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Moneyball & Smooth Strokes



Since they've just come out with a film version of Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, I thought it would be interesting to revisit a 2003 review I wrote comparing Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book, to Long Strokes in a Short Season, a book about swim coaching.
 

I just read three books in a row. One involved a boy wizard with a scar on his forehead. The other two were about men taking a new approach to their sports using ideas that were not new, but which had languished because they challenged the conventional wisdom. In both cases, their teams showed significant success due to the contributions of athletes who were not obviously gifted.
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Globalization: What's Not To Like?

In his Foreign Policy article Got Cheap Milk?, "The Optimist" Charles Kenny decries local, organic food and especially government subsidies to farmer's markets:

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Ford pulls to the Right

I hadn't seen the advert in which Chris the customer says he bought a Ford because they hadn't been bailed out, but TTAC has the youtube in their article Ford Takes the Gloves Off About the Bailouts:

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Visiting the Solar Decathlon in progress

The Solar Decathlon felt like a small Olympic village today as team members from Canada, New Zealand, Belgium, China and the US hustled to finish their houses by Tuesday evening. Wearing Red Wing boots, I trudged the 1.3 miles from the Smithsonian Metro station to West Potomac Park. Because the nineteen small structures are still under construction, visitors were required to wear hard-soled boots, long trousers, a shirt with sleeves, safety glasses and a hardhat.

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Oil Springs Eternal

Writing The Prize (1991) , and winning a Pulitzer for it, brought Daniel Yergin automatic creds in the energy industry. Through Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), he has consistently maintained a cornucopian viewpoint about the future availability and price of oil, to the point that the energy depletion community has defined a Yergin unit as the $38 per barrel that in 2005, Yergin predicted would be the steady price of oil. Oil reached two Yergins in 2006, spiked to 3.6 Yergins in 2008, and currently Brent crude is trading at 3 Yergins. 

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Politics Under the Sun



As Solar Decathlon teams assemble their entries, politics heats up everything under the sun. Republicans gleefully exploit the failure of solar panel startup Solyndra, and Germany's Passiv Haus Institut casts out their US incarnation. In Passive House Schism Leaves U.S. in Limbo, GreenSource reports:

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Solar Decathlon under assembly

Solar Decathlon: A sneak peek at the houses from Mother Nature Network offers a quick look at each entry. Assembly started yesterday, and the event is open to the public starting September 23rd through October 2nd at the National Mall's West Potomac Park, near the FDR memorial, and not too far from the MLK memorial.

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Serena's Evil Twin



The US Open has played out on the men's side more or less as expected - the top four seeds made it to the quarterfinals and the top two seeds made it to the finals. Mardy Fish and Andy Roddick had decent runs, but lost to Jo Wilfried Tsonga and Rafa Nadal. Tsonga could not beat Federer this time. The former teen phenom Donald Young had a good run but eventually lost to Andy Murray. In his bio, Hardcourt Confidential, Patrick McEnroe hinted at the stormy relationship he had with Young's parents, claiming that they demanded far more resources than USTA player development had to give. But as a broadcaster PMac had only positives for Young.

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Can you write about the future?

 

In Efficiency is the Solution, Tom Whipple predicts the future by describing what we are already seeing: 
 
For the immediate future, however, much of what life in the future will be like will depend on the technologies that will enable civilization to continue while using only a fraction of the energy that is consumed today and to develop the technology to produce large quantities of cheaper renewable fuels. The manner in which our fossil fuels are being used is so wasteful of the energy contained in fossil fuels that major reductions can be made with little real impact on the activities that consume energy. The prime examples of this waste is the internal combustion engine which uses only 14 percent of its fuel to turn the wheels while wasting most of the rest. Huge central power plants waste most of the energy that devours coal and natural gas, and produce much waste heat that is dumped into the air or local water bodies or in line losses. Without the massive waste, the fossil fuel age could last a lot longer.
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Food for Fools



In the Wall Street Journal article, Can the World Still Feed Itself?, Austrian Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, portrays genetically-modified (GMO or GM) crops as the hero, and food-for-fuel as the villain in the effort to feed six, seven, or even nine billion planetizens:
 

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Donal is now posting on a wordpress blog called simply, Donal.

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