Innovative Pitching Usage: Micro-Starts by Relievers

The Rays started playing around with an interesting innovation in their pitcher usage in a recent series against the Angels: They started a reliever for one inning to face the tough top of their lineup, and then they brought in their scheduled "starter" for the second inning.

The Rays are doing this again in their upcoming series against the Orioles.

I think there is a lot of traction for more of this, though it will depend on a team's rotation (e.g., if you have one like the Astros, this is probably not as helpful as for the Rays), player, player egos, and so on.

Lyrical Repetition in Pop Music

Here is a cool article about lyrical repetition (and compression possibilities) in pop music and how it's changed over the last few decades.

I of course decided to look at how Depeche Mode stacks up, and I zoomed up on them as an individual artist.

From the song and artist library they used, Depeche Mode is listed as the band from the 1990s with the least repetitive lyrics, though it does only use a subset of their songs and it listed them in the 1990s instead of the 1980s. (Naturally, the employed songs span multiple decades.)

The most lyrically repetitive Depeche Mode song is very obvious.

(Tip of the cap to Taha Yasseri and I Fucking Love Data.)

Quiz: Do You Live in a Bubble?

This quiz, regarding whether one lives in a bubble with respect to middle America, is very interesting.

I got a 9, which ends up pegging me slightly incorrectly (but only slightly) with the potential labeling that goes with the score ranges. Sensibly, the score ranges with different labels overlap. I think I should get a very low score within the next highest range. (A score of 11 is the minimum to do that.)

Note: I did not count my Oxford get-up as a "uniform", as that's definitely not what they had in mind (even though it technically is a uniform).

Note that this is talking about a bubble with respect to America, which is fair enough. Of course, the phrasing is very USA-centric. I am a citizen of the world (and California), with a good amount of international experience, but I am less experienced with the rest of the USA (especially in recent years).

(Tip of the cap to Oleg Kogan.)

This Article Made Me Itch

IFLS has published a fascinating article about a new paper in the journal Neuron concerning why scratching an itch gives temporary relief but then makes the itch worse. I wish, though, that they had used the phrase "itching question" instead of "burning question". :) Reading this article made me itch more, by the way.

"A Quantitative Phrase of Deliberate Vagueness"

I love the phrasing "a quantitative phrase of deliberate vagueness" that this very interesting article on Yasiel Puig's defection uses to describe the phrase "a number of", which is something that I find irksome when it is used as a descriptor in scholarly articles.

The sentence in which this phrase appears is the following: A story has emerged from Despaigne's affidavit, the lawsuit, and its proceedings. It spawned a five-month investigation by The Magazine that included analysis of an array of legal documents and interviews with more than 80 people: Cuban baseball players in the U.S. both retired and active, talent scouts, sports agents, former MLB and players' union executives, federal law enforcement personnel, former Cuban government officials, former Cuban and American spies, Miami lawyers who have represented and are representing alleged smugglers who were and are the targets of criminal investigations, and --- to use a quantitative phrase of deliberate vagueness --- a number of smugglers themselves, who agreed to be interviewed under conditions of anonymity motivated by obvious fears.

Additionally, the article title refers to an old baseball expression that has been used for decades to describe the often-legendary impatient while batting of many foreign-born Hispanic baseball players (especially those from the Dominican Republic). It apparently goes back at least as far as Rafael Ramirez in 1986, though baseball prospects in the Dominican Republic appear to have used it long before then. I really like the article title, as it takes an old baseball expression and then changes its meaning in an interesting way.

Epigenetics and Enhanced Brain Connectivity from Reading a Good Book

These are actually from two separate series of studies --- and the former technically is referring to a single study --- but they have in common that they're both really interesting and both with strong connections to neuroscience (which of course has tons of cool things up its sleeves).

Epigenetics sounds like science fiction, and it includes behavioral epigenetics, which refers to genetic experiences that an animal (including humans) can have based on experiences of their ancestors. (You may be interested in the wikipedia entry on epigenetics.) It is also easy to see why this is a controversial subject.

Meanwhile, it was demonstrated in a recent study that brain connectivity (in the resting state) can increase for 5 days after reading an engaging novel. The popular article to which I have linked indicates that "function" increases, but it is a leap to go from the conclusion of increasing connectivity (which one can measure, e.g., using tools from network analysis) to that of increasing function. I only looked at the paper very briefly, but from a scientific perspective I am currently much more comfortable claiming the former than the latter. Note, however, that this is very consistent with loads of anecdotal evidence and what many people have claimed about their own reading experiences for a very long time. I view it as somewhat akin to exercise and do think the strong form of the big-picture conclusion to be pretty damn likely (and the result is both sensible and intuitive), but the bar for scientific comfort naturally must be very high (and obviously is much higher than what intuitively I believe to be valid).

(Tip of the cap to Stephen Heise for neurological tips on reading a good book and to Susan Baldry Dole --- Stephen's friend on Facebook --- for posting the link to the popular article on behavioral epigenetics.)