I turned 30 today. And as you can tell, I've celebrated the best way I know how: by blogging up a storm (by my standards, at least.) Much more to come over the next few days.

The Atlantic Monthly has not yet lost quality in the wake of Michael Kelly's resignation and subsequent death. Two outstanding pieces from this month's issue are available online.
First, check out James Fallows' assessment of Rupert Murdoch and his business empire. While the piece is long and meanders a bit, it is a very sober assessment of the scope and ramifications of the Murdoch phenomenon:

The political component in Murdoch's media operation is larger than people inside the company admit—and perhaps larger than they believe. But it is smaller than most people who dread Murdoch's influence assume. He is principally a businessman, of conventional business-conservative views, who vents those views when possible but not when they interfere with any important corporate goal....The main political significance of a Murdoch era is that more of the press will become more openly partisan than it has been in many years.

(For a shorter profile with a similar perspective, check out this old Slate piece.)
In the same issue, Caitlin Flanagan has a classic appreciation of housewives and Erma Bombeck, which is worth reading along with her semi-paean to 50s-style marriages from several months ago.

I finally saw "The Matrix Reloaded" today, and got a laugh that was certainly not intended by the filmmakers.
The scene was where Neo, Morpheus and assorted subordinates are discussing how they will shut off power to the building that houses the "Source" so Neo can go meet the "Architect" (as opposed to the "General Contractor" or the "Interior Designer"):
SOMEBODY: "We'll have to shut off power to the whole block!"
MORPHEUS: "T-w-e-n-t-y s-e-v-e-n blocks."
SOMEBODY ELSE: "Shutting off power to twenty-seven blocks? That's impossible!"
ME: "No, it isn't! Just ask someone in Ohio to throw a switch and you'll have all the powerlessness you could ask for!"

Yesterday, I had Shabbat lunch with the rabbi of my synagogue, who recently received his Ph.D in English Literature from Columbia (on the work of James Joyce). Reflecting on the experience, he noted that while the quality of our political discourse has never seemed shallower (I don't agree, but it is a common perception), other areas such as the study of literature (not exactly a news-flash; click here and here for people who regularly cover this) and the rabbinate (maybe I'll do a post soon about the latter) have been rabidly politicized as politics has spread "like a germ" (his quote) into other areas of life.
Whether the rabbi is correct about the spread of politics is worth a separate discussion, which I don't feel like getting into right now. But what is one area where the forces of reason and evidence are in the ascent, forcing the retreat of prejudice and politics? That's right - thanks to Billy Beane and friends, baseball management is shaping up. It may be time to update Earl Warren's famous quote about why he read the sports pages first; the sports pages may now provide something more than who won a game - namely, a guide to error-correcting, which is indispensable.

Earlier this week, the NYT ran a front-page article with the following headline:
"Israelis Worry about Terror, by Jews against Palestinians."
The article cited the concerns of the Israelis about the likelihood of Jewish terrorism, and the steps taken to prevent it.
Avraham Bronstein of the great Protocols blog had the reaction that I figured many pro-Israel types would: “another example of moral equivalence.” In this case, though, he and they were wrong, for the following reasons:
1) The article put the concerns in the proper context:

...Israel has not confronted a Jewish militant group of any size for nearly 20 years.
...One of the few points of agreement is that attacks by Israeli civilians against Palestinians are rare. According to B'Tselem, 32 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli civilians in the last three years. At the same time, 328 Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinians inside Israel, and 190 more in the West Bank and Gaza.

2) Yes, Jewish terrorism is vastly less prevalent, less encouraged by the larger society, and more punished after the fact than the Palestinian variety. As such, it is less representative of Israeli society than its Palestinian counterpart. But the events themselves, and the perpetrators thereof, are no less evil. And there is no reason for the media not to pay due attention to such evil where it exists. Jewish-based suggestions to the contrary are, in my opinion, merely based on the all-too-common impulse to cover up bad news.
3) Most importantly, the headline itself was, in its own way, publicity that Israel should have paid for in its struggle against Palestinian terrorism:
"Israelis Worry about Terror, by Jews against Palestinians."
Israel is worried about the prospect of Jewish terrorism, and is trying to prevent it (even arresting the father of a murdered baby).
The same day this headline appeared, the Palestinians showed that they were not nearly as worried about terrorism, nor were they making such efforts to prevent it - in fact, they celebrated it.

