August 6, 1945: Just Another Day in the War?

October 6th, 2009

Freeman Dyson is a man I admire as one of the physics greats from the early days of quantum electrodynamics and as an original thinker and writer on diverse subjects. I recently heard him speak at Tufts University, or rather read, as he announced he would do at the beginning, in order, as he put it, to avoid going on for two hours. Such is the effect of his physical presence and his economical, straightforward writing and reading style that I have a feeling I wasn’t the only member of the rapt audience thinking: “This may be the smartest person I’ve ever encountered.”

Dyson’s talk was divided into two basically unrelated sections. The first part was devoted to the topic of abolishing nuclear weapons and some of the obstacles, particularly psychological obstacles based on misconceptions, to achieving that desirable end. The second part provided a glimpse into a dangerous but exciting future in which home biotechnology is as wide-spread as home computing today. There would be no point in my trying to summarize the many thought-provoking ideas Dyson presented. I saw a video camera, presumably for the benefit of the overflow crowd mentioned to be in another room, so I’m hoping Tufts will make the talk available to the public. I will only mention one of the ideas from the second part: bio-engineered plants with silicon-based, black leaves to serve as living solar cells, ten times more efficient at solar energy conversion than natural, chlorophyll-utilizing plants. We’re here to empower you with knowledge so you can make informed choices. While Modafinil can boost focus and productivity, it’s important to be aware of potential side effects. From mild headaches to occasional nausea, our bodies might react differently. But fear not! These effects are often temporary and manageable.

Much of the first part of Dyson’s talk was devoted to the task of exploding a number of widely believed “myths” that, according to Dyson, stand in the way of progress in eliminating nuclear weapons. One such important myth being that unilateral actions of disarmament are to be avoided and that only multilateral agreements with cheat-proof safeguards should be pursued, Dyson cited a number of significant unilateral steps to limit or eliminate weapons taken in the past by American Presidents (all Republicans, as it turns out, perhaps not surprisingly), which were later reciprocated. I confess that I didn’t remember them all, and the list was quite impressive.

While I share Dyson’s belief that the continued existence of large nuclear arsenals by major world powers is a great danger, probably the greatest danger, to the world’s future, I have to question the importance of some of the “myths” he enumerated. If all Dyson’s myths must first be overcome, I am not optimistic, for not all his myth-busting arguments were to my mind convincing. The one that struck me as least plausible when he made it was his claim that Hitler’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would not have enabled Germany to win the war. As a counter to this Dyson just asserted that had London and Moscow been leveled in nuclear attacks, then the allies would have been motivated to reach Berlin all the faster, possibly triumphing sooner than they actually did. I would hate to have the case for getting rid of nuclear weapons depend on that argument.

The shakiness of that argument made me start to wonder about Dyson’s ability to objectively analyze historical questions of this type. I’m not sure why he feels that dispelling what he sees as a false belief about a hypothetical outcome to past history is essential, though I suppose he thinks it necessary to correct the idea that the development of nuclear weapons was ever in any sense a good thing and to expunge whatever prestige they may retain from having possibly served a useful purpose in the past.

One of Dyson’s myth-busting arguments did in fact make me question what I thought I knew about what had prompted the Japanese surrender in World War II. I of course had read and wondered about the question of whether the nuclear bombings had been necessary to bring about the surrender, leaving aside the moral issue involved in deliberately destroying whole cities. Dyson’s assertion went well beyond arguing that Japan would have surrendered without the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He maintained that, contrary to the accepted view, the bombings had not been seen at the time as significant enough to initiate a crisis, or even special concern. He presented some historical evidence for the view that it was the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, and especially its invasion of Manchuria, that had prompted the Japanese surrender, with the nuclear bombings essentially being viewed by Japanese leaders as tolerable and not particularly noteworthy, only coincidentally having taken place at about the same time as the Soviet invasion, which had actually prompted a rapid surrender. Introducing a comprehensive guide on Propecia and its potential side effects. Knowledge is power, so let’s dive deep into the facts. Learn about the benefits, risks, and possible adverse reactions associated with Propecia usage.

I don’t agree that destroying the belief that American nuclear weapons were taken to be a serious new threat by the Japanese war leadership is a prerequisite for convincing people of the undesirability of nuclear weapons today. The truth or falsity of that belief is certainly of historical interest, though, and Dyson’s surprising assertion that Japanese leaders had basically shrugged off the Hiroshima bomb led me to do some research on the topic. Yes, my “library” was Google.

I found that Dyson credits his current view on the Japanese surrender to the argument presented by Ward Wilson in an article called The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima published in International Security (Spring 2007) and available online as a pdf file. Dyson read his “myth-busting” argument about the Japanese surrender to the Tufts audience, and I believe what he read was very similar to the text of an earlier piece by him posted on the internet, though in his presentation at Tufts he elaborated much more on the psychological significance of the similarities of historical situations fifty years apart alluded to in point 5 below. I am going to discuss the way in which I think Wilson and Dyson have stretched and “cherry-picked” the evidence they present to fit their conclusion. I will bring in some outside evidence gleaned from my online research now and then.

Here follow Dyson’s basic (numbered) points from his online article along with my responses.

1. Members of the Supreme Council, which customarily met with the Emperor to take important decisions, learned of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. Although Foreign Minister Togo asked for a meeting, no meeting was held for three days.

I can’t see how any firm conclusion can to be drawn from this. It may be that Togo was just more perceptive than others. The singular nature of this attack, which had come as a complete surprise, not to mention President Truman’s promise to continue dropping atomic bombs until Japan capitulated, may have taken time to sink in. And of course the second attack of August 9 on Nagasaki, which demolished the wishful thinking which held the Americans couldn’t have made more than one atomic bomb, had not yet occurred. I read elsewhere that the meeting requested by Togo did not take place because the military members of the Council were unavailable. Given the split on the Council between advocates of peace and hardliners, there was perhaps some deliberate stalling involved.

Togo made an urgent personal report to the Emperor on the Hiroshima bombing on August 7, and came away feeling he had convinced Hirohito that surrender with only one condition (maintenance of the Imperial throne) was now a necessity. This in itself would seem to be sufficient proof that the Hiroshima bomb was being viewed as qualitatively different from conventional bombing raids.

2. A surviving diary records a conversation of Navy Minister Yonai, who was a member of the Supreme Council, with his deputy on August 8. The Hiroshima bombing is mentioned only incidentally. More attention is given to the fact that the rice ration in Tokyo is to be reduced by ten percent.

The diary that records the conversation is that of Takagi, the deputy, not Yonai’s. In it occurs the following (Takagi speaking), quoted by Wilson:

“I used to think that by September or October the domestic situation would rapidly deteriorate while you said it would start deteriorating in mid-August. Actually, the situation is getting steadily worse in many respects during these couple of days, especially after Hiroshima.”

“Especially after Hiroshima” seems more than an “incidental” mention. Rather it seems to be an acknowledgment by Takagi that the Hiroshima bombing may have been a tipping point in the populace’s willingness to continue the war. Yonai replies, “Bad news continues and the ration of rice in Tokyo will be reduced by ten percent after the 11th of this month.” Yonai, already convinced that surrender was necessary, and living in fear of a popular uprising if the war went on much longer, may have been less attuned than Takagi to the significance of Hiroshima, but I wouldn’t call this exchange one that gives “more attention” to the rice rationing, which came up in the context of discussing the ever worsening popular mood, Yonai’s ongoing concern.

Perhaps post-war recollections are not to be trusted as much as wartime diaries, but I did note in my online reading that Kido, Emperor Hirohito’s most trusted adviser, related that on August 7, after it had been confirmed that the Hiroshima bomb was indeed an atomic bomb, the significance of which was not lost on the Japanese, Hirohito had told him, “No matter what happens to my safety, we should lose no time in ending the war so as not to have another tragedy like this.”

3. On the morning of August 9, Soviet troops invaded Manchuria. Six hours after hearing this news, the Supreme Council was in session. News of the Nagasaki bombing, which happened the same morning, only reached the Council after the session started.

