prod & ponder

Here’s a comic-ified version of my latest outing to a Nats game (the last game in a three-game sweep of the Cubs).

I made the remark in the comic that, despite the improvements with new team ownership, the stands are still too empty. Someone on flickr remarked that the problem was RFK, and I gave the following reply:

I’ve always supported building a new stadium, but I think you’re wrong to blame the low attendance on RFK.

1. Attendance has taken a dramatic fall this year, and the stadium isn’t anything new in the equation.

2. If anything, the fan experience at RFK has improved since last year. While food concessions still leaves a lot to be desired (understatement), it’s better than it was opening year, even before the food court addition two weeks ago. Metro has also gotten better at handling game day traffic.

While RFK is showing its age and it is not baseball-focused in design, it also has some nice benefits. It’s certainly a democratic stadium: there may be no great seating, but there’s also very little terrible seating–the cheap seats are still pretty darn good.

Again, don’t get me wrong, I support a new stadium. RFK’s geographic location means that we can’t get any good development around it, and that means a huge amount of tourist revenue is lost because there’s no place for fans to go before and after the game. And fans lose out on that fun as well. RFK doesn’t have, and could never have, the equivalent of Wrigleyville built around it.

In contrast, the new stadium location will allow for a new region of economic development for the city and more entertainment options for fans. Those before and after-game entertainment options will also help spread out fan travel plans, giving the metro a bit less of a rider crush.

Also, the democratic seating at RFK makes it less desirable for team owners. RFK doesn’t have the luxury seating and more sharply divided class tiers in seating that helps make a stadium profitable for owners. It’s hard to imagine MLB ever opting for a new franchise in a city that only gave them an RFK-type stadium to work with.

If you ask me, three things are to blame for the lower attendance:
1. The honeymoon of the inaugural season has passed.
2. Recent win streak aside, the Nats have had a poor season.
3. The Comcast/MASN feud that has made it nearly impossible to catch live games on television, taking away a major hook and marketing tool for a new team.

Personally, I put a lot of blame for the lower attendance on the Comcast/MASN feud. Most of the ire I hear over the dispute is directed at Angelos, but I think MLB deserves its fair share of the criticism. When you give a monopoly to a party with conflicts of interests against those served, this kind of travesty is predictable.

Photo (manipulated) of a column in Adams Morgan.

I wasn’t planning to post these photos–they were just quick snapshots I took a few weeks ago while visiting the zoo for Butterstick’s birthday–but I starting tinkering around with a new cartoon program (Comic Life) and had some fun with them.

Black & white cookies given out at Butterstick’s birthday celebration.

The o line in action.

Unsurprisingly, it took a gadget to put me over the edge and pick up running. Yesterday I picked up a Nike+ running kit. Since I already had an ipod nano, it was a fairly cheap investment (< $30), and despite marketing material to the contrary, the sensor it uses is simply an accelerometer that can work with whatever shoes you already own. This graphic is from the Nike+ site, which has a reasonably slick flash interface that tracks runs and your progress toward any set goals whenever the ipod is synced up.

If you're curious to tunes I'm running to, click on More for a list of the running tracks I put together.
(more…)

Are we making progress in Iraq?

American casualties aren’t a sufficient metric, but it’s certainly an interesting variable to consider. In all honestly, it’s also a chance for me to tinker a bit more with Tufte’s notion of Sparklines using some regularly available data.

So, here are two graphics of American military monthly casualty numbers from March 2003 to June 2006:

The 20 and 137 refer to the lowest and highest monthly casualty numbers, February 2004 and November 2004 respectively.

And here’s the same data as a line graph. The 65 and 62 refers to the start (March ‘03) and end (June ‘06) casualty numbers. The blue line is the average casualties for the entire period (62 per month).

The source I used for these figures was icasualties.org.

Yes, you read that right, Ali G interviewed Noam Chomsky. It didn’t turn out to be a very funny interview, but still, it’s Ali G…. and Noam Chomsky. Now if you want both surreal and funny, then there’s the old Atari Pole Position commercial, with such classic lines as:
“Hey, you look like a real jerk.”
“Well, I am a corporate executive.”
and (brace yourself)
“It’ll bust your crank and leave skid marks on your soul.”

Happy day! Edward Tufte recently released his new book, Beautiful Evidence, and my copy just arrived in the mail.

One (of many) interesting graphic device Tufte introduces is the Sparkline, a micro-graph that relays a large amount of information in a space small enough that it can be embedded in the text it illustrates. So here, for example, is the win-loss record of the Washington Nationals: (38-49) — wins are up ticks, losses down, and it gives a quick visual reference for trends. (By the way, you should follow the Sparkline link above, since my baseball example doesn’t do the idea justice.)

You can create baseball sparklines for all MLB teams here. You can generate sparklines for your own data with this online tool. And you can find information on adding dynamically generated spark graphs to web applications here.

Yes, this post is about Ken Lay’s demise before serving time for his crimes, but that’s not directly the missed justice I’m referring to.

Today the Post ran this editorial by Henry Allen, a staff writer for the paper. Allen makes some fair remarks about the justice lost by Lay passing away before he could serve the prison time for his crimes. Lay certainly didn’t deserve the final days of luxury his crimes afforded him.

That said, this line in the editorial kept nagging at me:
“… he might be spending long nights locked in a cell with a panting tattooed monster named Sumo, a man of strange and constant demands…”

Because here’s the thing, when I first read that line I laughed, and I really wish I hadn’t. Yes, there’s a place for punishment in justice. But when I think of justice, I also think of basic human rights and the moral call to treat all people with basic human dignity, even those guilty of crimes, even those who are incarcerated. It’s not funny, laughable, or right that rape has become an institutionalized norm and cliche joke of prison life, and it’s not an acceptable thing to do for the media to perpetuate that bad behavior with light-hearted references to it.

We have the Stanford prison experiment as a warming that it’s a tempting and slippery slope to prisoner abuse. We have the recent abuses at Abu Ghraib as a stark reminder of how this can play out. And if you think prison rape is just a matter of prisoner-fueled violence, consider the history and rationale behind the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act, which highlights the many ways that institutions and guards have turned an intentional blind eye to the problem.

Yes, it’s a shame that Lay didn’t serve his time. And yes, I admit it, the joke got a laugh out of me–”a man of strange and constant demands,” come on, that’s hard not to chuckle at. But whether or not it’s funny, torture certainly isn’t justice, and I wish the Post didn’t miss that point and represent it as such.