I’d previously written that the “road map” process seemed perfectly designed to repeat every mistake made during the Oslo process and reject every lesson to be learned from such mistakes. Others made similar arguments, most notably Charles Krauthammer.
I had also thought that terrorists might attack hotels in the U.S. where Jews were celebrating Passover. I was wrong. I prefer being wrong about things like that.
This attack was a very big deal. The Passover Massacre, aside from culminating a massive terror onslaught in the spring of 2002, was perfectly calibrated to push the most sensitive buttons of the Israeli populace. By massacring a group of Holocaust survivors celebrating the formative experience of the Jewish people (literally, per the book of Exodus), the Hamas terrorists made it clear that their war was one of extermination rather than for territorial gain. As the Israeli papers quoted from the Haggada in the wake of the attack: “In every generation, they rise up to destroy us.”
This attack was similarly calibrated: a massacre of children who had just departed the holiest site in Judaism that Jews can visit (I’m not going to get into the Temple Mount issue now).
I think it is only a matter of time before another massive assault on the terrorists begins. Hopefully, Arafat’s deportation or death will be part of it. (Some Israelis think that Powell’s request for Arafat’s help was to help prepare the diplomatic ground for such a step. Let’s hope.)

Some of you might have been too distracted by recent events in Israel and Iraq to notice the most important event of the summer: the publishing of the results of a major study by Diamond Mind Baseball testing the veracity of the radical “DIPS” theory of Voros McCracken. For those who might be unaware, McCracken’s theory is that pitchers have little if any impact on the outcome of balls put into play; whatever happens to balls put into play is attributable to the defense or luck. Most tests of McCracken’s theory have tended to support it; it has been endorsed by Bill James and made famous by Michael Lewis in Moneyball.
Well, the people at Diamond Mind did an exhaustive study of the previous 90 seasons to test McCracken’s theory. And the punch line was:

I am convinced that pitchers do influence in-play outcomes to a significant degree. There's a reason why Charlie Hough and Jamie Moyer and Phil Niekro and Tom Glavine and Bud Black have had successful careers despite mediocre strikeout rates. There's a reason why the top strikeout pitchers have also suppressed in-play hits at a good rate. Using power or control or deception or a knuckleball, pitchers can keep hitters off balance and induce more than their share of routine grounders, popups, and lazy fly balls.

Those results are noteworthy enough, but the ramifications are greater than I’ve seen discussed anywhere on the Net.
Aside from McCracken’s theory, the greatest advances in sabermetrics over the last couple of years have been in measuring defensive performance. The most noteworthy examples are the the defensive component of Bill James’ “Win Shares” and similar methods used by Baseball Prospectus.
At the heart of both of those methods are analyses of the outcomes of balls put into play against the defense. They thus were developed in partial response to the issue that Baseball Prospectus called one of the game’s “Hibert Problems” in its 2000 book – namely, how to distinguish the respective contributions of pitching and defense to run prevention. Or, as Michael Lewis writes on pp.235-236 of Moneyball:

…Voros saw someone say that no matter how much research was done, no one would be able to distinguish pitching from defense. That is, no one would be able to distinguish pitching from defense. That is, no one would ever come up with good fielding statistics or, therefore, good pitching statistics. If you don’t know how to credit the fielder for what happens after a ball gets put into play, you also, by definition, don’t know how to debit the pitcher. And, therefore, you would never be able to say with any real certainty how good any given pitcher was. Or, for that matter, any given fielder.
When Voros read that, “I thought, ‘That’s a stupid attitude. Can’t you do something?’…”

And he began the research that would culminate in his “DIPS” theory.
Here’s the problem: As noted above, the new advances in the measurement of fielding performance are based on analyses of the results of balls put in play. As such, absent McCracken’s theory, they are based on a kind of question-begging: they assume that the results of balls put into play are attributable to the fielders rather than the pitchers. If the pitchers influence the results of balls put into play, then don’t you have to take that into account? And if that’s the case, then haven’t you merely reopened the “Hibert Problem” of distinguishing pitching and defense?
McCracken’s theory had value beyond what it said about pitchers’ performance. By largely removing the influence of pitchers from the results of balls put into play, it also provided the justification for the foundation of Bill James’ and Baseball Prospectus’ methods of measuring fielding performance. But now, it seems like we have taken several steps backward. To use an example cited in the Diamond Mind study, in measuring the defensive performance of the Seattle Mariners over the last several years, don’t you have to adjust for the influence of Jamie Moyer? And again, doesn’t that merely reopen the “Hibert Problem” of distinguishing pitching from defense?
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I’m not sure what it is.
UPDATE: David Pinto supplies what I'm missing:

What Tippett is saying here is that you can predict strikeout rates pretty well just by looking at the previous season of the pitcher, but you can't predict -play batting average relative to the team well at all. That's what correlation means. Correlation goes on a scale of -1 to 1, where 1 is perfect correlation (the best at one will be the best at the other), -1 is perfect opposite correlation (the best at one will be the worst at the other) and 0 means no correlation at all; in other words, being the best at one will tell us nothing about how you do at the other. The statistican I learned from used to tell me that if he sees .5 correlation, he assumes the data is random. Seeing a .09 correlation tells me the data is very random. It's not 0, but it's very close to 0.
So, as to Dr. Manhattan's question; yes, you are missing something. The effect Tippett is showing is small, so small that DIPS is still valid. Bill James knew about this when he wrote win shares, but for the aggregate I think it works really well. We don't have to reopen the “Hibert Problem”; we just have to understand that the solution is just an approximation.