Let me quote the opening remarks of Prime Minister Suzuki at this meeting:

“We have been hit hard by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Now we have the Soviet entry into the war. It has become almost impossible to continue the war any longer.”

So the first words out of the Prime Minister’s mouth in this first meeting after Hiroshima refer to Hiroshima, putting the atomic bombing on a par with the Soviet attack. In other words, it is the combination of these two heavy blows that has brought them to the point where surrender is necessary. This was indeed before news of the Nagasaki bombing came.

The meeting time may have been changed as a result of the news of the Soviet attack, but we read in Wilson’s article that Yonai spoke of this meeting with his deputy the day before it occurred, thus it had been scheduled before the Manchurian news, I think it is clear that Hiroshima would have been a topic of serious discussion in any case.

4. The August 9 session of the Supreme Council resulted in the decision to surrender.

Here is a concise statement, which could make it appear that the Council came to quick agreement due to the startling development of the Soviet invasion. In fact, as I learned in my online history reading, despite news of both the Nagasaki bomb and the Manchurian invasion, the vote split 3-3 with three military members of the Council voting to go on fighting unless several unrealistic conditions were agreed to by the Americans. Unanimity was not reached by the Council until they were invited along with the rest of the Cabinet to an extraordinary midnight session by the Emperor, who did not, as point 1 implied, regularly meet with them.

It should be noted that HIrohito stepped far beyond his normal role and used his prestige to gain reluctant agreement to sue for peace with only the condition of maintaining the Emperor on his throne, which makes Hirohito’s reason for choosing surrender most important.

5. The Emperor, in his rescript to the military forces ordering their surrender, does not mention the nuclear bombs but emphasizes the historical analogy between the situation in 1945 and the situation at the end of the Sino-Japanese war in 1895. In 1895 Japan had defeated China, but accepted a humiliating peace when European powers led by Russia moved into Manchuria and the Russians occupied Port Arthur. By making peace, the emperor Meiji had kept the Russians out of Japan. Emperor Hirohito had this analogy in his mind when he ordered the surrender.

There are a number of things that need to be said about this point. First of all, it deals with what Hirohito said in the rescript to the military issued on August 17, 1945. True enough, this rescript makes no mention of the atomic bomb attacks, and it does refer to the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, though not to the invasion of Manchuria, which according to the analysis related by Dyson is supposed to have had a special resonance with an earlier historical event in the minds of those in the Japanese military. One can of course speculate on the significance of Hirohito’s approach, and I will join in the speculation below.

Now I want to mention a very important event which Dyson’s point 5 and Wilson’s article fail to take into account, which might be called an inconvenient fact for their theory. On August 15, two days before his rescript to the armed forces, Hirohito had caused to be broadcast to the nation a recorded radio address announcing his decision to surrender. In that message there is no mention of the Soviet Union, except in passing as one of the allied countries to which Japan was surrendering. But within that address occurs the following justification for surrender:

“…the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”

Is there any doubt what this passage in the Emperor’s message is referring to? Is there any mincing of words about the results of continuing to fight? No, no nation without nuclear weapons could stand against one that had them. The Emperor saw the reality and spelled it out plainly, in his own voice, thus undercutting any future attempt to rally a defense to the last person of the homeland, before he’d even addressed the military.

At the very least Wilson and Dyson need to discuss this message to the Japanese people. Wilson acknowledges (though only in a footnote) that the nuclear bombs were “mentioned” in the Emperor’s message, failing to note that the Soviet entry into the war was not mentioned there or that the rescript to the nation preceded the one to the military by two days. Nor does the word “mentioned” do justice to the decisive way in which the new weapons were described in their “incalculable power” as making resistance futile. Dyson ignores the Emperor’s message to the people entirely. I suppose Wilson and Dyson might say that the common people wouldn’t have understood the argument about the Soviet Union, so that something closer to their experience, as the ones subject to bombing, had to be used as justification for surrender; but the fact remains that Wilson and Dyson chose to avoid the issue, as it clearly doesn’t fit their thesis that the atomic bomb attacks were barely noteworthy within the context of many devastating conventional bombing attacks and the paramount importance of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.

The question Hirohito and others must have asked themselves was would the message of surrender broadcast to the nation be enough to induce the laying down of arms by the military, which for many months had been gearing up for a last-ditch defense of the Japanese Islands, with death before national dishonor the mind-set and with kamikazes already a major part of the defense effort? Here is where the Soviet entry may become very significant from the psychological standpoint. The Japanese military could still take pride in its initial successes against the Americans and the British and French empires, and it had made the Americans pay dearly for every small island they captured. But add to the forces already arrayed against them those of the Soviet Union, how could they be expected to win? They had started the war against the others, and so couldn’t surrender to them without admitting the war to have been a mistake from the start. Surrendering to the Americans after such a long and bitter struggle must have seemed particularly odious. Here is the Emperor’s reference to the Soviet Union.

“Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue the war under the present internal and external conditions would be only to increase needlessly the ravages of war finally to the point of endangering the very foundation of the Empire’s existence.”

That’s it. Contrary to what point 5 all but declares there was no allusion of “the historical analogy between the situation in 1945 and the situation at the end of the Sino-Japanese war in 1895.” Whether or not this historical analogy was really something the Japanese military would have seen and found soothing or is only a fantasy of this particular analysis, I can’t say. Barring some testimony from the Emperor that I haven’t seen, I think it is going beyond what is known to say “Emperor Hirohito had this analogy in his mind when he ordered the surrender.” In any case, this only speaks to the words chosen to get the military to comply with the surrender order.

There is certainly material in this history for a Rashomon sort of story about how the war really ended. I can imagine Truman’s telling, Hirohito’s telling, Stalin’s telling, just for starters. Obviously there are open questions. With the Soviet Union about to enter the war, why couldn’t Truman wait and see what impact that event had before dropping the bombs? Was there a rush to make sure the bombs ended the war and at the same time send a message to Stalin?

Would the two atomic bombs (or just one) alone have been sufficient to have ended the war without Soviet entry into the war? That is impossible to know since the bombing and Soviet declaration of war occurred so closely together. But had the Soviets decided to let the Americans continue the war alone, is there anyone (except perhaps Wilson and Dyson) that believes Japan would have held up long against still more nuclear bombs? Let us all be thankful that the end came when it did.

6. The Japanese leaders had two good reasons for lying when they spoke to Robert Butow. The first reason was explained afterwards by Lord Privy Seal Kido, another member of the Supreme Council: “If military leaders could convince themselves that they were defeated by the power of science but not by lack of spiritual power or strategic errors, they could save face to some extent”. The second reason was that they were telling the Americans what the Americans wanted to hear, and the Americans did not want to hear that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria brought the war to an end.

Well, I suppose some leaders may have lied to Butow (who interviewed many after the war and wrote a gripping history of the events leading to the surrender in Japan’s Decision to Surrender), though Kido only speaks here of military leaders convincing themselves that they were not at fault, which can be taken as an interpretation of events as much as a falsification of history. Where is the quote from the Japanese leader that the atomic bombs entered not at all into the decision for Japan’s capitulation? Is there not a single such truth teller? Speaking of Kido, quoted by Dyson above, he is also the source of my earlier quote about Hirohito having decided on August 7 that the war must now end as a result of the Hiroshima bombing.

The continued intransigence of the military members of the Supreme Council all through the events of August 9, would seem to make it clear that Hirohito’s intervention was essential to the decision for surrender, and from what I have now read I believe that what finally pushed this man to act in a decisive way was the threat of continued atomic bombing of his country. While this is speculation, it is a fact that the Emperor gave the atomic bombs as the reason in his message of surrender delivered directly to his people.

Back when I was a physics student there were certain kinds of arguments in physics that were called “swindles” because they skipped over difficulties to arrive at a desired result without really having proved what they claimed to. I doubt Freeman Dyson has ever had recourse to a swindle in a matter of physics, even by accident, but I feel he has let his worthy goal of eliminating nuclear weapons lead him into accepting and now promulgating a significant swindle on the question of the importance of the atomic bombings in the minds of the Japanese decision makers at the end of World War II.

