Wednesday Links

Dear James, Daniel and Emily

Bill Simmon's on baseball and steroids

He has some good points, most of which I agree with (although the fact that his 2007 Red Sox crushed my Rockies changes my attitude a little). I have written in the past about my feeling that the drug policies for professional sports are foolish. And I still think that. Yes, the people who take the PED's (Performance Enhancing Drugs for those of you not familiar with the sportswriter parlance) are technically cheating. But I think that is a moral position that will eventually fall by the wayside. The other day I was talking about football with some friends and raised the point that only someone who is seriously naive can believe that a human being, no matter how fit, can bounce back from knee surgery in 4 weeks without the help of some outside forces. And that no one can put on 30 pounds of muscle in 3 months. I think that is where my stance as a football fan first makes it easier to not freak out about the baseball issues. The players still have to play the game, and you still need an insane amount of skill (and luck) to become a 'great' player. And when the stakes and money get raise as high as they are in modern professional sports, of course anyone who is that dedicated and competitive to reach that level will continue to search for that little edge. You want to make pro sports 'pure' again: take away the money (and I mean all money, because I don't consider major college football and basketball to be all that pure either).

An admitted geek lists things her kids do better than her

While this is an interesting exercise it is not one I can get my heart into. For a couple of reasons:

1. Who thinks it's a good idea to be that competitive with your kid? If I truly want my child to excel than I want them to be better than me or at least as good. And I don't think that getting competitive about it will really help.

2. The world changes. There are a lot of things that kids can do now that I couldn't even imagine doing when I was their age. Of course my son is better at video games, it is not something I had when I was little, and never developed an interest in later on. My kid can program in Linux (which James cannot, and neither can I for that matter)? Again, when I was 8 the only programming that was around was machine language and some other older computer languages, and the only computers available were huge mainframes the size of my house and with less power than I have in my desktop today. There is just a different range of possibilities and skills available today then I had, and as a result I didn't pick them up until later.

3. Note the last point where the parent is still better: endurance on long hikes. Of course the parent has better endurance, based on the list of things the kids are good at, they probably never leave the house. I would be far more excited if my 8 year old could beat me at tennis or soccer, than their ability to program a computer.