Beaneball

I've finally updated the NBA Heavyweights toy over in the right sidebar. The current top heavyweight is Boston, with a tremendous 9-1 record. Phoenix is the current beltholder, and has a 3-1 record. The next heavyweight championship bout is tomorrow, Thursday night, on TNT, against San Antonio (who came into the year holding the belt, but have just a 3-2 record in championship matches). This promises to be a knockdown, drag-out fight as the two teams play for the coveted Beaneball NBA Heavyweight Championship Belt.

Phoenix, by the way, comes in having won three straight, while the Spurs have lost the same number in a row, getting beat twice by good teams (New Orleans and Utah) and once by a terrible team (Seattle).

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Basketball, The Blog at 20:27 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Random House recently sent me a copy of W. Timothy Gallwey's classic "The Inner Game of Tennis", so I suppose it's only fair that I say a few words.

I'm not much of a tennis player, and probably never will be. I likely won't join a club and thus worry about my placement on the club ladder. I probably won't play in tournaments. I do like hitting a tennis ball with A from time to time. All of this might make one think that I wouldn't get much out of a book about how to master the mental side of tennis, but of course, as you might predict from my paragraph and sentence structure here, that's not true. Gallwey's techniques, if you can call them that, are explicitly meant to be applicable to all kinds of sports and all areas of life. The basic take away is "stop letting your conscious take over". That is, don't think about your technique, don't think about the last shot you missed (or made), don't think about anything -- just do it.

The key reason why Gallwey advocates this method is because he believes the part of your mind that controls your body during physical activity can't be made to understand the verbal language employed by the other part of your mind. Your body doesn't really understand "bring the racket back higher" -- it understands how it feels to bring the racket back higher and can replicate that motion as long as it doesn't have some inner voice shouting at it "higher higher higher!" (Or an ultimate frisbee example: your body doesn't understand "elbow out on the flick!" -- it understands how it feels to throw with the entire arm unconstricted, away from the body, without the whole upper part of your arm locked to your ribs.)

As for how one is supposed to learn basic technique, Gallwey essentially advocates a combination of feeling it out for yourself, seeing what works, and watching other people. In the last, the key is not analyzing what they're doing and trying to translate their motion into language: don't go, "Ah ha, he brings his left foot back to that angle to prepare his forehand". Instead, just do what he did. Let your body emulate the motion.

One does occasionally get frustrated reading the book because Gallwey makes it all seem so easy. Anyone who has tried to "just relax" or meditate or any other kind of activity where you have to turn off or ignore the constant babbling of the conscious mind knows how difficult this is. Gallwey does acknowledge that it takes a lot of practice, a lifetime of practice, really, but he doesn't really give much in the way of tips on how to accomplish this centeredness he advocates. (Of course, you should probably expect that he wouldn't -- after all, Gallwey's entire system is dependent on the idea that these things can't be translated into verbal language, so of course he can't tell you how to let go of the conscious mind.)

Feel free to skip right over Pete Carroll's new foreword. It adds nothing to the book, and was presumably only written so that Random House could slap his name on the cover.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Books at 19:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

... opposite sides of the world, same side of the debate.

That is, read Flynn's passage:

Tolerance school fallacy ... Somehow my coining this term has not made it into common currency, but no doubt that is merely a matter of time. It underlines the fallacy of concluding that we should respect the good of all because nothing can be shown to be good. This fallacy puts a spurious value on ethical skepticism by assuming that it entails tolerance, while the attempt to justify your ideals is labeled suspect as a supposed source of intolerance. It surfaced in William James, was embraced by anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict, and is now propagated by postmodernists who think they invented it.

James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence?, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p.150.

Compare this to Michaels' The Trouble With Diversity.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Books at 09:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

[T]here is one way in which individuals can make their own luck. He or she can internalize the goal of seeking challenging cognitive environments -- seeking intellectual challenges all the way from choosing the right leisure activities to wanting to marry someone who is intellectually stimulating. The best chance of enjoying enhanced cognitive skills is to fall in love with ideas, or intelligent conversation, or intelligent books, or some intellectual pursuit. If I do that, I create within my own mind a stimulating mental environment that accompanies me wherever I go. Then I am relatively free of needing good luck to enjoy a rich cognitive environment. I have constant and instant access to a portable gymnasium that exercises the mind. Books and ideas and analyzing things are easier to transport than a basketball court. No one can keep me from using mental arithmetic so habitually that my arithmetical skills survive.

James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence?, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007, p. 87.

So marry the smartest person you can find, read books like Flynn's, and take challenging classes in high school and college. The nice thing about the practical wisdom resulting from the Dickens/Flynn model (that is, the model of intelligence that results in the above characterization of individuals making their own luck) is that it can't hurt. Even if you don't actually gain intelligence, IQ, from taking harder classes, what do you have to lose? (Grade grubbers who only care about an impressive GPA to show the law schools need not comment.)

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Books at 07:51 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The A's managed to get Joey Devine back from the Braves in the Mark Kotsay sweepstakes, which is exciting (he's Sickels' fifth-best Braves prospect, a B grade) given the level of prospect I thought was coming back. The A's are saving $2 on the deal (about $1.5M of which is immediately eaten up by Emil Brown).

Also, great challenge trade yesterday! Scott Rolen for Troy Glaus. Granted, it's not a pure challenge trade because there are personalities and PED's and all manner of other things involved, but a straight-up, 3B for 3B trade? Awesome.

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski in Oakland A's at 09:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)