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Thinking of One Who Died on September 11, 2001

September 10th, 2009

A number of my posts here have noted the way my memory of past events is quite restricted. Only memories of certain events in my life—exceptional in the impression they made on me—have survived the decades, and even then in fragment and mist. I talked about this phenomenon in Something on Memories. I’ve actually become much more aware of it through my writing here, and I can’t say how typical it is.

As the fatal date September 11 approaches, I’m moved to write of one of those memories from my childhood that is dreamlike and without clarity of detail, yet definitely grounded in real events and with strong, undefinable feelings and impressions attached.

I know the setting, though not the exact date, of this memory. It was at my Uncle Herman’s house in rural Northeast Texas. Herman was one of my maternal grandfather’s younger brothers, perhaps the youngest. Although the two brothers lived only a short distance apart, there wasn’t much social intercourse between the two families, at least whenever I was there for summer vacation and holiday visits. The little community’s Methodist church was very important to my grandfather, but I don’t recall seeing Herman there, even though he and his wife lived close to it, on the same road. It could be that they went to a different church, but their failure to attend the same church as my grandfather would have made them seem less a part of the family and the community. In any case, we would see Uncle Herman in my uncle’s general store on a fairly regular basis. Almost everyone in the surrounding area would be there sometime or other during the week if only for the society.

As I recall him, my uncle Herman was a lively, outgoing man who liked to kid a lot. But in my memories of him from childhood a couple of things stand out more than his personality. One is that he had had his larynx removed due to cancer, which made his appearance quite singular and rather disturbing to a child that only saw him occasionally. I can remember him before the operation though, and before that alteration in his appearance and speech, the main thing that made him stand out in my mind was his hound dogs. On the few occasions I went with my grandfather to visit Herman, it seems we always saw him outside the house instead of going inside, as one would do on a normal visit. He had numerous coon hounds which he kept in an enclosure not far from his house, and the dogs were always part of the picture when we were there. I suppose he kept the dogs for his own hunting pleasure, but for all I know he bred them for sale. They were a noisy and undisciplined lot, and I did not like being close to them. I don’t know how many there were of them, but there were more than enough to intimidate a town boy who wasn’t used to semi-wild canines who lived for the thrill of the hunt in the company of men experiencing the same primal pleasure. I don’t know if they became agitated at the sight of strangers or from seeing my uncle, with whom I imagine they shared delicious memories of hunts and kills.

The event I am now seeking to recall was a large family gathering at Uncle Herman’s house. Perhaps it was a family reunion, though I have a vague feeling it might have been a wedding anniversary. It may be the only time I was actually inside the house. Large gatherings with relatives that one barely knows are not a great pleasure to children. This one was exceptional though, because among those present was a cousin I had never met before, a boy about my age named Jimmy, one of Uncle Herman’s grandsons, presumably just visiting for this special occasion. Jimmy and I hit it off immediately. Perhaps he had inherited something of Uncle Herman’s exuberance. All I’m sure of is that Jimmy and I had a great time playing together and that I liked him a lot. I think we must have run through the unfamiliar house a few times, because I have a tantalizing sense of what it felt like to jump onto and off the porch and can vaguely picture the room that opened to the porch. Cousins of my generation were not numerous in my family, and the unexpected discovery of a new one my own age was exciting, with its implicit promise that we would have many more days of fun together.

That was not to be the case. As far as I know, this was the first and only time I ever saw Jimmy. I have no memory of what he looked like. I’m not sure how old we were when we met; my guess is about ten. The very singularity of our meeting and the thrill of discovery must have preserved from that day a small pool of feelings and impressions deep in the cavern of my memory, long after the details of the event had evaporated. I know I would have wanted to see more of Jimmy, but I don’t remember wondering about him. Perhaps such fleeting encounters are not unusual in childhood, as grownups determine the where and when of our lives. Given the loose connection between our grandfathers, Jimmy and I may well have been in the same small area at the same time both before and after that day without being aware of it.

Now I need to say how the September 11 attacks brought me back to that day long ago when I met a new cousin. Talking to my mother on the telephone sometime after 911, I was surprised to learn that one of my cousins, whose existence was news to me, Jimmy Nevill Storey, a Houston businessman, had been killed in the World Trade Center, a trip to New York City having been timed with the worst possible luck. He was one of Uncle Herman’s grandsons. It was quite some time later that the memory of the family gathering at which I had met a delightful new cousin came creeping into my consciousness. Yes, he was the one, it had to be so.

There’s a lot to ponder in this: the way we led our separate lives, only crossing paths once, my presence at his grandfather’s on just that day being almost as much a matter of chance as his being a victim in the events of September 11, 2001; and the way my recalling our single meeting was only the result of the circumstances of his death, which made me search my memory for some recollection (for if I’d heard that a cousin I didn’t know had died of a heart attack it probably would barely have registered and wouldn’t have set the wheels of my memory into motion).

I wonder what it would have been like to have met Jimmy as an adult? Would we have remembered our first encounter from so long ago? Would we have had enough in common to have felt even a small fraction of the rapport we’d felt our first meeting? He was a businessman and a graduate of Texas A&M, whose students—”Aggies” then and forever after—have traditionally viewed and defined their school as the polar opposite of my alma mater, the University of Texas (with its “tea-sip” students). I think A&M at that time was still all male, with military training a requirement for everyone. That was definitely not my cup of tea. Given that we were roughly the same age, we would have been cheering for opposite sides in the big rival games between our two schools. Scratch “cheering.” Aggies make a point of saying they don’t cheer; they yell, and have yell leaders. Jimmy and I probably would not have agreed on the Vietnam War had we met while it was going on. Perhaps those accidental facts of our lives would have been insurmountable barriers to connection. Such thoughts can make me long for the simple days of boyhood.

As with other victims, a few details of Jimmy’s life can be found on the internet. I came across a web page that had the text of an article from the Houston Chronicle, which had details I found touching. It was transcribed on September 26, 2001, but the actual date of publication wasn’t stated. The memorial service for Jimmy reported in the article was held only after the family had given up any hope that he could have survived. He had been on the 99th floor that morning. The article implies that he must have lost his father at a rather early age; and a cousin of mine has told me Jimmy’s father died at around the age of forty. Jimmy’s mother is quoted in the article as saying “He was kind of thrown from boy to man real fast, but he handled it well. He was a very devoted son, a very, very good father to his children.” Jimmy Storey was just one of many who died that day, but he’s the one I’ll be thinking about this September 11.

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OnScreen Pitch Count Now On Sale on iTunes App Store!

August 29th, 2009

OnScreen Pitch Count, my iPhone “app” for recording pitch results in a baseball or softball game has been approved for placement on the iTunes App Store and is now available for purchase, in the Sports department, naturally. The past couple of posts here (OnScreen Pitch Count: An iPhone App Preview and How I Made a Quick-and-Dirty Six-Minute Demo Video of My iPhone App) have been devoted to describing the app and my efforts to get it ready.

The only way to sell an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch is through the App Store, and Apple has to approve individually every app that goes on sale there. The estimated time for this approval had been quoted as about two weeks when I submitted OnScreen Pitch Count on the night of August 12. I hurried to get it done then because I was going to be out town for five days, visiting family.

I spent the next couple of weeks wondering if I’d somehow introduced a fatal bug at the last minute (“impossible,” but still one thinks about the impossible sometimes) or if the reviewer at Apple might be someone that didn’t know the first thing about baseball. The evening of August 26 arrived, and OnScreen Pitch Count still hadn’t been approved. Then, almost two weeks to the hour since I’d submitted my app, I got the email saying it was now on sale on the iTunes app store.

Sure enough, within an hour or so the link embedded in my email worked to take me to the OnScreen Particle app’s display on the iTunes App Store. Sure, it’s too late in the baseball season to make many sales now, but it’s still a good feeling to know the app has been approved.

Let me quote a couple of paragraphs from the iTunes app description:

OnScreen Pitch Count from OnScreen Science, Inc. is an app for anyone wanting to have the pulse of a baseball or softball game at his or her fingertips. Pitching is the key to the game, and with OnScreen Pitch Count you’ll have data that even the tv analysts don’t. You’ll know how many pitches each pitcher in the game has thrown and exactly what the net results of those pitches have been.

