15 would-be Grand Slam winners

I’ve been watching Roger Federer, who is amazing (more lengthy post about that to come, probably), live here in Australia, and I got to thinking: this man has won 16 grand slams over the past 7 years. That is a lot. Who would have won those if he’d never existed? That’s a lot of narratives changed. Obviously draws would have been different, but without opening that can of worms, my best guesses on which of Federer’s vanquished opponents would have ultimately prevailed:

2003 Wimbledon: Andy Roddick (semis)
2004 Australian Open: David Nalbandian (quarters)
2004 Wimbledon: Andy Roddick (finals)
2004 US Open: Andre Agassi (quarters)
2005 Wimbledon: Andy Roddick (finals)
2005 US Open: Andre Agassi (finals)
2006 Australian Open: Marcos Baghdatis (finals)
2006 Wimbledon: Rafael Nadal (finals)
2006 US Open: Andy Roddick (finals)
2007 Australian Open: Fernando Gonzalez (finals)
2007 Wimbledon: Rafael Nadal (finals)
2007 US Open: Novak Djokovic (finals)
2008 US Open: Andy Murray (finals)
2009 French Open: Juan Martin del Potro (semis)
2009 Wimbledon: Andy Roddick (finals)

So, by my count, slams taken away by Federer’s existence:

Roddick: 6 -> 1
Nalbandian: 1 -> 0
Agassi: 10 -> 8
Baghdatis: 1 -> 0
Nadal: 8 -> 6
Gonzalez: 1 -> 0
Djokovic: 2 -> 1
Murray: 1 -> 0
del Potro: 2 -> 1

Poor Andy Roddick, who also would have filled the #1 spot for much of the time Federer had it if he had won those 2003-5 Wimbledons.

Cautionary Tales

In the end, as adults, there’s not much that our parents can do for us. If everything has gone well, at this point they’re pretty superfluous.

In a sense, there are two types of parents: role models and cautionary tales. All parents by definition aren’t miserable failures (since they produced children), but one can look at the happiness graphs over time of these people with very similar genetic patterns and try to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and why, the default assumption being that their happiness patterns, or innate action tendencies, or both, are reasonably similar.

I definitely have the cautionary-tale type: my mother, who I have been vacationing with for two weeks, has had a failed life by virtually any metric. Only one child (ignoring evaluations of my quality), low quality of life, poor, etc.. These two weeks have been very illuminating, because my mother has one of my worst qualities even worse than I do. Concisely, she’s unable to relax, but the situation is a lot more cascading than that. She’s constantly min/maxing. I do this all the time too, and one of the reasons I was looking forward to this vacation was the ability to not worry about things and give myself a conscious break from constantly evaluating everything, but it hasn’t worked because my mother does it for herself but also for me.

In a sense, this is why my relationship with my mother is filled with so much pressure. She’s always trying to figure out what the best thing for me to do is. This makes sense — I’m (reproductively) the only thing that matters in her life — but I’m always very conscious of her eyes on me, that she’s thinking about me (the number of times she has reached over to adjust my clothing slightly to protect me against the sun is astronomical — a valid concern, but just as an example — note that I am 29, not 5.) This makes it impossible to relax.

The thing is, I have in the past done the same thing — those are my instincts. I just try to figure out what the best possible thing is to do at every single second. And like my mother, I also min/max on behalf of others (although my reproductive cards have not been as completely dealt, at least), way too much (just as my mother doesn’t really know my happiness function, I’m sure I misjudge my confidence level in others’.) We both also beat ourselves up for making bad but ultimately meaningless decisions, a very high-pressure and, well, un-Californian way to live. I’m not sure whether it’s genetic or nurture and it doesn’t matter much: my mother is 50% and 100% of those respectively, so it all comes from her, especially considering the age-based ostracization I encountered through my formative schoolyard years — not an excuse, just a note).

There are even lower-level consequences of this primary instinctive min/maxing. One of them is a fear of silence. The worst part of this trip is that every few minutes, my mother gives me an auditory stimulus, usually either a min/max or a question about min/maxing [something irrelevant]. She’s always trying to make sure I’m happy and (this part is psychological analysis, but I think true) therefore always trying to say something interesting or conversational. Most of these things, unfortunately, I have no interest in; it’s rough, and I feel a bit guilty, but I struggle enough with my own min/max demons to not have any mental space left over to care about even more irrelevant topics.

It’s a daunting tale, because it shows that this inability to relax, which has already led to a great deal of misfortune in my life, might get even worse. Other than maybe ECH, I have never met anyone who is as bad at relaxing as I am, other than my mother, who is even worse. ECH has made a lot of strides, actually, over the years, and I’ve gotten better too, but it’s quite disheartening to see a glimpse of this potential future.

Hopefully this is a situation where being aware of something can help fix it. I have some advantages: I live in a country I grew up in; I have much better powers of perception than my mother (sometimes I forget this and am very disappointed in her, but I probably shouldn’t be; also, these likely wane as one gets older); I’m male (which allows for more acceptable iconoclasm, I think, although an equivalent female wins the supply-and-demand game, so maybe it’s all the same). I’m not saying I’m doomed to end up a 70-year-old obsessive min/maxer. But even aside from the fact that this rather exhausting personality type is the only [biological] family I have, somewhere in me (not very far down) all of those urges are there too, and it’s just up to me to mold them through sheer force of will.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am not trying to contend that this position is unique. We all have these cautionary tales (or role models, which have their own set of issues) floating around; we all are scared of becoming our parents in some way (or, conversely, faced with the daunting prospect of trying to live up with their lives.) I’m just sharing my personal predicament here.

The Irrational Football League

Note: Once again, I find myself writing about something that I don’t really care about, in this case football. So it goes.