So what I was, and am, missing is a real education in statistics. Oh well...

ANOTHER UPDATE: I've just fixed my post. Sorry - my Baseball Prospectus 2000 is in storage so I couldn't double-check it. The correct term is "Hibert" problems. Those problems were a list of 23 fundamental mathematical problems propounded around the turn of the century by a mathemetician nmaed Hibert. In BP2K, Keith Woolner tried his hand at setting out a list of parallel questions, and a primary one was the distinction of pitching and defense. The piece helped inspire Voros McCracken.
A FINAL UPDATE: The name is "Hilbert," not "Hibert." Thanks to Mike Molloy for the tip.

The first warning was when my noisy fan got quieter. It slowed, then restarted before I could turn around, and then stopped. I turned around, thinking I’d have to get a new one. Then I turned back and noticed that my computer had gone dead.
Once we’d ascertained that it wasn’t just the building (I thankfully had just replaced the batteries in my Walkman), I stocked up with some items from the emergency bag our firm distributed after 9/11 and walked down the stairs. All 53 floors’ worth. Descending 53 flights of stairs in 10 minutes is not the ideal form of “first exercise in ages,” and my quads are making sure it won’t be repeated anytime soon.
After reaching ground level, I rested for a few minutes (is it raining inside? Oh, that’s just perspiration) and then started off for the Upper East Side, where my friend is the assistant rabbi of a prominent synagogue. I figured he would allow me to crash at his place if I couldn’t escape Manhattan.
Once I reached the Upper East Side, I found a synagogue congregant with a working cellphone (I will not be a Sprint customer much longer) and finally reached Mrs. Manhattan, who confirmed that the express bus lines to my neighborhood were still running. As a stop was around the corner, I walked there and waited for a bus. And waited. (The buses that came were filled beyond circus-clown capacity).
After two hours, there were six of us going to the same neighborhood who were tired of waiting. We finally got a livery cab to stop and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. So I got home a little after 10:00 PM. Not too bad, all things considered.
When I first heard about the reach of the blackout, I was convinced it was terrorism. While that doesn’t appear to be the case, it was true that the atmosphere was suffused with the spirit of 9/11 – a combination of dread and industriousness. Walking from Grand Central, I immediately saw many pedestrians volunteering to direct traffic (click here for a first-hand story). I waited on the street until after 9:30 P.M., much later than I had originally intended to wait on the darkened streets. And while there was – at least initially – dread about whether or not the blackout was an act of terrorism, there was no fear of the streets. Much different than the last big NY blackout in 1977.

I first thought this was an April Fools' Day joke that got e-mailed four months late, but it unfortunately seems to be true.
Baseball Prospectus is reporting that Pete Rose has signed an agreement providing for his reinstatement to Major League Baseball. Apparently the agreement does not provide for an admission of wrongdoing by Rose, the one thing that baseball had insisted on all along.
For the findings against Pete Rose back in 1989, check out the Dowd Report.

Bill James has written several times (most recently in the New Historical Baseball Abstract) that he believes the case against Rose is far weaker than most people believe. James' writings on the subject are unfortunately not available online. Click here for a piece criticizing James' assessments and here for a piece defending them (in the context of a review of an ESPN-produced "trial" on the question).

UPDATE: MLB has denied the report. The denial would be somewhat more convincing if MLB had any credibility, or if the spokesman didn't have a record of exceptional mendacity and incompetence (even by MLB's considerable standards).
Lee Sinins has the last word on the subject (quote comes from his e-mail newsletter):

With MLB's credibility, this statement is just as good as a confirmation of
Will's story. With their track record, MLB is on my list of at least 3
entities, of which I believe nothing from them until as the events prove
the statement to be correct. Occasionally it does happen, but until it
does, I don't believe it.
Actually, my first reaction to MLB's denial was, if Pete Rose was mentioned
in their statement, then there is the possibility that Rose doesn't even
exist. But, as recently as a day or two ago, I was watching an old episode
of Baseball Magazine on ESPN Classic (which, as an aside, is a show I'd
like to see returned to the air) and Sparky Anderson was discussing Pete
Rose's reaction to Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. So, since independent
evidence of Rose's existence exists, at least that part of MLB's statement
is believable.
I won't even insult Will Carroll by including any discussion of his
credibility in the same sentence.