Is that an optical mouse in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Na zdorovye!

Earlier this evening...

Ivan: This trip [to Paris] is gonna be great!
Hulk: Yes.
Ivan: What about our [Canadian] friend. Is he coming?
Hulk: Sadly no. His job is taking him to Rwanda.
Ivan: So he's moving from Bosnia to Rwanda. What's next, East Timor?

Hulk: (pause)

Ivan: He's following the genocide trail?
Hulk: I heard Pol Pot's got some business to sort out...
Ivan: Pol Pot is dead.

Hulk: (long pause)

Ivan: I'll drink to that!

Little Wing

This song brings back lots of memories. Or rather, it brings back a single, very rich memory of an October night a few years ago.

I was moving that weekend, from my post-college midtown apartment to a new place downtown. I was planning to get up early and complete the move the move with my mom next day. It must have been Friday night.

I got an unexpected email from my ex-girlfriend, inviting me to attend a piano recital that she was giving with the Bach Society at school. She was still in college. We had broken up a month earlier.

It was raining. She played a piece by a Cuban composer. The piece was short, very complicated, and she made many mistakes. But it was beautiful, and it's the only piece that I remember from that concert.

Afterward, we met up with a new friend I'd made at work, and his friend who was visiting from Boston. Or rather his ex-girlfriend whom he had left behind.

So there we were, dressed up, with our well-dressed ex-girlfriends, new to downtown Manhattan, looking for a place to get a get a drink. On a rainy Friday night in October. We walked around in the rain for at least half an hour. Downtown is dead on a Friday night. It was raining. The girls were beautiful in a way that tall women in heels are beautiful when it's raining.

Finally we got directions to a bar, somewhere near City Hall. I don't remember the name of the bar or the street, but I could find it on a map. It was an old bar. There were posters on the wall advertising musical acts from the 70's. Downstairs, a band was playing.

There were three musicians. None under 50. The sparse crowd was made up of similarly aged people, and a few regulars. I thought it was a jazz band. But they played this beautiful song. No words. It must have landed about 15 minutes.

After about 10 minutes, I asked someone what they were playing. I thought it might be a Marley cover. It was Hendrix.

I've long since broken up with the ex-girlfriend for the last time, and she moved half way across the world. I became close with the new friend for a while, but I haven't spoken to him now in over a year. But I still remember those old guys (who I think were Wall Street guys, and not full time musicians) playing their 15 minute rendition of 'Little Wing.' On a rainy October night. On a Friday in downtown Manhattan.

What I learned about startups.

These thought are based on my own experiences, especially those from the past year. They are not intended as advice for you, or anyone else. Although I’m curious to hear what you think.

The main thing I learned is that you need to have a good idea. Although no one will pay you just for having a good idea, you will likewise never get much mileage out of an idea that isn’t actually useful. Furthermore, you will not come up with such an idea until you have a good understanding of the area in which you are trying to operate.

I used to think that many people had good ideas. They didn’t implement these ideas due to lack of resources, etc, or they were unwilling to implement these ideas due to laziness, etc. That may be the case, but I think that most people who try to build startups fail because they really don’t have good ideas. They may have good concepts, but not really ideas that are worth much.

For example, take the sewing machine, circa 1850. You could have said “I want to build a better sewing machine.” That would be a concept. You could even have said “I want to build a sewing machine that will work more quickly & less clumsy.” That’s still a concept. You’ve really got nothing. However, if you deconstruct a sewing machine, tinker with the parts, try to replace components and see what happens, you might decide that the machine would be greatly improved by using a flying needle, instead of a rotary one. Now that’s an idea!

This is more or less what Isaac Singer did in 1850. It didn’t hurt that Mr. Singer was an engineer, or that he was extremely OCD. But it also didn’t matter that he hadn’t spent years using a sewing machine, either. Instead, he saw a sewing machine being repaired, became intrigued with the concept of making it better, and eventually stumbled on his idea.

I think this is a template for how many good ideas come about. You need someone with a good amount of knowledge in the relevant area, combined with that same person exploring a general concept by doing specific, unguided work. It doesn’t hurt to be OCD, either.

