Ok, I read this, on the disappearance of the crafty pitcher, by Neil Paine at fivethirtyeight, and I have a question.

Here it goes, Neil: Does this have anything to do with the use of pitch location tracking, especially by MLB for their umpires?

I remember noticing in particular the extended strike zone for Tom Glavine with the Braves. Greg Maddux wasn't as exaggerated, but Glavine's strike zone included low and outside (to right-handed pitchers) when he could get away with it.

This was noticeable because TBS would broadcast the Braves games, and we could also watch their opponents (Astros for me) on a different broadcast. The camera angles from the outfield were close, but just enough separated that I could watch replays of pitches from both angles.

The TBS cameras were located a little farther into left field than the away broadcast. Which meant that a pitch a ball or two wide on the low outside corner for a righthand batter looked to be in the strike zone on the TBS broadcast. But when you saw it from dead center through the dead center camera, you could see how wide of the plate it truly was.

Glavine knew how to expand the strike zone. A pitch that was a clear strike in the first inning was now a ball or two wider by the fifth inning, just because he would pound it over and over again, a little farther outside each time, until the umpire was calling the wide strike out of habit, as much as anything.

With a truer measurement of the strike zone, and the umpires aware of it, I wonder if this is possible to the same extent that it was? If so, a pitcher who knows how to use a little Penn and Teller magic on the umpire doesn't have the same freedom as they did a generation ago.

Hey, psst.... I've got a new book out. Look over there to the right, in My Books list, or at the next post below. It's a science fiction book, one that takes place in both inner and outer space.

And yes, I'm afraid I'm made an algebrist's pun in the titles. Well, sometimes we revert to type, I guess...

Do you know yourself?

Do you know your songs? Dreams? How to dance and leap and where you'll be when you land?

Are you sure? Are you certain?

What would have to happen... for you to jump off into the void, knowing only that you'll have the chance to come back?

What would have to happen... for you to bet your life on how well you know who you are?

Automorphs, the first volume in the Transformalisms series, is available in print and ebook from all your favorite retailers, including Amazon (print) and Amazon (ebook), Kobo, Smashwords, Lulu, Barnes and Noble.

If you don't see your favorite retailer in this list, be sure and search for it; I use Draft2Digital to distribute to a number of other retailers, as well as to the public library system distributors.

I realized radio silence had extended a bit on the blog.

And then I remembered that I had a pretty busy week last week. I can see writers in the world that finish a book and publish a book in the same week as a normal thing. For me at least, I'm not there yet.

So my brain demands a little space to breathe.

Well, no, that's not quite it. Oh, there's a demand for a couple days unencumbered. But there's another book brewing as well. One that I've had in the back of my mind for a few years now, but I didn't expect to be tackling quite yet.

Then again that's two in a row, when I think about it. The book I finished last week wasn't one I thought I was ready to write yet, and then it snuck up on me, bit me, and next thing I know I was chapters in and the thing wouldn't let me go until I'd told the story good and true.

I'll be putting up links and so on later in the week, so watch this space.

Observations and notes - things I'm noting that will turn up in future work, in different ways and means. It helps to write them down.

These aren't presented as any sort of concrete thoughts meant to be important to anyone. They're just things I've seen and wondered about. I.e. half-baked noodlings that I store in the back of my brain, that may or may not be useful down the road, but if so writing the current thoughts will help me pick them back up again later. I hope only that when I reach for them in a story, these ideas are there to be played with.

Maybe. My brain could also just as well regurgitate it here and never use it again.

That said:

The muddy-boots engineering world looks to have a few interesting dynamic changes going on. Get on a plane, ignore the loud talkers who're only interested in getting to the drinks service, and watch and listen for those wearing steel-toed boots and carrying their hard hats. Especially the younger ones, those who look to be maybe on their first big-kid gig, or just a few into it. Notice the differing faces than you might expect, the different origins and, most of all, stories. As compared to last generation's faces and stories.

How's that going to look, ten, twenty, thirty years down the line? What kinds of impacts and stories will be there, how will they look and sound and think when these muddy boots engineers are training and hiring the next round? What kind of projects and where are they located, and what sort of stories are they going to be telling, in steel and pipe and dirt?

Next one:

Hiring for many jobs, out away from population centers, doesn't look like it's constrained by total population, so much as it's constrained by the population who can pass a background check and a piss test on demand. In small towns and low-population regions, that the total available local number who can do both of those things, and are interested in working out of the air-conditioning, is relatively small looks to be having a pretty significant effect on which muddy-boots jobs can be staffed effectively.