Whether you’re watching your favorite team play, listening to a game on the radio, sitting in the stands at your child’s Little League game, or coaching a game in which extra pitching data could help you make the right decision, you’ll find OnScreen Pitch Count enhances your enjoyment of the game as it increases your understanding of it.

If you enjoy following baseball or softball, and especially if you coach it at any level, you should check OnScreen Pitch out. Even if you don’t really need it until next spring, you might as well get it and learn it now. I welcome comments and questions. See the email address in the right hand column.

UPDATE: See also “IPhone App Updates and Experiences” and “OnScreen Pitch Count 1.3 Is Now on the iTunes App Store”.

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How I Made a Quick-and-Dirty Six-Minute Demo Video of My iPhone App

August 24th, 2009

My iPhone app OnScreen Pitch Count (submitted to Apple, but not yet approved for App Store placement) is easy to use. Even so, describing how it works, using only words and still images can be tedious and may give the impression that it’s more complicated than it is. The draft user’s guide for OnScreen Pitch Count details what every screen button is for. Most of them should be immediately obvious, but the sheer number of buttons might make learning seem an unpleasant task, at first glance.

I clearly needed a video presentation of OnScreen Pitch Count that showed both how to use the app and what it was to be used for. Not knowing either the timetable or the exact procedure for the Apple review, I also felt the need to get something online as soon as possible, just in case an Apple reviewer, with the app’s fate in his or her hands, came to the web site looking for help in using it. I originally thought that a video of me or someone else tapping the buttons on the screen would be best, as being more realistic and possibly making the viewer want to start doing the same thing. That may be true, but given my resources and my impression of some rather pathetic online videos of iPhone game play, where the player’s fingers really got in the way, and the focus was poor, I decided to opt for making a screen recording of the app running in the iPhone Simulator, which Apple provides for testing apps under development.

Since most button taps lead to the tapped button’s being highlighted, it should be easy for the viewer to follow the action, imagining the invisible finger or thumb of the user. I already had used a Macintosh program iShowU for making a screencast demo of OnScreen Particle Physics, OnScreen Science’s modern physics teaching software, so my first thought was to try iShowU. First I went to its web site to see if there was a new version. There was, one that required Mac OS 10.5. This raised the question of whether the version I had would run under 10.5 at all. Since there was a discounted upgrade price I decided to look into the upgrade. Unfortunately to get to the upgrade page, one had to enter a password, the meaning of which was not explained anywhere I could see. I decided to launch the older version to see if the password might be found there. The good news was that the older version launched OK under 10.5, but the serial number turned out to be extremely long and with no way to copy it. Perhaps some old email would have it, but that was enough to deter me from the upgrade, since I wasn’t even sure the serial number was in fact the required password. I decided to see how well version 1.7.2 would work before revisiting the upgrade or alternative software question.

iShowU provided an easy, intuitive way to capture just the portion of the screen I wanted. There was a draggable, resizable rectangle, which I could put exactly over the iPhone Simulator’s on-screen representation of the iPhone device. The on-screen instructions said to hit return to set the recording area. Nothing happened to indicate that the capture rectangle had been registered when I did that (several times). It seemed this might be an incompatibility with 10.5, as I had feared. What else to do but try quitting and relaunching? That did the trick, though as usual in such cases, I’ll never know why. I did a couple of short practice runs. It was working, saving a QuickTime mov file to the desktop, each time. I then plugged in my USB microphone, the Blue Snowflake, and tested it with commentary enough to see that the audio worked. About a megabyte seemed to be required for each minute of recording, which I thought was within reason.

Clearly, though, I could not just improvise my way all the way through a demonstration. I would have to script it, and try to keep it around five minutes. It was immediately apparent to me that methodically going through the use of each button would be boring, and probably impossible to do without a context for the button usage. At the risk of sounding dumb, I decided to use a made-up game scenario, which I would narrate sparingly, to illustrate the app. I typed the script as fast as I could, thinking of it as a first draft. Looking at it now, I can see a couple of things I might have added, and a couple of places where the order might be improved, but it covers most aspects of the app’s usage to record pitch results in a game. When I do it again, I’ll probably include a runner caught stealing and a batter reaching base after a dropped third strike. I definitely should have shown the use of the Undo button, but its visible presence hopefully makes the point that it is possible to undo actions.

Now, how to do it physically? The script went beyond one page, but I didn’t want to have paper rustling sounds recorded, and I needed to have my hands free to use the trackpad and keyboard on my MacBook Pro anyway. I should note that I turned off the mouse cursor recording feature of iShowU since I didn’t want the movement of a mouse pointer across the screen to be highlighting continually that this was a simulation on a computer screen. I didn’t try to get a visual display of mouse clicks (simulated button taps) since the mouse clicks almost always highlighted the button anyway. One place where the simulation didn’t match the standard iPhone screen was when I typed in names. The iPhone keyboard appeared in the simulation, but I would have had to click with the mouse pointer on each letter in order to show the big letter that appears beside the tapped key. This would have been much too slow, so I just typed on the computer keyboard, which accomplished the job much faster, but without the usual visual display.

I decided to lay the two pages of the script out side by side to avoid the paper handling problem. It was still challenging to go back and forth between the screen and the script, and I lost my place a couple of times and had to do some improvising. The result was bad enough in one six-second interval that I decided to edit the audio track, which I’ll tell about below. I may do more editing later. The method I used for script page display wouldn’t work for anything longer than what I recorded. Maybe I could use a page turner the way pianists do.

Despite the less-than-perfect delivery and the deviation from the script in places, I went ahead and posted the demo as recorded, copying the javascript code I had used previously to play the OnScreen Particle Physics QuickTime demo. One place where my voice trailed off while I obviously searched for what I wanted to say seemed worse and worse the more I thought of it (played it, actually). I wasn’t sure how to edit the audio part of the mov file, but I knew there had to be a way to replace the flawed section. I had Audacity, the free audio recording and editing software distributed under the GNU General Public License, on my hard drive, so I thought I’d give it a try. Audacity imported the mov file via the Open command. I was able to locate the problematic section without any trouble and see that it was six seconds long.

Now what? I had to record a replacement for the bad section. I considered doing it with Audacity, but for some reason I don’t recall now I didn’t succeed immediately, so I decided to use QuickTime Player (Pro) as my recording software. Recording with QuickTime Player proved easy once I realized I had to set the input source as the Blue Snowflake microphone via the Preferences panel, just as with Garage Band. I recorded what I thought was a major improvement both in wording and diction. I then opened the file with Audacity and located the beginning of the substitute sentence. Since it was spoken without hesitation or searching for words, it took a considerably shorter time than the original one had. In order to keep the rest of the audio in synch with the video, I just selected six seconds from the new recording, which included a good bit of silence at the end. I then went to the old mov file audio track, which still had the undesirable six seconds selected, and did a paste. Would it combine the two, insert the new audio before the old, or replace the original as one would expect? It replaced the original. I could now play right through the edited section without hearing any obvious “splicing” effects. I did regret not having given a little silence at the beginning of the new segment, but the result was well within the Guy Kawasaki “Don’t worry, be crappy” standard. I have a feeling anyone that knows there was an edit done somewhere will be able to pick out where it occurred, but it is definitely an improvement over the original.

I still didn’t have the new audio inserted into the video. A straight save from Audacity would only give me an Audacity project file rather than a mov file with a video track, so I did an export to AIFF, an Apple audio format I knew QuickTime could handle. It took a little bit of searching through the QuickTime Player Help, but I found the procedure for adding a soundtrack to a mov file. I opened the new AIFF file I’d exported from Audacity and chose Edit->Select All, then Edit->Copy. Then I opened the mov file with the original sound track and selected Edit->Add to Movie. I played through the “bad” spot and discovered I had just added a second track, so that both versions played in the six-second interval I wanted to change. No big surprise, but I had thought it might just replace the soundtrack. Revert. Then I rediscovered that Window->Show Movie Properties revealed the video and audio tracks of the movie. I selected the audio track and deleted it. Then I repeated the procedure for adding the new sound track and ended up with what I was after. I then replaced the online mov file with the newly edited one. The next edit will be much easier. One of the reasons for writing this is so that I’ll have it for future reference.

