Eric the Blue

Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews

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Nerdy Minnesotan

  • Lolling

    Uff da, sitting at home nursing a bug and scrolling while my friends play golf on a warm fall day. It seems I “interact” regularly with math-y posts, because my feed has lots of stuff like this

    which today is an excuse to stay in a chair instead of cleaning the refrigerator, the bathrooms, and doing the copious laundry of my sportzing kids. Some people have it worse than I. The lede to an interesting Slate article on physicist Richard Feynman:

    When famed physicist Richard Feynman and his second wife split in 1956, it made for a quirky newspaper item that was syndicated across the country. “Mrs Feynman won a divorce on cruelty grounds after testifying that her husband worked calculus problems all day,” the copy read. He did math “as soon as he arose, while he drove his car,” even “while lying in bed at night.” When he wasn’t doing that, he was playing drums, which “made a terrific noise.” If she tried to talk to him, he said she was interrupting his work. She got alimony; he got the bongos.

    Algebra is more my speed. In the above problem, let’s say that the big rectangle is W x L. Then the one with an area of 25 m2 is W x (L-18) and the one with an area of 32 m2 is W x (L-16). You can then expand these expressions to WL – 18W = 25 and WL – 16W = 32 to obtain what math books call a “system of equations.” It’s nice that both have a WL since we can eliminate it by subtracting term-by-term, yielding 2W = 7 and W = 7/2. Now it’s basically just number grinding: 7/2 x (L – 18) = 25 means that L is 176/7 and the area of the big rectangle is thus 7/2 x 176/7 = 88. (Remember that satisfying school sensation when your solution is a “nice” number, not some crazy-ass decimal, which would be a sure sign that you have screwed up?) The problem asks for the area of the shaded region, so subtract the sum of the two given parts (32 + 25 = 57) from 88: 31 m2. (The drawing obviously isn’t to scale.)

    Last note on Feynman’s divorce. I suspect the odd details owe something to family law in the days before “no-fault divorce.” If his wife wanted out in 1956, she probably had to prove that there had been either adultery, abandonment, or cruelty on the part of Feynman. Kind of crazy when you think about it: no doubt in lots of cases there had been adultery–but only on the part of the party suing for divorce. That Don Draper was a whore-dog would not have helped his family court petition. Anyway, the law required that the last act of cooperation between divorcing couples might be to conspire together to tell tales, improbable or embellished but not incriminating, to the family court in order to establish “cruelty.” The odd thing about Feynman’s case, as described in the Slate piece, is that his wife alleged physical abuse–in which case there would have been no need to complain about his drums or his penchant for working calculus problems. But the evidence for Feynman being (as my mom used to say) “a little different” would have been stronger than the evidence for him being a wife-beater.

  • Robbed again?

    I’ve been trying to gauge what percentage of my unhappiness with the officiating in the Lynx semifinal series against the Phoenix Mercury can be attributed to a rooting interest. Maybe a hundred. Who knows? The rooter is not in a good place to judge.

    One thing for sure, though, is that the Lynx have some history of getting screwed by the officials in big games. Back in 2016, the championship series against the L.A. Sparks was best-of-five, and the Lynx were leading the decisive fifth game by a point when, with just over a minute left, Los Angeles made a basket after the shot clock had expired.. The play was not reviewed, the basket was allowed, the Lynx lost the game by one point, and next day the WNBA put out a statement acknowledging the error. Thanks!

    Last year, the Lynx were in another all-or-nothing Game 5 of the championship series, this time against the New York Liberty. The Lynx led by two points in the closing seconds when a referee, but not slow motion instant replay, detected an act-of-shooting foul that allowed the Liberty to pull even. New York then won the game and the championship in overtime. Lynx star Napheesa Collier took 23 shots in the game, almost all of them from within a few feet of the basket, and was in the estimation of the officials never fouled: she wasn’t awarded a single free throw. For the game, the Lynx team shot 8 free throws, compared to 25 for the Liberty. Made field goals were 26-22 in favor of the Lynx; made free throws were in favor of New York by 21-7.

    Possibly the Lynx just foul a lot, and their opponents hardly ever: “style of play,” or something, something, etc. If so, the habit persisted in this year’s semi-final series. In Game 4, free throw attempts were 23 to 9 in favor of Phoenix; the previous game’s disparity had been 22 to 11 in the same direction. Collier again never got to the foul line in the last game she was able to play. The no-call on the play she was injured on appeared to me, if not correct, not outrageous either. Her coach Cheryl Reeve’s explosion was probably the conclusion to a slow burn, and a desire to protect her star, a player who seems to be loved by all in proportion to how well they know her.

    I’m referring to a slow burn of years. If you go back and watch Reeve’s press conference after the 2016 championship game, you’ll see that she was making the same points nine years later. The players in this league are really good. The officiating is not. The players deserve better.

  • Fair-minded

    Of course I’ll wait for all the evidence to accrue, but just going to put it out there that, as of today, I’m leaning toward the conclusion that the President of the United States is not a good man. However, (public service announcement): if you voted for him, and would like something to talk about for the next several years, allow me to suggest a Sunday-afternoon grocery-shopping excursion to the Aldi store at 26th & Lyndale in south Minneapolis. Here is one of my favorite Replacements songs, an ode to several of today’s grocery-getters:

  • Some numbers

    According to its president, there are “fewer than ten” trans students competing in NCAA athletics. This likely explains why your MAGA friends seem to know all their names. The number of NCAA student-athletes is about 510,000, and 9 is to 510,000 as 1 is to about 56,000–which is roughly how many Americans a Harvard study estimates die in a year on account of having no health insurance. A clue, perhaps, as to why our president is so distressed about pregnant women taking Tylenol.

    Whoa, better do something about that!

    I lack scientific credentials, but I suspect the evidence for the perils of Tylenol is on a level with the case Trump makes for America’s babies being subjected to too many vaccines. “It’s too much liquid,” he declared at a White House rollout of the new and scaled back recommendations. “Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing when you look at it. It’s like 80 different vaccines and beyond vaccines.”

    Penetrating analysis of the kind that lefty bloggers attempt to ridicule by quoting.