In order to come up with a great idea, it is necessary to have deep knowledge in an area like engineering, design, organization, etc. However I’m not sure it’s possible to have a great idea without investigating some other, less valuable ideas. That takes time.

I’ve had a few friends begin what they called “startups.” However none of them had really nailed down the idea that they were actually going to implement. In the process of building their original concepts, they all realized that they should have been doing something a little differently. They should have been happy! Their second version of their concepts were most likely more valuable than the first versions. However, making major adjustments midstream can be difficult and costly. Especially for those have raised money, recruited people, or build software that they now had a personal attachment to. In all cases, this process of change and improvement led to stagnation, or to spectacular collapse.

So the conclusion is simple: if you’ve got an idea, think of it more as a concept. You probably won’t have a truly great idea until you explore that concept with specific work. Work on your concept. The concept could be anything, but it helps if you have deep (and broad) knowledge of a closely related area. But do work on your concept, regardless of what you know. You don’t have to work very hard, or very often. But you do need to explore it for a while. Some things just take time, and lots thought.

Talking to other people about your concept can be helpful. However don’t do something stupid like raise money, hire someone, or quit a job that you like, in order to work on a concept that you have fooled yourself into thinking is a well formed idea.

Edison worked on many things. Usually, he worked alone. He took pride in his failures, as he thought trying out flawed ideas got him closer to good ideas.

However even Edison got married to ideas that did not survive the test of time. He did not accept that alternating current was a viable technology. Not only did he smear Westinghouse and his company publicly over the issue, he even invented the electric chair to prove how dangerous alternating current could be. Eventually, Edison accepted that alternating current was a good way to deliver power to home and businesses, and his company started providing it. The electric chair is no longer used in the United States, though a few states still allow it.

Don’t think you have it all figured out. Don’t be a slave to your own half-baked ideas. But do work on them. Eventually, you may discover something meaningful.

So my advice (to myself) is simple: work on you ideas. Work diligently, but be flexible. Some things take time to figure out. Sometimes you need to take time off from working on something, to let your mind make more sense of it. So work on several concepts, or at least a couple variants of a singlecocept. Take vacations. Have faith in yourself, but be objective about what you have actually come up with. Most of all, don’t put pressure on yourself to have that great idea. It will come. But if it doesn’t, you should not have to explain to your parents, investors, employees, girlfriends, and moreover, to yourself, why you have committed to a great idea that you now realize isn’t so great, or wasn’t an idea at all.

Just work on your idea. And talk about it, if you find that helpful and enjoyable. But don’t make irreversible decisions or sacrifices, if you can avoid them. Don’t quit your job to work on the idea. Just work on the idea. Don’t become committed, and don’t commit anyone else, unless you actually have something worth committing to. You might be surprised how far you can go, working without outside financing, during the time that your current employer doesn’t pay you for.

Anyway, that’s my take.

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After I left my job with Google over a year ago, I was briefly involved with a friend’s startup. Despite an intriguing concept and plenty of financing, the idea failed somewhat spectacularly. My friend wanted me to come in and fix it. We had disagreements and I ended up not being involved for very log. I spoke to him much later and apparently they’d made some major changes. I hope things work out for him.

That said, my experience showed me some ways of how not to develop a concept into a startup. My friend is a creative type, and a very successful businessman. He wanted to build an online virtual community around a theme that is very important to him. I still think he had a good concept.

He hired some guys to build the interface for his community. Unfortunately, they were not qualified to build anything of the sort. They were graphics guys, and had very little idea about engineering. They in turn hired some other guys, end the whole thing ended up as a mess.

Early on, someone decided that the community’s interface would be accessible via a web browser, using Flash. I’m not sure who made that decision, but it must have been made early on. Until I came on board, I don’t think anyone asked why the decision was made. I doubt they considered many alternatives.

I’m sure that if I spoke to my friend today, he wouldn’t agree that the use of Flash was the reason that his venture had so many problems. He’s right, of course.

However, using Flash meant that the company hired (and later fired) a bunch of Flash developers. It also meant that they hired a guy to build 3D objects in Flash. They hired a contractor to build a major component of the interface, also in Flash. All of these people were difficult, and very expensive.