So, is a something-less-than-professional, hand-rolled video better than nothing? I have no doubt that it is. There really is no easy way to convey the app’s usage with text and still images. I plan to improve on this first video effort; and, as I await Apple’s approval, I may be moved to do the whole thing over, but I feel it is an asset already. You can see and hear the results here.

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OnScreen Pitch Count: An iPhone App Preview

August 5th, 2009

I’ve been explaining the infrequency of my postings here as due to the time I’ve spent working on an iPhone “app.” Now that it’s about to be submitted to the iTunes App Store for inclusion on that exclusive online site for selling (or even giving away) iPhone apps, it seems I should give my devoted readers a preview of the app: OnScreen Pitch Count, the first iPhone app from OnScreen Science, Inc.

Pitch Count? “How could you take that long to make a pitch counter?” you may be thinking (and perhaps “How is it better than the mechanical clicker kind you can buy at the hardware store?”). Hopefully a description xanax of what the app can do will answer both those questions.

The screenshot below shows the main display and the buttons one taps to record pitch results. Incidentally, I considered naming the app OnScreen Pitch Results since it more accurately describes what the app keeps track of, but that name is two characters longer than allowed before being truncated in the App Store listings, so I’m going with Pitch Count, which may be better anyway. The name of the current pitcher is displayed at the top. This example is from a moment in this year’s MLB All Star game.

The buttons in the lower green area are the ones that record each pitch result. One of my first tasks was to determine just what I wanted to keep track of. I referred to my own experience as a Little League coach and also as an interested baseball fan. I rejected the level of detail that would include pitch location and pitch type (curve ball, fast ball, etc.) as being more than anyone but a pitching coach or scout would probably want or be able to handle, not even considering the difficulty in coming up with a user-friendly way of recording that much information for each pitch.

basic
Using a basic knowledge of baseball and some trial and error, I came up with the buttons that are displayed above. In keeping track of strikes thrown we need not only to record pitches that add to the strike total in a given at bat but also the pitches that result in foul balls after two strikes have already been recorded or that result in balls being put into play, leading either to an out being recorded or to the batter reaching base. A great deal of thought and experiment went into choosing the size and placement of the buttons, which I have (Lisinopril) found to be easy to use in the actual flow of a game.

The bottom two rows of buttons are for recording pitches not put into play: balls and the three kinds of strikes. The Walk and Strikeout buttons are not enabled until four balls or three strikes have been registered. I found from experience that putting in the extra step of recording a walk or strikeout reduced the chance of error and made the situation that much clearer. The Undo button can be tapped to undo the results of as many as two pitches, for example for changing a ball into a called strike after a hasty tap made before the umpire had spoken. It can also, of course, be used to cancel an accidental tap of any button. When three strikes have been recorded, the Strikeout button is highlighted to indicate the next step, and all other ball and strike buttons are disabled until the strikeout is recorded or the strike call is undone. At any time, only the buttons that have meaning are enabled. For example, if there are no runners on base, the Basepath Out and Run buttons are disabled. At important steps such as recording the third out, the next button to be tapped is indicated by highlighting (as mentioned previously for recording a strikeout).

Above the two lower rows of buttons are those relevant to balls put into play and possible results with runners on base. As currently programmed, hits and errors are recorded but without the specific type of hit (single etc.). The Out button is tapped whenever a ball hit by the batter results in the batter being put out before reaching base or in a baserunner being forced out. A basepath out is recorded when a runner is put out not as the result of a hit ball, say caught stealing. In the case of a double play, both an out and a basepath out are recorded. This system of buttons keeps the hits, errors, outs, and current baserunners straight. The Other OB button is used to record batters reaching after being hit by a pitch and so on. It even has the option of the batter reaching first base after a dropped third strike, properly recording the strikeout while removing the out.

The middle yellow section above shows the current situation in the inning: outs, runners on base, and the ball and strike count on the hitter. The cumulative game totals of balls and strikes (including balls put in play etc.) for the current pitcher are shown above that section. A tap of the Details button brings up the cumulative game totals for pitch results, runs allowed, baserunners, etc. for the current pitcher, as shown in the screen shot below.

review

The pitcher whose results are shown above pitched only one inning as closer, but the same totals for every pitcher in the game can be brought up for inspection by a tap of the Review button followed by a scroll and a tap to select the pitcher from the list of those recorded (see below). All pitchers appearing in the game for either team can be recorded. Or, a single pitcher appearing at any point in the game can be followed alone, depending on the user’s interest. All of the data recorded in a given game is saved on the iPhone or iPod Touch and can be reviewed at any time with prednisone the OnScreen Pitch Count app.

list

When I started to work on this project there were no competing apps that I was aware of, but since then a few have appeared. OnScreen Pitch Count lies in between some that seem to be really barebones counters of balls and strikes (with limitations on the number of pitchers) and much more detailed “pitching scout” type apps that record more data but are aimed at tracking individual pitchers over time. I think OnScreen Pitch Count should find  a comfortable place in this niche of pitch recording apps. I’m pretty confident it can more than hold its own in usability and usefulness. As far as I’ve been able to tell from scanning app descriptions, OnScreen Pitch Count is the only app that properly charges runs to the pitcher that allowed the scoring runner to reach base even when the run scored after a relief pitcher had come into the game.

Of course, interrupting the pitch-recording to answer the iPhone or to play a game between innings has no effect on OnScreen Pitch Count, and it will resume right where it left off whenever it’s pressed into service again. This happens automatically for pauses of up to an hour, but you can resume any unfinished game at any time, whether after a long rain delay or after you’ve paused a game tape for days.

How much will it cost? I’m leaning toward $2.99. It would be worth a lot more than that to some people, but the way mass appeal apps have been forced to fight for attention on the App Store has led to popular games being sold for 99¢. OnScreen Pitch Count is not competing in the popular game market, but the depression in game prices has led to iPhone users’ expecting very low prices on anything they buy.

I should mention that I found in my testing of OnScreen Pitch Count, watching both local softball games and televised major league games, that the spectator experience was enhanced by following with such close attention and having so much information literally at my fingertips. I would have loved to have had the information when I was coaching Little League. It was a lot of work to program OnScreen Pitch Count, though the development tools Apple supplies are excellent. Further improvements and my next app (I have an idea!) will be easier, assuming I get on with it before I forget what I’ve learned.

In a day or two after I post this I should have more information about OnScreen Pitch Count up at this link: http://nondummies.com. I plan to have a video demonstration.

UPDATE: See also “OnScreen Pitch Count Now On Sale on iTunes App Store!”, “IPhone App Updates and Experiences”, and “OnScreen Pitch Count 1.3 Is Now on the iTunes App Store”.

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Sudden Death for Thirty Classmates

July 20th, 2009

Thirty of my high school classmates wiped out in a few seconds! Did disaster strike a class reunion? No, in truth they have been dying one by one over the years, while I was unaware of it, just as I was unaware of any details of cialis their lives. But reading the list of the names of the deceased, as I did recently, was like reading in the paper that they had all been mowed down at the same time, and I was shaken.

This experience has made me realize how my life, divorced from contact with anyone from that time in my past, has been unrealistic in a certain way, shielded from the strongest material evidence of mortality, the numerous deaths of those my own age with whom I shared the rather unhappy years of my adolescence. Suicide and heart attacks and causes unknown to me—accident? AIDS? cancer?—have brought them down. The total represents roughly ten percent of our class, which seems reasonable, though the list is probably incomplete. Of the thirty dead, twenty-two ambien were male.

Some of the names on the list I merely recognize as belonging to a classmate but associate with no face or personality. A couple of names are even below that level of recognition. A few names evoke phantoms I can almost but not quite make out clearly. Some names are attached to persons or events that have survived in my memory. Here are some I remember, without mentioning names.

