are severe and likely to be carried out.

This is what much of the current debate about ‘civil liberties’ comes down to. One side wants to impose regulation and accountability on the various surveillance/intelligence apparatuses, to attempt to rein in the inevitable anti-democratic abuses. The other side either wants to expand the powers of the state because they feel that they will benefit from those powers as they are part of the elite who will get to wield them, or they have some bizarre (but fervent) desire to be ‘protected’ by a set of forces that seem ’strong’ (and are usually desirous of protection from terrors that are in reality far less dangerous than commonly depicted).

That group, the second set, want to believe in a ‘good’ government, to believe that those in power are too noble to abuse that power. (Ironic, really, since this exaltation of the nobility of the rulers is normally found hand-in-hand with a distrust and fear of the ‘others’, that is other people, who fall into the category of those-who-will-run-amok-if-not-constrained.)

One more point: it’s not just the growth of the surveillance state, it’s also the growth of laws (and penalties for breach of those laws). The surveillance state is more effective as a weapon against political enemies if it’s easier to demonstrate that those enemies broke actual laws. Therefore the proliferation of laws, and particularly the criminalizing of so many things that people have historically engaged in on a wide scale, also aids those who can gather more information, as it’s simply more likely that this information will contain details about ‘lawbreaking’ by enemies.

Tags: law, politics, power

Storytelling Via Google Maps

Tadhg — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 07:50:27 +0000

Continuing directly on the theme from the previous entry, author Charles Cumming has written a hypertext work that’s a fiction/Google Maps mashup: The 21 Steps.

I’ve always been interested in hypertext fiction, although I’ve written almost none of it myself. It tends to split into two large groups: texts where the reader doesn’t get to make choices and texts where they do. In the first case, what then makes it better than a typical book narrative? Experimental form can be interesting in itself, but tends not to hold enough interest to make the form really work for non-experimental works.

As for the latter category, why then not go further and make it a game, a text adventure? The rules for games and non-game narratives are rather different, however, and it’s hard to move to that realm while remaining “fiction” in any traditional sense.

Which isn’t to say that people shouldn’t try to create hypertextual works, or that every work of fiction should in fact be considered a candidate for the form, with attention to where on the game/non-game continuum it might end up.

Hypertext works do tend to be clunky, though. The reader isn’t used to having to do more than turn the page to continue the narrative, and almost no work emphasizes within itself the necessity for page-turning, whereas hypertextual works tend to do just that. Sometimes, as in the case of The 21 Steps, this emphasis comes partly by way of the initial explanation, instructing the reader how to read. The fact that instructions seem necessary is a warning in itself.

As is usual with hypertexts, the flow is broken, resulting in staccato episodes that feel oddly strung together. This might well suit the work in question, but it also feels like a structural limitation.

The map interaction, however, is quite interesting. It doesn’t do much other than move you around a Google Maps view of London, but having that backdrop, intertwined with the narrator’s movements, has a powerful effect and embeds the reader in the location in a way few non-cinematic forms can match—which, of course, is the point.

It’s definitely worth a look.

(But how do I enter it as a published work in Freebase?)

Tags: reading, writing

Editable Google Maps

Tadhg — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:29:38 +0000

Depending on how well they can deal with spam, and how open they make it, this could be a big deal. Google are letting users edit locations in Google Maps.

Having done my fair share of adding geolocation information to Freebase recently, I’m quite interested in open mapping technology. Google Maps does allow you to get latitude and longitude coordinates—to get the center of the map, run gApplication.getMap().getCenter() from JavaScript while using Google Maps, and you’ll get an object containing that data. I’m not sure that they have an API that lets you get at it more reliably, but there are other services which will let you do so.

You can also give Google Maps latitude and longitude as inputs, which makes all of this even more useful. Really, I begin to think that any location, and especially any location run by public services (such as transport) should be providing the geolocation of all their facilities (including every stop) as a part of their base service. I’m quite convinced that good would come of such efforts.

Tags: coding, semantic-web, tech, web-development

‘Danny Boy’ Differently

Tadhg — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:56:26 +0000

Since I generally side with the “snakes” in that particular conflict, I’m not a huge fan of St. Patrick’s Day… but the following rendition of “Danny Boy” is just too good not to post (even though it was on BoingBoing earlier).

Tags: culture, humor, ireland, music

Cheery Thoughts after Light Reading

Tadhg — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:59:07 +0000

I finished reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance today. It’s an excellent book, covering a broad swathe of life in India during The Emergency, a period of what was essentially dictatorship form 1975 to 1977. It’s also extremely depressing.