In the end, they produced a prototype that crashed, loaded slowly, and didn’t size properly in different browsers. Some of the graphics were beautiful, but they didn’t look good in a web browser window. Any experienced engineer could have told you that this would happen. I’m not saying that Flash is garbage, but rather that it is not well suited for what they were trying to build.

They should have build a stand alone executable that accessed the web (in Java, for example, or anything else). Not only would this have succeeded easily where Flash proved difficult, but hiring would have been much less difficult. The guys running this venture were not qualified to interview and hire engineers. However, they were further handicapped by being forced to hire “Flash developer” engineers. If they’d searched for Java engineers instead, they would have had a much larger pool to choose candidates from.

Again, this is not the reason that my friend’s venture failed. But it does show how running with a concept (posing as a well-formulated idea) can be very expensive. The concept of “let’s build a beautiful virtual world for X” was a good concept. But to build a “multimedia virtual world for X using Flash” was never a good idea.

Increasing my observed sample space.

As some of you know (well probably no one that might actually read this blog), I am a huge proponent of the idea that randomness rules our lives. This is almost a religion to me. Rather, you can even argue that religion was born of the need for humans to make sense of the randomness of their lives. But that is neither here nor there.

Recently, I've thought about going to work as an analyst/programmer/quant on Wall St. I've had friends encourage me to look in this direction for a while, but only recently have I given it serious thought. Things quickly came together, and I had an interview at a place that had the resources to hire and train me, and in many other ways would have been a good fit. The only problem: I totally bombed the job interview.

The interviewer asked me a technical question about a C++ library that I used for several years, but haven't used for the past year. I totally forgot it. Nothing that a flip through the definitions couldn't solve, but still not good. Then he tried to make it into a more general question about design patterns, which I learned in college over the course of two A+ semesters. Fail. The funny thing was that I wasn't nervous. I didn't cave under pressure. He asked me easy warmup questions for which he expected quick answers and I didn't deliver. Simple as that.

Small sample size? Perhaps. Probably more to it than that, but since we are all (even statisticians*) so prone toward trying to find patterns from small samples, I will actively refrain from going down this road.

While I don't begrudge the fund I was interviewing with for rejecting my application based on a poor interview, I nevertheless do not think myself any less qualified for the job because of the same interview. Or at least so I tell myself.

In any case, it may be for the better. The fact is, I don't need this job, although I would probably have taken it. I'm happy with what I'm doing now.

I'm on my way to ski in Colorado for a few days, then off to Thailand, Bali and Australia. Not sure when I'll be back, but certainly not before January. Not sure how much time I will spend working on baseball stuff. I'm sure I'll be thinking about baseball, however. Also I've been learning a little about basketball (ie NBA & men's college). Maybe I'll find a problem in that universe that I think I can contribute toward solving. Or maybe not. Basketball stats are much more shallow and unreliable than baseball stats. So creating something meaningful based on currently recorded basketball statistics seems both hopeless, and kind of intriguing.

* I recently read an article by Bill James, where he tried to prove that the Royals can not possibly be even an average team, because they were blown out in 5 games in a row. His reasoning was mathematically sound, but the desire to prove that the Royals were a bad team based on 5 aweful games, rather than a 100 games where the team was bad on average, was very human.

The King of the Apes was Left Handed

This post is not related to the game of baseball, baseball strategy, or baseball research, although you can make these parallels if you want to.

My mother told me this story when I was a kid in Russia. Although my memory has changed the details, so please don't blame my mother for anything that follows.

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A long time ago in Africa, there was a great ape. He was recognized by the other apes as the greatest ape of them all, and he became known as the King of the Apes.

Unlike the apes before him, the King of the Apes ate his birds with his left hand. This was unusual, as apes had always eaten their birds with the right hand, for as long as any ape could remember.

