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@laneunderwave

my side blog studyblr is @havealittlehappiness , which I run with @ollyoxenollies
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Reblogged pangur-and-grim
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“I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school. Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there’s a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it’s a matter of aesthetics and it’s a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they’re so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another. So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that’s a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that “Why is the world so beautiful?” is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Intelligence of Plants”, from the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett

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I want progress in the NHL as much as anybody else and I want queer players to feel safe, so I hope that Heated Rivalry can be a catalyst for a shift in hockey culture. I really, really do.

But we can’t let this blind us to the fact that Gary Bettman is a member of Trump’s council of sports. Their goal is to prevent trans women from participating in women’s sports at all levels. Gary Bettman also tried to ban the use of pride tape and wearing pride jerseys during warm up. It was only reversed when players chose to do it anyway, risking fines.

Needless to say, I don’t care if Bettman liked Heated Rivalry as long as he continues to be involved with a government that is actively hostile to not only trans people, but all queer people. I don’t give a shit if those two fictional gay hockey players were interesting enough that he binged the show as long as Bettman refuses to take meaningful steps to make the NHL safer for real queer people.

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hockey teams dont even say theyre playing to lose anymore they just put matthew tkachuk on their roster

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Reblogged em-dash-enthusiast
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The more I think about both Tkachuks being included on the US Olympic roster while players like Jason Robertson and Cole Caufield didn't make the cut, the crazier I feel.

I keep thinking about the Oakland A's and Billy Beane. When Beane decided to essentially revolutionize baseball by constructing a team based on stats instead of eyeball assessments from scouts, he got a lot of pushback. Old school baseball guys lost their minds if he signed a guy who didn't 'look' like the 'right' kind of athlete.

When his scouts tried to tell him that the player he wanted to draft was too fat, Beane kept saying, "We're not selling jeans here," which has become a kind of shorthand for saying to look at what the numbers are telling you, not what you feel should be right. Reducing the impact of the eyeball test also, incidentally, can reduce the impact of bias (conscious or unconscious).*

Bill Guerin and US Hockey have an old baseball scout problem.

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Not to make this post about baseball, but @walterthemelon you are so right about Alejandro Kirk as a fascinating example. He is the 'wrong' type of player in a few different eye test directions, but he's defensively sound and he can hit, which for a catcher is like fucking gold. He batted .282 last year, very much nothing to sneeze at in the contemporary dead ball era.

If he'd been the right age when Billy Beane was inaugurating the moneyball era, Kirk absolutely would have been available, Beane absolutely would have tried to draft him, and some Oakland scout absolutely would have gotten weirdly angry about the size of Kirk's underpants.

As an aside, this was probably the article referenced, and it's interesting specifically because it was a scout who eyeballed Kirk and told the Blue Jays they had to consider him. He wasn't identified as a prospect by blind statistical analysis.

But this particular tale takes place in 2016. The moneyball revolution was around the early 2000s (the book follows the 2002 Oakland A's). The scout who 'discovered' Kirk had been working as a scout since 1994-95. Instead of doubling down on the very earliest years of his scouting criteria, he took (at least part of) the moneyball lesson to heart and taught himself to focus on what guys were actually doing on the field in front of him, not what they looked like.

The article repeatedly references other staff in the Jays org who had an 'egads that's not the right kinda fella' reaction upon seeing Kirk, and only gave him a chance because he had the backing of this long-tenured and very deeply respected scout. The numbers came later.

So Kirk represents a sort of roundabout affirmation of the moneyball ethos, but it's all mixed up in there, and it's definitely interesting (to me) (nerd).

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