16 November 07
Pitch By Pitch
Josh Kalk is a sabermetrics god. This past baseball season marked the widespread deployment of a measurement system (called PITCHf/x) to track location and velocity of every pitch. The motivating reason for this was to provide animations of each pitch for MLB.com’s Enhanced Gameday application, but a few baseball stat geeks discovered they could extract the underlying pitch measurement data and started to do analyses with these.
Enter Josh Kalk, who has built up a database of about 300,000 pitches from this season and has presented these graphically on the web. At left is an example of one of his plots. This graph shows the location of all the changeups thrown by Tim Lincecum of the Giants that were captured by the system. The view is from the catcher’s direction; the box in the middle is the strike zone.
Another view of these data is provided by his player cards, such as this one for Tim Lincecum. Kalk has developed an algorithm to separate different types of pitches (i.e. sliders from changeups from fastballs etc.) and these are shown plotted in different symbols on these graphs. In another set of charts he also graphs pitches for each batter, such as this chart for Red Sox slugger David Ortiz.
15 November 07
Bird-Proofing Windows
Dave Sibley has conducted an experiment to see what will keep birds from colliding with windows. It’s a simple highlighter, almost invisible on glass to humans, but apparently very visible to birds.
Lots of Swainson’s thrushes hit our windows this spring. I’m definitely going to try it.
Spill news: some grebes (Westerns and Clark’s) will be released at Half Moon Bay tomorrow, out of the way of oil. These birds don’t do well at all in captivity and are best released as soon as possible, but I’m amazed it’s THIS soon.
For the sound of a loon at Cordelia, see this (scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on the audio file).
13 November 07
Hometown Stars
Our neck of the woods is now a breeding ground for baseball stars. Dustin Pedroia of the Boston Red Sox won the AL Rookie of the Year yesterday. This wasn’t unexpected, but it’s fun because he’s a Yolo County lad: he grew up in Woodland about 10 miles north of here, and graduated from Woodland High in 2001, a couple years after we arrived in Davis.
Meanwhile, C.C. Sabathia, who pitches for the Cleveland Indians, just won the AL Cy Young award. We actually live in Solano County, just on the other side of the border with Yolo County; C.C. Sabathia grew up at the western end of Solano County in Vallejo, graduating from Vallejo High.
12 November 07
Swimming!
Went back to Cordelia this afternoon. I saw people looking in pools as I arrived. I went up and there, in the first pool I got to, were about twenty surf scoters. Swimming. Clean, washed, waterproof, and swimming. I sketched one quickly. Have you seen the grebes, I was asked. No.
Eared grebes, and horned, fluffballs in a pen in the back close to cover.
I lost it.
Lots of birds, now, pens everywhere. There are nearly 700 of them. People are starting to get really tired, but they’re not quitting… Ran into Ron and Joe who were dropping 17 birds off from Brooks Island… this was their fifth run up to Cordelia.
11 November 07
Prima Materia
There comes a time in a chocolate lover’s career when one realizes that sugar is basically an adulterant. Today I tried the Prima Materia bar from Dagoba Chocolate, makers of the previously discussed Xocolatl bar. A single block of this unsweetened 100% cacao content bar is almost too much to eat at one time.
9 November 07
(o)
Greg, doing intake on an oiled surf scoter.
It smells of oil in this room.
This was my day. During lunch I did this.
8 November 07
Bane of Rhythms
By now most Americans have realized that daylight saving time here ended last Sunday morning, a week later than what has traditionally been the date for the turnover. Not soon enough for me — I view daylight saving time as, to quote Terry Pratchett, an abomination unto Nuggan. Thankfully there is now scientific evidence to support such a view: a recent study indicates that the twice-annual time shift disrupts human circadian rhythms for many weeks after each event.
7 November 07
Arrival of New Sketchbooks
Finding the perfect sketchbook is as chimerical as finding the perfect planner: you basically need to make your own. Well, now you can: on a recommendation by John Muir Laws, I checked out Komtrak, a quaintly archaic company out of Plainview, New York, which offers completely customizable sketchbooks and notebooks (and, it must be said, planners).
The three sketchbook options I ordered arrived today. The paper options include drawing, multi-surface, arches cold press, a very fine paper for pen and ink work. You can get pastel paper, or just cut up your own and get it punched at Kinko’s or some other such place: the vinyl-covered sketchbooks can be refilled easily.
I tried a couple of the surfaces but will hope to put these books through their paces this weekend.
5 November 07
Brush Pen in the Zoo
Every time we go on a sketching outing we are always faced with the crisis of what art materials to pack. Not having to carry the materials on a week-long backpacking trip means the luxury of porting drawing implements one never ends up using. Of course I try to guess what will be most useful, but the guess is usually somewhat off.
My experiment yesterday at the zoo with the waterbrush loaded with ink was interesting — I like the technique, but the particular waterbrush I had was leaking too much ink onto my hands. I ended up using mainly a sepia Faber-Castell brush artist pen together with watercolor wash. The red pandas were simply crying out for lots of rich burnt sienna. At left is one of them being fed bamboo leaves. I also drew lots of the big cats — at right is a tiger I sketched just before we headed out.
4 November 07
Sketchcrawl XVI: Sacramento Zoo
There were about eleven of us at the Sketchcrawl though I think we added some numbers along the way (it goes like this: What, are you guys in a class? No, this is worldwide sketching day. Oh. That’s really cool. Turning to partner: I think we should go and get some paper and a pencil and start drawing. Haha, the cult’s expanding…)
Some really fine artists were among the bunch, and a good time was had by all, especially by young George who’s in line to be the next zoo docent: “That’s a giant anteater. It’s bigger than you are. Daddy, can we go on the train?”