As the King of the Apes grew old and eventually died, his legend grew. Ambitious apes sought to imitate the King of the Apes. They asked 'what made the King of the Apes so great?' Since none of the other apes ate their birds with the left hand, some of the ambitious apes seized on this characteristic, and sough to emulate it. Eating birds with the left hand was not natural to most of the apes. But neither it was it terribly difficult to learn. Soon, all of the ambitious apes were eating their birds with the left hand.

Some of the ambitious apes had their own achievements. Soon enough, eating birds with the left hand became ubiquitous among the apes in Africa.

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I was recently visiting San Francisco, and staying with a college buddy of mine. One of his room mates quit his job to work on a startup.

As a departure from working on his idea, he would attend "Startup School" in Berkeley. Sometimes the other room mates would join him. This 'school' is a speaker series, where successful web-based entrepreneurs share their experiences & give tips to the future go-getters of the internet business world.

I remember one of the room mates talking about a lecture he attended. The speaker was the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. Zappos is an internet retailer known both for its excellent customer service, and also for the strong culture within its workplace.

My friend's room mate was impressed by the speaker. Apparently his speech was focused on Zappos's company culture, and how that culture had made Zappos into a great company. One of his points was that a small company has to be willing to let go of their best engineer early on, if the engineer does not acquiesce to the demands of the culture that the founder wants to instill upon his young company. This bold & original idea stuck in the mind of my friend's room mate.

But is that really such good advice for a startup? Did the Beatles succeed because John Lennon & George Harrison made Paul McCarthey acquiesce to the culture of The Quarrymen? Or did they find a way to get along with Sir Paul, and in the process, made the band take on some of his characteristics as well?

Moreover, why should we care so much when people that we admire say something that goes against conventional wisdom? Is it because we think that what they are saying makes sense and represents progress? Or is it because we want to 'Be Like Mike,' rather than to think for ourselves?

What are the odds that Malia or Sasha will be President?

Let's forget about politics for a moment, and look at this strictly as a probability problem.

How likely are Malia or Sasha to become one of our future presidents? Or rather, how much does the fact that their father is Barak Obama help them?

For an American chosen at random, his or her probability of becoming president is too tiny to imagine. But let's imagine it. The youngest president was Bill Clinton, elected at 42. The oldest would have been John McCain at 72. Throwing out those outliers, let's estimate that to have a shot at being elected President, you need to be between 45 and 65. According to the US census data, there were 62 million Americans in this age range in 2000, comprising 22.0% of the US population. So if we had no other information about a person other than his or her age and citizenship status, we could guess that there is a 1 in 65 million chance that he or she was elected President, if we guessed in 2000.

Now consider America in 1800. The free population of the United States was 4.3 million. The life expectancy in 1750 was 36. Well actually the life expectancy in the Northern States was 40. In 1950, that number was 68. So to be conservative, let's say that we can estimate the number of Americans over 45 in 1800 by looking at the number of Americans over 70, alive in 2000. By this generous measure, 9.0% of free Americans in 1800 had a hypothetical chance to be president, out of a population that was 50 times smaller. That amounts to a little better than 1 in 400,000.

I already factored in our country's ugly history of slavery. However one must also remember that in 1800, women were not eligible to be President. So if you picked a random free American man in 1800, you had a little better than 1 in 200,000 chance to pick the President of the United States.

Now those odds look a little better than 1 in 65 million! And I think I was being very generous with the age issues.

Presidents don't get elected randomly. However in 1800, if you got into politics early enough, stuck around, and lived long enough, you were a long shot to be President. At least statistically speaking.

As a kid, I always assumed that John Quincy Adams became president at least in part due to nepotism. Maybe it was so, but given the fact that his chance was 1 out of 200,000 before you even considered his qualifications, things are not so clear.

However, we are not looking at individual cases here. Instead, we are considering the probability of two presidents being close blood relatives, if selected at random. We've never had two Presidents who were brothers, first cousins or grandchildren of other Presidents. But if we had, I don't think that we would have though of this as any less nepotistic than father and son. Still, let's scratch cousin and brother. Although both RFK and Ted Kennedy had a non-trivial chance of becoming President, which is worth noting.