The girl and boy whom I and the rest of the class gathered around to watch dance the “dirty bop” at the seventh grade Christmas party—they’re both dead. That girl whose ass caught my attention with such curious force (as I watched her walk out of the room one time in the seventh grade) that the event seems to have marked the beginning of a new phase in my life, as if some dormant primate instinct came to life at that moment—she’s not moving now, or ever again. The senior football player, whom I saw brutally put a sophomore player in his place (I picked a tooth up off the ground)—he’s no longer commanding respect on this Earth. The catcher that threw me out at third base in “Show Me Where It Hurts: Memory Illuminates a Few Moments of My Baseball Career” is gone as well. Our exuberant male cheer leader—silent now as old Marley. Dead also is the boy I envied as he related how a neighbor kid’s older sister had called him into her bedroom for an initiation I could only dream of.

My friend with the Ford convertible, one of only a couple of boys with whom I could talk about books, God, life, and death, now knows nothing—or perhaps everything—about what we pondered then. My fellow unexpected National Merit Finalist—he’s been dead some twenty years. A girl xanax whom I imagined to have suffered, as one deemed so unattractive must, feels neither suffering nor joy anymore in this life. A boy that later served voluntarily in Vietnam and survived the war, now rests in endless peace. Another who went to West Point (and Vietnam too?)—also dead. An odd fellow I really didn’t like, who once in the ninth grade invited me to meet him after school for a “friendly fight,” is now among those I’ll never meet again in this life. How could that boy I knew as such a lively, smiling kid in junior high, before he slipped into the background for me, have come to such a static, stolid end? The boy I resembled superficially, whose name a friend would tease me with, owes any current resemblance to the embalmer.

Also on the list of the dead is a guy with whom I shared a hair-raising (for me) ride home from an out-of-town football game as he drove at high speed on the city streets; we stopped to retrieve beer from the back of a building, the site where he had earlier in the evening used the full beer cans as missiles in a battle with someone encountered on the way to the game. Had he tried to escape there, only to find himself cornered? Or had he and a different passenger been the pursuers? I never understood what had happened. The chance for him to clarify has passed away with his existence.

I’ve written this piece to convey the shock that I experienced on learning of all these deaths at once and then the contemplation I fell into about this new knowledge. I remembered some of the dead and have presented a few images of them, just to cast the light of memory on a moment or two of their lives. The moments I remember are by the nature of memory—mine anyway—ones that stand out because of something out of the ordinary in my experience, and thus they are not at all of the sort to give a full and undistorted picture of the person. Should any of my surviving classmates read this (and I know at least one will), I request you not to ask me about the identity of any of the people in these memories. Read the names and see what images your own memory pulls up. As far as relevance to the lives of those dead classmates goes, I could have made up my memories. To me these memories made the people real again, though, and let me experience more intensely the knowledge that they have left this world forever, trailblazers for the rest of us in the class, whose names will all surely join theirs on the list of the departed within the next three decades.

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Some Google Search Examples to Start Off July

July 6th, 2009

“I’m shooting for one entry a week.” That’s what I stated when I first put this blog on the internet. The past couple of months I have fallen pathetically short of this. The main reason is that I have been spending time and mental energy programming an iPhone (and iPod Touch) “app.” It’s neither earth-shaking nor a potential fortune-maker, but I think it will be useful to baseball coaches (and the parents of pitchers) at all levels and to fans who might like to keep better track of how a pitcher is doing than they can from the statistics typically displayed during a game. The app is a pitch counter that allows one to record, not just balls and strikes, but also the kinds of strike (swinging, called, foul, or ball hit in fair territory), as well as the number of strikeouts (and what kind of strike the third one was), base runners (and how they reached base), runs allowed, batters faced, outs recorded, and of course total pitches thrown; all for any number of pitchers in a game. I’ll have more to say about it later when it’s finished. Anyone interested in being notified when it’s done should send me an email (address in upper right).

In lieu of writing one of my usual long posts, I’m going to share with you a few more of the Google search strings that have led people to this tiny spot in the great blogoverse. They will illustrate comical misdirections, obvious intention to come here, and ambiguous intention; sometimes giving me a glimpse into how the blog is perceived. I enjoy seeing them.

Even more so than before, the people coming here for advice on how to get their Macs to run at a lower temperature greatly outnumber all others combined. I’m just happy that I finally have a solution for most of these frustrated seekers of relief, as I related in “What a Relief! MacBook Pro Overheating Problem Cured—Really” and “Too Good to Be True? My MacBook Pro: First Cool, Now Quiet.”

As an example of a mistaken visit, I’m pretty sure the person that searched Google for “pulled pork lowell ma delivery” was a Lowell, Massachusetts, resident who wanted barbecue brought to his or her door. Yet Google, a word matcher without the ability to judge intent, just noticed that I had recorded buying a pulled pork sandwich at a Lowell Riptide pro softball game where I had also noted a peculiarity in a pitcher’s delivery, and thus suggested this blog as a possible destination; which suggestion was, surprisingly enough, taken.

The writeup of that softball game (An Evening in Lowell: Mixing in a Changeup) also brought to this blog someone looking for “jocelyn forest left power line.” Not remembering who Jocelyn Forest was, I at first drew a total blank on the meaning of the phrase. I had to do the Google search myself to solve the mystery. Google put the Lowell Riptide game post at the top with:

‘On-Screen Scientist » National Pro Fastpitch Jul 30, 2008… effort to learn how to coach softball pitching, Jocelyn Forest, the Riptide pitcher, instead of landing with her stride foot on the “power line” … always landed well to the left of it—yet another example of someone …’

So the match was a good one, and it had been a technical comment on that particular pitcher’s delivery that had stuck in someone’s mind. Had it been Ms. Forest herself, worrying much later that she might need to change her pitching form a little if a casual observer was making comments about it?

The story of the dying and death of our guinea pig named Chestnut (Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig) continues to bring a few people here every week. Some are looking for information on pet euthanasia or guinea pig health, but a few must have somehow learned of the specific story, as witness their searches for “chestnut the guinea pig” and (probably) “guinea pigs last days.”

It’s hard to guess what the searcher for “ginipig war pitchures” had in mind; really hard, unless he or she remembered having read both the story of Chestnut and another of my posts called “Souvenirs of the Pacific War” and just wanted to find the way back here to the blog. I give Google a good deal of credit for coming back with “Did you mean: guinea pig war pictures?” That searcher did come here or I wouldn’t know about it. Still I have trouble reconciling the spelling in that search string with the act of reading either of those two rather long pieces. Maybe the searcher meant “New Guinea” instead of “ginipig” (plausible) and had no inkling of this blog’s existence.

Some Google searches seem to be clearly aimed at a particular post of mine. “Dante’s Heavenly Vision and the Physics of the Proton” is almost certainly what the people looking for “protons god,” “holy trinity hydrogen atom,” “dante paradisio dark matter,” and “dante’s quantum physics” had in mind. On the other hand, a Presbyterian minister came to it after some sort of search on the Trinity and (perhaps) physics without prior knowledge of it. I know this because she emailed me to ask permission to quote from it in a Trinity Sunday sermon she was preparing. I’m still hoping to read the sermon.

There’s no doubt what the string “on screen scientist perfect italian woman” was meant to find, as there is a post archived here called “The Perfect Italian Woman.” However, “dna of italian women” is a puzzle to me, even though I can see how Google might suggest this blog, given the DNA software I sell, in addition to the presence of the post about my Italian experience previously mentioned. If the searcher for “italian woman are not good looking” was hoping to find confirmation here for his mistaken idea, he was disappointed. However, the search string “the perfect american woman” is actually pretty good, even if the searcher probably didn’t tarry here long enough to read the post and see that. I won’t rule out the possibility that it was a deliberate search for the Italian Woman post by someone who had already read it and just got mixed up on the name.

I can’t deny that it’s gratifying to see that a few people have sought this blog out using the phrase “on screen scientist” explicitly. Whether they were returning or had somehow heard the name from someone else, I’ll never know. Those that mention the name seem mainly to be interested in questions of science and religion. For example, I have noted searches for “theist on screen scientist,” “on screen scientist moral non religious,” “on screen scientist god no bible,” and “on screen scientist recognize god.” I’m a little surprised that I’ve come across to some as being irreligious or rejecting the Bible, because I wouldn’t characterize myself that way, though I am certainly not a Biblical literalist, and I would have some difficulty in saying exactly how my belief in God translates into Christian terms. Finally, I can’t imagine where the deluded searcher for “famous on screen scientist” got his or her information. If there were another one out there, and famous to boot, wouldn’t I know about it?