The same dynamic exists in the major population centers, broadly extending out past the exurbs, within the hour+ driving range, but the total available population that passes the piss test and the background checks and doesn't mind working outside is larger at least. It's still a constraint, and you can see the effects on staffing nonetheless. The broadening legalization of marijuana appears unlikely to change the piss test portion of the proceedings anytime soon.

Since there's no equivalent of BAC for cannabis/THC that would be broadly immunizing in terms of liability for, say, a pilot who puts a plane full of people into a lake, or a railroad engineer who derails. So, the patchwork of local laws plus unknown and, at current, essentially infinite liability for jobs DOT related (essentially any job not retail or medical or educational or similar areas adjacent, in other words) means that there's going to be a Lost Generation coming that are barred from entire industries.

And this won't be a whiff of froth on the body of the cappuccino Lost Generation (Hemingway etc), either, this looks to be something on the order of 60 percent of the population (who've smoked pot at work, according to the DJ and who knows whether that was a correct reading of whatever he was looking at), assuming the radio station survey I heard this morning is anything like representative. I'm not sure I believe it's that high, pardon the expression, but I could reasonably guess thirty percent at least that would be in trouble if you handed them the plastic cup and pointed them at the bathroom. In certain age groups, a lot higher.

Let's say it's twenty, thirty years down the road, being generous, before all the kinks get worked out and some broadly acceptable liability-assuaging parameters for marijuana use are established. That's an entire set of overlapping generations with precious few forklift operators, truck drivers, pipeline operators, plant operators, pipefitters, welders, etc. in their experience or circle.

Amazon's fulfillment center just up the road from me, I'm told, uses a completely autonomous forklift/warehouse stacking system combination. There are welding robots for big fabrication jobs. I watched a fully assembled pumping station waiting for wire hoisters to clear the road ahead of its haul truck this morning; it's headed to the municipal water station a couple miles over from my house. They'll set it in, run the pipes, and probably have it going through its pre-runs and start-ups in a week at most.

A job that would have been minimum, say, three months in a rush. With an electrician and helper, a pipefitter, couple of helpers, couple of iron workers, half a dozen concrete hands, a welder and helper, hot-shotters for the pumps and parts... Lot of jobs unseen. The slab's already been poured, I'm sure, so the concrete job's still there, the wires have to be run, and they'll need all that crew for "Just in Case", but the city won't have to hire them just for that one job, they'll use their permanent hires and fly them in for the couple weeks needed.

I'm not sure yet that I completely buy the "robots are takin' all our jobz" bit. But I do see a lot of open questions. A lot of stories coming that don't look like what we know now, or what our parents and grandparents knew. I said the municipal water service still needs the pipefitter, the welder, the iron worker. They'll always need them.

However: Next generation, a pipefitter and her helper will also have a couple robots, for grinding and cutting, while the fitters do something closer to what a foreman does now. Next generation's fitter is going to be doing a lot more high-level stuff than this one's; today's journeyman and tomorrow's apprentice are going to share a knowledge base, but they'll have a completely different level of capabilities.

And tomorrow's fitter will need it. If she's doing the work that two or three would have done yesterday, since 60 percent of the population couldn't get the job even if they wanted it.

Right, where's this headed? What sort of stories? In the cyberpunk world, who's beholden to corps and employers more? Those who can get a job broadly? Or those who can only get a certain subset of jobs? And how will a generation that's already begun to work outside of a regular employment (ie. the gig economy compared to the post-war standard) approach this world? How's the hierarchy react when there's a dominant labor pool, both necessary and available, that knows how to tell the suits to fuck right off? But that dominant labor pool is, at the very same time, a shrinking minority of the overall working population?

How does the hierarchy treat the welder who knows she can flip them the bird and go to the competitor, versus the IT worker and the administrative assistant that are effectively locked in? Or, at least, aren't necessarily going to be challenging the engineer or the welder for their job? IT isn't currently subject to this, are they? But at the very same time, the big Tech world is working like hell to make sure that IT in the next generation doesn't require a dedicated, on-site IT staff, they want everyone to be IT tomorrow, i.e. everyone to be comfortable enough with the tech so that a dedicated IT administrator isn't necessary day-to-day...

Some observations on the reactions of A Game of Thrones fandom, some in person, some online (and all with good humor and wishes to the fans whose theories went poof):

Team Cersei: "Really?"

Team Dany: Loudly ignoring foreshadowing since 1996!

Team Jon: The only winning move is not to play.

Teams Sansa and Tyrion: Batters Up!

Another Game of Thrones thought (because like everyone else, I'm watching the end of the era with great interest.)