I’m pretty sure that no sport is as irrational as American football. This came to a head, of course, when Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, facing 4th and 2 at their own 29 with a six point lead and about two minutes left, decided to go for it. They failed, the Colts scored seven and won, and Belichick was lambasted by a gaggle of resulters, which was absolutely preposterous. The most common arguments seem to be: 1) “The Colts were almost a shoo-in to score from the 30.” Well, if that’s true, the Colts must have almost been a shoo-in to score from their own 30 (say) after a punt, as well — those first 40 yards are easier than the last 30 because of the back of the end zone, and time was not a factor. 2) “Belichick’s decision demoralized his team by not showing faith in his defense.” Well, there were no quotes from players to this effect, and also, the decision showed more faith in his defense: it showed that he thought the defense could stop the Colts from the 30. And it showed faith in his offense, too.

Gay Marriage

It’s weird that this will be the second politics post out of three, considering that I’m not very political myself, and in fact, neither of these posts has anything to do with my own political opinions (if you can read them between the lines, bully on you, I guess.) My actual opinion of politics is that they matter far, far less than people think, and that most people’s happiness function is much more affected by their own decisions than by who happens to be in office. I think a lot of times politicians and the exact nature of government are scapegoated for people’s personal failures. To take one example, if unemployment goes up from 5% to 10%, this is certainly not a good thing, but (a) it only affects one person in 20, and (b) those effects are at the margins anyway. While you could come up with an extremely well-qualified person who doesn’t have a job (likely due to some seniority-based unmeritocracy), most of the newly unemployed people are those without useful job skills, or those who weren’t very good at their job, people for whom having a job was already touch-and-go. You could argue that these are the people who need the job most, but my point is just that this correlates with people who don’t care about having their job as much and/or those people who don’t deserve to have a job as much. (Yes, I know, everyone deserves to have a job.)

So why am I talking about gay marriage?

Creator Month

This is November, and so it’s National Novel Writing Month, which I’m doing for the 4th time (2002, 2004, 2006, and yeah, I missed last year, but back with an especially convenient vengeance since this is the first time since 2004 that I’m missing fall bridge nationals.) I’m making sure to post this on November 1, because you too should write a novel (for all values of you.) It turns out that this is totally doable. It’s an especially good match for me because since the goal is to write a novel, not a good novel, my perfectionism fades to the background and my logorrhea can take over.

While we’re linking stuff, I also actually made use of The Game Crafter, a make-your-own-boardgame site which has to be the most targeted-at-me thing I’ve ever seen, and pressed a game called Farmer Brown. (You can’t buy it yet, because it’s still in alpha.) The informal release party (scrambled up mostly spur of the moment) was today, and, much to my surprise, people seemed to actually enjoy it. This of course has me dreaming of actually having a calling in life. I’ve always thought of myself as the reactor (I have an opinion on anything, I can reply to most things (I used to be a very prolific email writer with a ratio of like 1.5/1 words-written to words-read)), but maybe there’s a creator in me yet.

And now, off to start the novel. 50,000 words, 30 days, everyone should do this at least once. I guess this is the nerd equivalent of running a marathon.

Strange Bedfellows

I’ve always thought that the current alignment of political beliefs categorizing the voting blocs in the United States was a little strange. There are lots of weird aspects, but I want to focus on two things I find particularly perplexing: attitudes towards homosexuality and the death penalty.

Poor Things

Since this is my first book review, let me preface this by saying that I love reading. I adjust for this in reviews, but really I probably enjoyed reading anything that gets a 3 or higher — the goal, with the reviews, is to renormalize the scale to be uniformly distributed.

Anyway, Poor Things is a novel by Alasdair Gray. The novel is decently written, but much of it employs a device which I’ve always hated — telling the story in the past, so that you know while reading it where it’s going. I’m not demanding that everything be a mystery per se, but there’s something that I just find deflating about knowing where things are going to end up — I guess it’s because it lends a level of detachment to the proceedings. It’s hard to live “along with the protagonist” when you know what’s going to happen.

This is perhaps especially true of this novel, which falls into the “fantasy but not sci-fi quadrant” — a Frankenstein-type book in more ways than one, with humans engineering humans in a low-tech way (the novel is set in the 1800s.) The journey is interesting and reasonably well-written, though I wouldn’t say exceptionally so — but for me, the aforementioned plot device took away a lot of the suspense and intrigue which might have otherwise fallen naturally into such a story. The last 40% or so of the book is overtly re-historical, and seems entirely superfluous to me (though this completist reader always does make it through.) The novel probably gets a 7 on ideas, a 4 on writing, and a 3 on execution.

Why Do People Get Married Later?

An ongoing trend in developing countries is that of people getting married later in life. The explanations given to this are largely cultural — for instance, in the US, college is almost de rigueur among the middle-class and higher, which certainly has not been the case for very long. However, from my personal economic-evolutionary outlook on things, this also makes sense for other reasons.

New York: the PC of cities

While I was in New York, it occurred to me that all of my strife with and objections to the city can be summed up in one pithy aphorism: New York is the PC of cities. (Northern) California, on the other hand, is more like a Mac.

Danielle’s wedding

My best friend Danielle — well, I call her Delle, but I think only myself and Reene are allowed to do that — got married last weekend, an event really fourteen and a half years in the making. We met almost exactly half a lifetime ago, playing (sorry to impugn you) Magic: The Gathering on the sixth (fifth? seventh?) floor landing. It’s still weird to me that such an essentially random conjunction of space and time could lead to these lives that we share — I guess it seems to me that most of my friends were inevitabilities in the provable sense, people who I clearly would have met eventually even if the exact circumstances of our meeting were random. Perhaps this was an inevitability in the other, more nebulous destiny’s child-type sense*; who knows.