For the early years, there were too few former Presidents. But let's assume for now that there were always past Presidents, who each served either 4 or 8 years. Each President has on average 1 son, and on average 2 grandsons, who will live to be of Presidential age. Each of these men has a 45-65 window to be elected President. So he's got 3 shots at the top job. Thus each new President is contributing about 9 future nepotistic Presidential hopefuls over their lifetime. Thus in the long run, the average number of such hopefuls during a given Presidential race must be around 9. Let's make it 10, for a round number.

OK, so during every election cycle, there are 10 or so potentially nepotistic candidates (let's call them PNCs from now on).

If we lived in 1800, there would be a 1 in 20,000 chance that the electorate would choose a PNC, even if the election was a random drawing of free male citizens. (Not really, since there was not a full set of past Presidents to use as fathers and grandfathers, but bear with me.)

In 2000, there are still 10 PNC, but now that women have a real chance to be President, there is only a 1 in 6.5 million chance that we will elect a PNC by random drawing.

So far, I have not even mentioned one obvious fact: on average, the PNCs are much more qualified to be President than an average American of the correct age. Most people don't even want to be President. Even if we restrict eligibility to those who went to college (or the military), and score in the top 2/3 of Americans in IQ, public speaking and some measure of organizational skills, we would eliminate most people. Most people are not interested in a political career. Not all of those who are interested can pass the basic qualifications for election. However, it is probably safe to say that any PNC who wants to start a career in politics can do so. Not all PNCs will be interested in politics, but for now let's assume that they are at least as likely as an average American to be interested in a career in politics, but with perhaps a better chance to get started, because of their family connections.

So by the most conservative of measures, we can estimate that a PNC is about 10 times more likely to enter politics as an average American, given the same level of interest.

Therefore, we estimate that under the conditions of 1800, a PNC had a 1 in 2,000 chance of being elected President in a give election, even if the election consisted of a random drawing among all of the minimally qualified people. Let's review how we got here:

4.3 million Americans * 0.09 [aged 45-65] * 1/2 [men] = 200,000 eligible

200,000 eligible / 10 [estimated PNCs] = 1 in 20,000 to elect a PNC

1 in 20,000 chance / 10 [estimated advantage to a PNC] = 1 in 2,000 to elect a PNC

What this calculation actually suggests is that if there were 2,000 politicians on all levels of government in 1800, typically 1 of them might be a PNC. If we elected Presidents at random from all current politicians, then there is a 1 in 2,000 chance that we elect a PNC.

Given these odds, it is unsurprising that America elected a single PNC (John Quincy Adams) in its early days. You may say that his odds should have been much worse since he was 6th President, but I would argue any son of Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, or any other Founding Father could be considered a PNC.

In any case, I think that it's fair to say that during America's early history (ie before the 20th century), a PNC was not much more likely to reach a high political office than a similarly ambitious white male citizen, who was able to get a college education, or to become a reasonably high ranking officer in the army. This was simply because there were about the same number of high level posts as there are today, but with magnitudes fewer candidates.

Contrast this with today's conditions. There is still only one President. Only one Secretary of State. Only one Speaker of the House of Representatives. There are a few more lower ranking secretaries and a lot more advisors. However the pool of Americans aged 45-65 who are full citizens has increased by a factor of over 100. Let's consider the chance of America electing a PNC in 2000 purely by chance:

280 million Americans * 0.22 [aged 45-65] = 65,000,000 eligible

65,000,000 eligible / 10 [estimated PNCs] = 1 in 6,500,000 to elect a PNC

1 in 6,500,000 chance / 10 [estimated advantage to a PNC] = 1 in 650,000 to elect a PNC

So everything else being equal (except a 1ox advantage to a PNC for getting started in politics), America should only have elected a PNC with 1 in 650,000 chance in 2000. But we did in fact elect a PNC, George W. Bush. I don't think that anyone thinks that this occurred simply by chance. I think we all know that George W. Bush had a huge advantage in becoming President because his father was also President.

This in itself is not remarkable. What is remarkable is that this was not really the case in 1800.

In 1800, there were exponentially fewer candidates per high level post, so anyone who was qualified, ambitious, and had talent for politics had a non-trivial shot at a top job in his lifetime (provided that he lived long enough).