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Show Me Where It Hurts: Memory Illuminates a Few Moments of My Baseball Career

June 9th, 2009

This is going to be another brief example of how the survival of ancient memories depends, not on the real significance of the remembered events, but on the intensity of the feelings associated with them at the time they took place, a subject I’ve touched on before (Something on Memories). I was fourteen years old on that evening of which some small portions have stuck in my mind. Few, few are the moments that come to memory from that far back.

The occasion was a baseball game. I was on a Pony League team, which in my Texas town near Dallas was the step above Little League, played on a bigger field, but one which I believe was still smaller than a full-sized one. Despite my having come to love baseball (listening to the 1952 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers was the turning point at age ten) a few years before, I had never played in an organized league before the age of thirteen, not having lived any place that had organized youth baseball until I arrived in my new town for the seventh grade. Baseball was a big sport in this town, the Little League all-star team having made it to the State tournament the summer before I arrived to start school in the fall.

Before then, I had done my best to acquire baseball skills without the benefit of organized play or coaching, most of the time without the benefit of a partner to play catch with. I was not that bad at fielding and catching. My arm was weak though, and I had never batted against fast pitching. My hitting skill level was low, and my confidence in it was even lower. In truth, I had been one of those kids that hoped for a walk whenever I was at the plate in a game important enough to have an umpire, such as the sixth versus fifth grade softball game with a teacher umpiring. Yes, I can remember a painful called third strike I took in a crucial situation!

Despite being conscious of my below-average baseball skills, a condition which I still hoped was temporary, I was eager to play at last on a real team, so I had signed up at the first opportunity and had gone to the tryouts, which were conducted on a real field under the lights and open to the public. I don’t remember much about the tryout beyond being nervous, dreading to hear my name called, and then getting ready to field ground balls from one of the league officials, as all the coaches waited to judge my performance. I recall no details of the tryout, just the feeling that went with the knowledge that I had done poorly, worse than I had hoped, and being relieved it was over.

In addition to making the jump to a high-level baseball culture, I had experienced substantial culture shock in this new town and school due to the advanced boy-girl relationships compared to what had known before. There were lots of couples going steady. They danced to “cat music” (more on that some other time). I was not part of this social scene and had slipped into a low status slot, which I was not accustomed to, having the previous year been, in a small school, very popular with the boys and girls alike. I was really quite intimidated by the social scene, and my self-confidence had been battered.

But in that spring of my first year in the new town, I recall that my mere trying out for baseball had evidently impressed one of the fairly high-status girls, who was a baseball enthusiast (perhaps a bit of a baseball groupie). She had approached me with a smile and a glowing face saying she’d heard (I think) that I was playing baseball. Rather than accepting this as a good icebreaker, I had evaded the subject, though I can’t recall the awkward details of how. I felt ashamed of how poorly I had done, and I think I was afraid that she had only heard I had tried out, without getting a performance report, so that it would be better for her not to view me as a “real” baseball player, especially since she valued baseball so highly. I was realizing just how far I was behind the good players in my new league. But for all I know—it would not be surprising—she had been in the stands during the tryouts. Perhaps just being on a team (like playing in a rock band for some) was enough to give me prestige in her eyes. Or maybe she had been wishing for a way to approach me before. Maybe she just relished any chance to talk about her favorite subject. I’ll never know. Though I can picture very well how she looked those many years ago, I can’t recall her name. I do feel a certain tenderness toward her now, though; and retrospective gratitude.

When I started writing this piece I thought that the remembered events I was going to relate had occurred in my first year in Pony League, but on reflection I feel sure they were in the second year. That’s the strong feeling I got from picturing the catcher on my team on the night in question and then remembering who the catcher was on my first team. Catchers are central to the game, so I guess it’s not surprising I can remember them.

Speaking of memories, I might as well relate another that just popped up. It was during an intra-squad game of some sort on that first team, so that half our team was playing the other half. I had just come to the plate to face one of my teammates, a pitcher from the previous year’s all-star team. The catcher was into the game and said to the pitcher the same thing he would have said when an opposing batter came to the plate in a real game: “OK, this guy can’t hit!” Then he must have realized just how true that statement was in my case, and that I might be stung by those words, so he quickly added “Just doubles, triples…” Of course, I understood what had gone on in his mind, and it would have been better for my ego for him to have treated me like anyone else, since the change revealed just how lowly he estimated my batting prowess. It was an attempt at kindness that made things worse, leading me to mutter something in protest of the supposed compliment to show I knew better. Still, I had to appreciate the tough thirteen-year-old catcher’s consideration for my feelings, and I haven’t forgotten it. Thanks, Gary.

After I had been in town for a while and gotten to know more neighborhood kids, I started playing baseball with some of them in a vacant lot practically every day. I enjoyed that a lot more than the organized baseball. I got plenty of batting practice in those games, but our rule was not to throw full speed. We could only try to get people out with pitch location. Other than that it was like batting practice. I’m sure my batting eye and swing improved over time. I was comfortable hitting in those pickup games. Of course a real game with fast pitching and game pressure was something else.

Anyway, the Pony League game I’m going to talk about was one of those in which the other team only had eight players show up. As a coach, I’ve always hated those games and tried to make sure the game just got rescheduled before teams showed up at the field. That only works for anticipated absences though. Once the players, coaches, and umpires have arrived at the field, possibly for a night game which requires a lot of electricity for the lighting, it’s hard to just leave and reschedule. No, if one team is short and the other has more than it needs to field nine, the frequent solution is for the team with a surplus to lend a player to the other team for the night. On this night, I was that player. As a coach, I made it a point not to choose the worst player on the team as the automatic substitute for the other team, but that’s not the way it usually goes.

On this night long ago I was certainly being offered as a substitute because I was deemed by my coach (whose name and face even are lost to me, though I can remember those of my first-year coach) as the worst on our team. It was embarrassing, of course, to have that distinction, even though I imagine I was asked to volunteer and probably thanked for agreeing to. I was performing a service and I would definitely get to play the whole game this way. I can’t remember any details about the team switch; just the fact that it happened and that it was embarrassing. Nor can I remember anything about the game until the first time I came to bat.

So here I was on this night facing a pitcher named Bud, who was wearing the same uniform as I. I can’t be sure if I only remember one pitch or if it was in fact the first pitch I was thrown (as it seems) which I lined into right field for a clean single. I do remember it was very satisfying to be standing at first base, especially under the circumstances. I remember the coach of my temporary team saying “He wasn’t supposed to do that, was he?” to my regular coach.

The next thing that I remember distinctly is being on third base after that hit. I can’t recall the exact details of how I got from first to third base: some forgotten sequence of events drawn from the possibilities of hit, walk, error, and wild pitch. I just remember being on third when the batter took ball four to bring me home: yet another contribution I was about to make to this my adopted team-for-the-night.

As I proceed in my trot toward the plate, the catcher (my “real” team’s catcher) evidently decides to start playing psychological games with me. Or is he just having a little fun with a teammate? But he looks serious and irritated, as though I were rubbing it in that I was helping the other team. It’s not my fault. I’m just playing the game! He’s glaring at me and faking throws to third base. What’s the point of that?

Soon, but not soon enough to escape the terrible destiny Fate had prepared for me, I realized my situation. The bases had not been loaded! I could not walk home. The throw was made to the third baseman. I was tagged out. Shame and ignominy fell on me like heavy shrouds! The Earth did not open up to let me escape through an underground passageway, so I must have trotted to the dugout, but I have no memory of anything beyond the realization of my mistake, not of the tag nor of who was playing third. Did anyone on either team or any coach say anything to me? Did I bat again that night? Did I make any plays in the field? Who won the game? All of these details have been wiped clean from my memory.