There’s some hope that comes out of it, but not much… most of it is about the powerless being ground up by the machinations of those further up the ladder. Casual violence and an utter disregard for human life abounds, some of it arising from the still-extant caste system in India, but much of it bound up in simple economic/power inequality.

While it’s about India, and much of it is unique to that country, the politics of it are clearly seen across the globe. I have no doubt that horrific abuses on par with those in A Fine Balance go on in some sectors of many Western nations (in American prisons, for example). There are significant difference, and things are unquestionably better for the majority of people in the West. A lot better. Nevertheless, the question of which direction we’re headed in remains. Economically we’ve been stripping away barriers to inequality, with predictable results, and encouraging grossly irresponsible practices in the financial markets (where things are not looking good), which is not a recipe for political progress.

Further, while the idea that America was some kind of uniquely moral actor in world affairs has always been ludicrous, the acceptance of torture and executive writs of attainder seems worse. The former was delusional, but underlying that delusion was some kind of decency, whereas decency and torture are rather difficult to reconcile—and decency does not fit at all with the acceptance of torture as a state practice, nor with the acceptance that the state can imprison whoever it pleases.

But there’s still some hope drifting around in my mind, a belief in other people, in the human capacity for compassion, in our ability to resist, to overcome fear, to seek and embrace understanding, and to see through the same old divide-and-conquer bullshit that the elites have been manipulating us with for millennia.

Tags: books, economics, personal, politics, reading

A Cover by Who?

Tadhg — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 07:44:37 +0000

Apparently this is a well-known internet meme at this point, but I had somehow missed the fact that William Shatner covered Pulp’s “Common People”.

Yeah:

Internet “memes” like this now have the ability to propagate very quickly and widely. So is this ability warping our culture in some way, or just exposing a tendency that was already there? Is warping too loaded a term? Is it a radically democratic seizing of the means of cultural production (in the sense that the collective gets far more influence now in determining culture), or is it a further extension of late capitalist boredom and parody that the usual suspects can use to distract us from ongoing horrors? These answers are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Tags: culture, politics, web-surfing

Job: Thinker for Big Shot

Tadhg — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:50:35 +0000

Okay, so it’s not quite “thinking”, but it’s $150K/year to accumulate ‘interesting people’ and summaries of the zeitgeist for Hollywood producer Brian Grazer.

In many respects it sounds like a fairly interesting position for anyone interested in disparate subjects, but I wonder how much of it requires Hollywood networking and hobnobbing—and how much of it is like being an assistant in Swimming with Sharks.

Given the salary, I suspect that it’s not as bad as that job:

You’d get to meet a lot of interesting people, you’d get to read a lot and get paid for it, and that salary is pretty good. On the downside, you would have to live in LA…

Tags: culture, economics, film

Bad Trailers

Tadhg — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:57:20 +0000

When I went to see Michael Mann’s 1981 directorial debut, Thief, this evening, I was struck by the two trailers accompanying it, the original trailers for Robocop and The Terminator. (There will be spoilers for those movies in what follows, so if you somehow haven’t seen those movies yet, you probably shouldn’t read on.)

The trailers for both were awful. Both selected what seemed to be carefully chosen bad dialogue from their respective movies. There was more of that to choose from in Robocop. Both trailers managed to make their films appear stilted and choppy. My impression while watching was to think that somehow decent trailer technology hadn’t been invented until the late 80s…

This is the version of the Robocop trailer I saw tonight:

Somehow it doesn’t seem as bad on a small screen. I think this is mainly because the music isn’t as noticeable. In the theater, the music really made it seem hokey.

The Terminator trailer is worse in terms of comparison with the movie itself:

I get the impression from this that the producers decided audiences would be much more interested in the idea of the future war, as much of the trailer is clips from that, despite the fact that those are very small parts of the film itself.

I really like both of these films, and think that The Terminator especially is a classic. That makes it all the more painful to see both represented by what look like slapped-together action clips.

One note, however, is that both trailers are relatively good at not giving away too much. Robocop’s trailer is clearly better, thankfully not referencing OCP’s connection to the criminal enterprises in the city. I get the feeling that modern trailers, at least in the US, are a lot worse about spoilers. The Terminator’s original trailer could have been a little better—really, it shouldn’t give away the fact that Kyle Reese is there to save Sarah, although that does become clearly early on.

Tags: culture, film, science-fiction

tadhg.com » Uncategorized

Federer’s Bad Clay Dream

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