Nowadays, there are many many more candidates per top job, and as such, each qualified candidate's chances at a top job are much lower. Except for PNCs, that is!

By my estimates, if there were 2,000 politicians (and high level military brass) in 1800, about 1 of them would be a PNC, and all would have a roughly similar chance to become President. That is not all that inconsistent with what actually took place in the 1800's.

By these same estimates, if there were 650,000 politicians (as well as high level military, influential businessmen, and politically active preachers) in 2000, then about 1 of them would be a PNC, and all would have a roughly similar chance at the Presidency. All those numbers sound reasonably accurate for 2000, except that the one politically active PNC had a disproportionately large chance of being elected President.

Moreover, George W. Bush knew of his advantage from his first days in politics, if not earlier. Everyone else knew it too, which helped him on every step along the way to the top.

I am not suggesting that nepotism handed George W. Bush the Presidency. But nepotism gave George Bush a much better shot at the Presidency early in his political career. Also, I am suggesting that nepotism is stronger in American politics now than it was 200 years ago. And that it will get stronger still, simply as a result of our population growth.

I think we know intuitively that it is hard to rise up a hierarchy on merit alone. As the hierarchy becomes increasingly complex, or the pool of qualified candidates increases, this becomes even harder. To rise up a highly competitive hierarchy, one needs to be either really lucky, or to have some sort of advantage. The instant name recognition of a PNC helps him or her at every level. Even if the difference is small at the highest level of the hierarchy (ie national elections), it gives him or her enormous benefit in getting to that level in the first place.

One result of this phenomenon is that some of the best qualified candidates drop out of the hierarchy early on. Many others never even enter the fray, deciding to pursue promotion in smaller hierarchies, or avoiding hierarchies entirely. There are probably about 500,000 Americans today who are relatively young politicians, military types, or the right kind of businessman or preacher to break into politics. All have a relatively equal chance to become President. Except for the PNCs. Even a minor PNC like Mitt Romney has a better than equal chance because his father reached a second-tier position in the hierarchy of government. However his advantage is nowhere as big as that of George W Bush, or Hilary Clinton.

The fact that unconnected individual like Bill Clinton, Barak Obama, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and John Edwards all became President, or almost became President should not distract from the fact that individually, unconnected people have almost no chance to become President (even if their cumulative chances are good).

The old days had their fair share of strange, crazy and incompetent candidates, to be sure. America almost elected Aaron Burr over Thomas Jefferson, and neither Andrew Johnson nor Franklin Pierce were remotely the best man for the job. And yet, for a well qualified, ambitious and talented politician, his chances of reaching a top job in the old day wasn't bad.

In 1787, 55 of the most brightest political minds in the United States gathered in Philadelphia to write our greatest political document to date. Today, that would not be possible. Consider the mess in California, where no one can agree on how to select the delegates for a new constitutional convention.

Is this a problem, and what can be done about it? That is beyond the scope of this discussion.

However, I think we should consider the example of India. The world's largest democracy has had both many PNCs at the top job, and also some completely unconnected candidates, in a roughly 50-50 split. I think that this is where America is headed.

So how does this all relate to Malia and Sasha? If they want to become President one day, their chances are exceptionally good. Even if we say that their chances are 1 in 30 each (based on a rough historical average), those odds are much better than the 1 in 500,000 or so for a typical minimally qualified candidate.

I have argued that America is headed toward more nepotism at the top, so their chances of becoming President might be as much as 100,000 times higher than those of their Sidwell Friends classmates. This is even assuming that their classmates are likely to be wealthier, smarter, more educated, and better politically connected than your average American.

On top of that, Malia and Sasha are possibly the most qualified 9 and 11 year old future Presidents ever. They are incredibly young for Presidential children, giving them a head start in just about everything. By they time they are 45 years old, being black women will not hurt them in national elections, even if one argues that being a black woman is still a disadvantage today. Also, our country will be 30+ years removed from the first Obama Presidency. We always remember our Presidents well, given enough time. So their father's legacy, whatever that may be, will help them more than ever before for a PNC.