All that remains is the humiliation of being the player given to the other team, the brief glow of satisfaction from my clean hit, and the anguish of comprehending my boneheaded mistake. Was there no third base coach? I suppose not. Did anyone suspect that I had deliberately made an out to help my real team? I would probably have preferred that to the felt certainty that everyone had clearly seen my mistake, one that a “real” player would never have made, so that in the commission of it I had thereby amply justified my selection as the giveaway player, my blunder having effaced that beautiful single. I don’t remember anything about the rest of the season, before or after that game. Just those few moments have survived. Such is the way of memory.

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Too Good to Be True? My MacBook Pro: First Cool, Now Quiet

May 15th, 2009

This will be a brief coda to a couple of recent posts in which I related how I finally solved an ever-worsening (OS changes?) problem of overheating on my first generation MacBook Pro. See “What a Relief! MacBook Pro Overheating Problem Cured—Really” and “Can’t Boil Water With Vista on My MacBook Pro Anymore” for the details. The solution turned out to be undervolting—setting cpu operating voltages at values (determined by experiment) below the overly conservative ones set at the factory. A great little ambien piece of software called CoolBook enables one to do that on the Mac. A similar program (RMclock) is available for Windows.

I can report that I have encountered neither high temperatures nor computer instability since adjusting voltages lower with CoolBook. After a couple of weeks of stress-free lower temperatures, I realized that the previously necessary evil of the constant droning of the MacBook Pro’s cooling fans was no longer necessary. In my earlier efforts to control temperature I had installed a System Preferences utility called Fan Control. This allowed me to set the minimum temperature at which the fan speed would start ramping up and the rate at which it would increase with temperature. This was not a solution for sustained operation at the highest default voltage used when the cpu was running at maximum speed, but I think it did keep things cooler than what Apple’s normal fan speed algorithm did.

It may seem funny that Apple would have such high operating voltages coupled with such puny fan cooling; but I think we have reason to believe that Steve Jobs hates fan noise (I’m with you there, Steve), perhaps beyond reason. I remember buying a third-party fan that sat on top of my first Mac, the mighty one-megabyte-RAM Macintosh Plus. Word was that it was needed to prevent premature death of the convectively cooled Mac. I can imagine Steve telling the engineers to get rid of that fan noise on the MacBook Pro, or else.

The fans on my machine, even though one of them was relatively new, having been replaced under AppleCare when my original hard drive croaked (Fatal But Survivable: A Hard Drive Transplant Story), seemed to have gotten noisier over time, from overuse I suppose, so they were annoying me more. Why not get rid of Fan Control? Removing it from the System Preferences Panel wasn’t hard (Ctrl-click and make selection), but this merely put the fan speed versus temperature profile out of my control, while leaving the last one set by Fan Control in effect. I saw one unfortunate on MacUpdate warning people not to install Fan Control because it permanently changes the fan settings. This is fortunately not true, but the folks that make Fan Control should probably do a better job of letting people zithromax know how to completely uninstall it. Here is the rest of the procedure: remove the following files and folders (both on your start disk)— /Library/StartupItems/FanControlDaemon and /Library/PreferencePanes/Fan Control.prefPane.

In order to have a way of monitoring temperature and fan speed I went back to running smcFanControl, a program that only allows one to set the minimum fan speed. I used it to set the minimum speed back to 1000 rpm, down from the Fan Control minimum of 1600 rpm I’d been enduring. This is really quiet!

Having smcControl running enables me to step in to raise the fan speed if necessary. Shades of the past: yesterday I was reinstalling the iPhone SDK as part of a long battle (probably not to be related here) to be able to test my in-development iPhone app on an iPod Touch, when I noticed the smcFanControl temperature reading said 90° C, while the fans were still whirring away at less than 2000 rpm. I used smcFanControl to raise the minimum speed much higher manually, which had the desired result. When that taxing installation procedure was over, I set the fan antabuse speed back to 1000 rpm.

Now that I finally have what I thought I was getting modafinil when I bought the MacBook Pro, this should be the last I’ll have to say on the subject of temperature control and fan noise. Peace.

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Can’t Boil Water With Vista on My MacBook Pro Anymore

May 5th, 2009

It was a little over a year ago that I got Windows Vista up and running on my first-generation MacBook Pro by means of Apple’s Boot Camp, only to discover that it ran hot—so hot that it seemed pretty worthless. I believe that post (Vista on My MacBook Pro Is Hot—Boiling Hot!) has brought this blog more visitors than any other, which I count as solid evidence that many other Mac users have encountered the same problem and have gone searching on Google for a solution.

Unfortunately, all I could offer my fellow sufferers was the knowledge that they were not alone, but now I have a solution for them, based on the same “undervolting” technique I finally discovered to solve the even greater overheating problem I had encountered running under Mac OS 10.5.6, where temperatures would climb over 115° C and cause the computer to shut down unless I exited certain programs (rendered useless) or web sites in time.

I recently wrote What a Relief! MacBook Pro Overheating Problem Cured—Really, in which I told of finding a program called CoolBook to be the answer to my overheating problems. The basic idea behind the solution is that the computer’s factory-default voltages, which essentially determine the operating temperature, are for the different cpu clock frequencies substantially higher than they need to be. CoolBook enables one to reset these voltages to lower values, thus gaining much cooler operating temperatures, most importantly for the highest frequency, where sustained heavy-duty computing can lead to overheating. Undervolting with the help of CoolBook really gave me back the full use of my MacBook Pro. I refer anyone having similar problems to that recent post. The procedure for finding the lower voltages your particular computer can live with involves a fairly lengthy trial and error period, but it only needs to be done once.

I mainly wanted Vista on my Mac in order to test the Vista-compatibility of the Windows versions of my science education programs, OnScreen Particle Physics and OnScreen DNA. Having done that, and not having a new version to test, I could easily live without Vista; and the overheating problems encountered under 10.5.6 were much more serious for me. Nonetheless, it was an ongoing irritation in the back of my mind that Apple’s promise of being able to run Windows with Boot Camp was really a false one so long as the temperature went up so high under normal use. Thus it was natural to ask if I could apply the same undervolting procedure under Vista to eliminate the heating problem there as well.

Of course, CoolBook was no help for running Vista, since it is a Mac program, but a Google search for undervolting led me to a Windows solution. If you Google with the search string “undervolting guide,” you will find The Undervolting Guide, which tells you everything you need to know to undervolt under Windows. There is a free downloadable program called RMclock that allows you to reset the default voltages, just as CoolBook does for the Mac. The guide is written under the assumption that you have no previous information about temperature or the lower voltage limits at which your computer can operate stably. It leads you through a procedure similar to what I outlined in my post on Mac undervolting. Since I had already gone through this under Mac OS X and couldn’t see any reason why the lower-limit voltages would depend on the operating system, I assumed my results would still hold under Vista. The whole procedure seems a lot easier on the Mac side, so I would recommend anyone trying to cool down Vista on a Mac to determine lower-limit voltages under the Mac OS. Be sure to write down the lower-limit voltages you have found before booting into Windows to set voltages there.

I went directly to the RMclock instructions in the guide, skipping the parts dealing with stressing the computer at different voltages. You need to follow the RMclock instructions closely, as the procedure is considerably more complicated than what it is for CoolBook, there being several steps to go through before you reach the point of actually setting voltages. Things look quite a bit different too. Instead of showing the frequencies in physical units of MHz, RMclock shows “multipliers,” which are presumably the factors by which some reference frequency (unspecified) is multiplied to obtain the actual frequency. I just made the reasonable assumption that the maximum multiplier corresponded to the maximum frequency (2.004 GHz in my case) and set the voltage to what I had previously determined was sufficient under Mac OS X for my MacBook Pro. For the other multipliers I scaled accordingly, but chose voltages on the conservative side, i.e, a little higher, just to be safe. For keeping the maximum temperature down, it’s really only the top frequency voltage setting that matters much anyway. Lowering the other voltages below that used for the highest frequency just gives you a lower average temperature and longer battery life.

Did it work? Yes, I can run the most complex simulations of OnScreen DNA at a “cool” 80° C, instead of the previous 100° C. Undervolting has made it comfortable for me to run Vista on my MacBook Pro, so I don’t feel cheated anymore. Maybe I’ll actually use Vista for something other than testing my software now.

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