Ok, this one's about Sansa Stark. We're way past the books as published, so the show has to stand on this point.

I'm intrigued by the contrast the show poses between Sansa and Ned Stark. Recall, in the first episode of the show (and in the first book), Ned executes a deserter from the Night's Watch. In the doing, he tells the boys that he who passes the sentence should be willing to execute it.

In contrast, as the show portrays it, by the time we get to Ramsay Bolton and Petyr Bailish, Sansa does her killing at a remove. The dogs in the first case, Arya in the second.

Now, I'm not arguing why this occurs. It's pretty evident why, given Sansa's personal story. There are many arguments about how this choice fits, pretty much all of them useful and defensible on some level.

What I'm interested in is this: are the storywriters going to leave this as purely a contrast?

And I wouldn't disagree; Sansa is Sansa and Ned is Ned and leaving this obvious story arc as is, no explanation, can stand on its own.

However, this contrast can also be used. If it's a contrast, but one with possibility to be resolved in some way? Now that would be an interesting choice, as well. That's usually the way of it, in the classic tragedy sense, isn't it? And Ned's choices mattered: he paid for them. Will Sansa's matter in a similar way? Or are the writers headed for a different path.

Again, this contrast doesn't have to be anything except a pure character statement. At the same time, it can be a fulcrum to pivot around, in the way the story goes. Which one would you choose?

Hie thee North, Jon Snow.

Do what Rhaegar and Lyanna couldn't quite manage; what Ned Stark should have done but couldn't bring himself to: win the war if you must, but then pack up your shit and head North. Not to Winterfell, leave that to Sansa and Arya to figure out. Go wildling. Join up with the Free Folk as just another sword, a nobody from nowhere.

Don't leave a forwarding address. Don't wait around to celebrate the dead or the living. Get on the first horse you can find and leave the squabbling to those who revel in it.

You have Aemon's example. You have Mance Rayder's example. You've been told repeatedly that you're no Stark, beginning with Catelyn. Even Ned was getting ready to tell you that you're something else besides. Take it, live it, and leave all the rest behind.

Just my opinion, based only on what the books tell me. I have no expectation that either George or the showrunners will follow up on the trail of crumbs that seems to be there for Jon.

I think I'm going to start calling the phenomenon of "dude country" something else. (dude here used advisedly, there are several female singers who have constructed their own versions of the phenomenon. I think dude works here in the BillNTed *Dude* sense, if nothing else. Further, I am being descriptive here, not trying to express an opinion.)

I think I'm going to call it Audrey's Revenge.

There's a bit to unpack here. First, by "dude country" I mean the shirt-popping, chest-thumping song, video, and stagecraft style of many country songs and singers these days. It's a little grating when it's becoming a dominant public-facing form of a music that was usually supposed to be known for being a little more adult than pop. How did "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and "Whiskey Lullaby" turn into forty different iterations on the "Red Solo Cup"?

So be it, not my bag and I'm not ragging on the musicians. They've got checks to cash and bills to pay and an audience that's willing to pony up for it.

That said, the particular cultural style (and it is a conscious, very well polished, stylistic choice) is, from observation, descended from one particular person: Hank Williams, Jr.

Hank Junior appears from this seat to have consciously constructed his act, both musically and in terms of stagecraft, and in terms of the audience he courted.

This audience thing happened later, after Hank Junior became the first person to win back-to-back Entertainer of the Year awards from the CMA. That's when the videos and the self-parody stage set in, again from what I saw.

But Hank Junior did, and does, appear to have a very good idea of the sort of audience that was paying attention to him when that self-parody image began to grow out of control. While Hank Junior ultimately stepped away from that image, except for the Monday Night Football Cash-In which was, let's face it, a once a year video performance, there were plenty of acts (the class of 1989 being the most prominent) who stepped in to fill the void.

Consciously, I'd argue. People tend to go where the money is. And then later, where their idols went. Which is now the generation of artists we're into now.

Ok, that's the immediate phenomenon. Audrey, as in Audrey's Revenge, is Audrey Williams, Hank Junior's mother.

And the reason I think Audrey's Revenge is appropriate is that Nashville basically kicked Hank Williams Senior out of town (literally: 'They' kicked him out of the Grand Ole Opry).

Like Mick Jagger said, if you don't like Hank Williams (Senior), you can kiss my ass. And, at least metaphorically, you could read the "dude country" phenomenon as Audrey's Revenge on the town as a whole.

Of course, to read it that way, you probably have to be the kind of person who knows why Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin put out a full-page spread in Billboard Magazine flipping the bird to the entire industry...