Jordan Ellenberg's Blog

But not the Orioles, against whom he is now 0-3. He got beat by Dylan Bundy in the 2016 game, then by Grayson Rodriguez (remember Grayson Rodriguez?) in 2023, and by Tyler Wells this week. That’s only the regular season, though. The game I really remember is the 2012 AL wild card game, the first playoff game for the Orioles in more than a decade. Darvish, then an MLB rookie, started for the Rangers. And we beat him then, too. I just claimed to really remember that game, but if you asked me who won it for the Orioles? You could give me fifty guesses and I wouldn’t have come up with Joe Saunders.

I would have thought it was hard to beat every team, but in the balanced schedule / interleague schedule it’s gotten a lot easier. Of course Wikipedia has a page of everybody who’s done it. Our old friend Kevin Gausman has managed to beat all 30 teams despite having only 110 wins. Maybe even more impressive is Jameson Taillon (who I saw beat the Brewers a couple of weeks ago in my first-ever trip to Wrigley Field, a game I never got around to blogging about), who is 0-1 against the Dodgers in 4 tries, but who has beaten all 29 other teams with only 80 career wins!

Wikipedia is really an incredible triumph of human cooperation. Why does it work so well? How is it so unpolluted? How is it that when some very weird niche question like “which pitchers have beaten all 30 teams,” comes to my mind, some human being has already compiled this and put it there? I don’t know. But I’m glad it exists.

I don’t know why there are so many baseball posts right now. They’re faster to write than math posts. More math posts to come, I promise! (But there’s also one more Orioles post I want to write…)

is a pitcher named Carlos Lagrange and if his major league nickname isn’t “The Multiplier” I will be sorely disappointed.

I knew this was going to be a fun one when the first question was about how I came to use lyrics from the Housemartins in How Not To Be Wrong. No one has ever asked me that before! I resisted the urge to do a whole hour of 1980s college radio content and instead we actually did talk about math, schooliness, AI, etc. Have a listen!

I just learned that the origin of this word is “that which is predicated,” which is to say, more or less, any condition that can be described or specified, whether good, bad, or neutral. Not much different in this respect from the word “situation,” that which is situated. In other words: the present English meaning of “predicament” — “a difficult problem” — must be some kind of fossilization of a now-forgotten euphemistic phrase akin to the current “We have a situation.”

The story opens:

Most of the people in the damn place were hacking away at their disgusting lunch, but I was still drinking Martinis and sitting alone in this thing that I guess could be called a booth, although it wasn’t even the height of my shoulder….. Those that came in together would blab-blab about what they were going to drink, and then, when they would order their drinks, they would have the same things they always had. Those that came in by themselves would light their silly cigarettes and bore the bartender with their phony politeness, just to prove to anybody at all that they knew the bartender.

This reads pretty differently than most of the stories in the anthology I’m reading (Hellbox). I would imagine that anybody who reads mid-20c American fiction would have the same reaction I did to this scene of a man drinking alone in New York, moodily hating all the chatty phonies within earshot — oh, this is a Catcher in the Rye imitation thing. But “Wise Guy” was published in the New Yorker on May 18, 1945 — Salinger’s first story in Caulfield’s voice, “I’m Crazy,” doesn’t come out until December.

I don’t think Salinger was imitating O’Hara. My sense is that the germ of Catcher in the Rye already existed for Salinger during the war.

But even if he was — I mean, the O’Hara is fine, but you go back and look at any of Catcher-era Salinger and it’s like nothing else. Yes, superficially, it’s cranky like this O’Hara passage but every sentence sings with life, joyous despite itself.

For every insult, it is possible to conceive of an ideal type who displays all the features the insult conveys, but in whom they are somehow virtues rather than deficits, and Tom Lehrer was that for “smart-ass.”

Also, I thought I’d seen just about every speck of Tom Lehrer content there was, but nope — here he is doing a promo for the new Dodge models of 1967.

“Rest, Imagining Poisoning Park Pigeons,” that is.

On the occasion of Lehrer’s passing at 97 let us remember the most gloriously comic and enthusiastic celebration of mass death ever put to jaunty music.

I wrote an opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel expressing my view that attacks on science funding and international students are bad. This will probably not be very controversial to readers of this blog. But I do think it’s worthwhile to say this in public, because I do think science is in general pretty popular and well-liked, certainly more so than politicians. “Does anybody really care what’s published in local papers?” I’ve been told, again and again, that yes, people do care. And my own experience with gerrymandering is that it really did make a difference, in the long term, that gerrymandering went from something very obscure to something people had heard of and generally agreed was kind of scummy. Long slow work of letters to the editor and public conversations were part of that. As Bryna Kra just reminded me, the actual financial situation of NSF and NIH is not determined when the President signs a bill; it has a lot more to do with the messy, political, hard-to-predict appropriations process, which has months to go still. So it’s far from too late to be talking about this — I encourage you to write your own!

Science Homecoming is an interesting project in this vein, asking scientists, wherever they now work, to write letters to their hometown papers. Click on the county you grew up in, it’ll suggest papers to submit to. (But don’t you already know what your hometown paper is? Sadly, if you’re around my age, your memory of what newspapers exist in your county of birth may be out of date.)