The biggest obstacle to a Obama 2050 (or so) coronation would be the chance that neither of the girls wants their father's old job. That could happen. But I would still be willing to place a 10 to 1 wager that one of the Obama daughters achieves a top 4 position in our country's government within her lifetime.

Given that our country will by then have 500 million other eligible citizens, such odds are truely remarkable.

WTF?

So here are my thoughts for this blog.

There are already some good places on the internet for me to share my thoughts with others. But I've got a lot of thoughts, and not all of them have a good home.

I have a blog where I write about my baseball research. I've got a Facebook profile that I try to avoid, but often fail. Heck, I've even got a Twitter account, but 140 words doesn't do it for me. I didn't leave Communist Russia to have the folks at Twitter tell me how long my thoughts have to be.

I'm not sure what kind of content I'll have here. But so much of the things I like to write about don't belong on Facebook, Twitter, or a nerdy baseball blog.

I use to write this kind of stuff in emails to friends. But no one reads long emails any more. Or if they do, they sure don't respond as often as they used to. Maybe Twitter and links to articles on Facebook is the future, and the future is now. And maybe proofreading emails is dead. And maybe I'm becoming a grumpy old man, but that doesn't mean I have to be like any of it, or that I have to be like anyone else.

So that's it. No 140 character haikus. No links to news articles. And absolutely nothing about statistics, baseball, money, poker, or anything like that.

Appendix number four.

Here is a partial list (off the top of my head) of significant competitions where I was number four (or so):

I once won 4th place in the school science fair.

I was the 4th highest rated chess player in my state among children.

I was then the 4th highest rated chess player in my college.

I finished 4th in a state-wide math competition when I was in high school.

I finished ranked 4th (or so) in my high school class.

I graduated college cum laude.

After a year as a graduate student, I was one of four (or so) students from my college's computer science department to go work for Google (at a time when everyone wanted to work for Google).

In poker... well I'm not gonna discuss poker on a public blog, so I guess that's it.

I am number four.

Maybe it's just my mind playing tricks on my jet-lagged, sleep deprived body, but I've realized that when in comes to competitive things that I care about, I am usually number four.

Fourth out of hundred, and occasionally out of thousand, so fourth ain't bad. But never first, and hardly ever second.

Maybe it's because I've dabbled semi-seriously in a number of things. Although they are loosely related, I've never had that dedication to be really good at something, at the expense of everything else. Maybe I just never had that desire to be number one. Maybe I never found that one thing that my natural talents are uniquely suited for.

In any case, I'm not unhappy about this realization. I'm not an extremely competitive guy, and just being really good, rather than the best, is good enough for me.

I'm more interested in analyzing how my experiences subconsciously affect the things I like. As a result of being good, sometimes very good, but never the best at anything I took seriously, I wonder if I'm attracted to similar characteristics in people and organizations?

I've been a Yankees fan since I fell in love with baseball as a Russian immigrant in the early 90's. However as the team spends more money and wins more championships, it's become harder to be fan. Being a San Francisco Giants fan is much easier. My favorite year to be a Yankees fan was 1996. The team was good, but probably not the best team in the American League. The Atlanta Braves were easily the best team in baseball that year. Seeing the Yankees beat the Braves in a small sample of games was great. Seeing them win as favorites in the later years was much less gratifying.

My favorite Yankee was Andy Pettitte. But I could never really give a good reason why. I've always liked Derek Jeter, of course. Yet he never interested me all that much. Pettitte is not a terribly exciting personality either, but he's your quintessential number four. He's been one of the top pitchers in baseball throughout his career. Also he's a crafty pitcher, with a intense scowl and a great pickoff move. And yet he's never won a Cy Young (his one second-place finish in 1996 would not even rank that high in most other years). I was never unhappy to see Mariano overtake Pettitte as the most well-known Yankees pitcher, nor Clemens or Mussina after him.

I was never unhappy to see someone do better than me in a fair test, especially if that person was a friend or a team mate. I don't think this is because I'm a 'team player' or anything like that. I'm just happy to work pretty hard, be really good, let someone else be the best, and collect whatever you get for being number four.