It’s not because the wall is easier to play or because there are more players to back up the play (though both are certainly true); rather, it’s because the ball is much, much easier to read off of the bat in center field than it is in left or right.

Simply observing the play develop from almost directly behind the pitcher gives a center fielder a clear view of when the batter opens his hips and where the pitch will be located, and that’s really all it takes to get a good jump. In left field and right field, it’s easy to tell when the batter opens his hips, but it’s much harder to tell where the pitch will end up, which ultimately determines how the ball will cut through the air if it’s hit to left or right. This often results in fielders misplaying balls, whether it’s by misjudging the slice and/or dive on a ball or by not anticipating a sharp break to one side when the ball hits the ground.

I do still have to import the entries which are backed up from my old host, which went down in flames just before the start of freshman year, as I recall. I think I’ll take care of that this evening, actually, as I have nothing else planned.

In other news, my birthday was on Friday, and I had a very nice time eating at Paisan’s with my family and roommate. It feels weird being 20, not in the sense that I feel older, but in that I feel like others perceive me as older. I mean, when you’re 20, people start to wonder what you’re going to do with your life. At 19 you’re still just some jackass teenager. It’s quite a step up.

I’m working on a standard stylesheet and a standard HTML template for Housing to try and increase readability and editability between the IT department and Marketing and to help standardize our page design across the Housing network. The first snag I’ve hit is how to best markup breadcrumbs.

Right now they’re just a line of links with little markers between them to mark progress. The Food Service site has an example.

Now, I use unordered lists for my navigation menus, since that’s generally what a navigation menu is: a list. However, breadcrumbs are more of a path than anything, and I’m hesitant to mark them up as a list, since a list of breadcrumbs would, to me, comprise of places you’ve been, which isn’t the case.

Right now I’ve kept it as just text, but I’m going to do a little research and see if I can’t find  better way.

Anyway, I have been writing a lot lately, but mostly for myself, about personal things that either nobody would care about or that I just don’t want to (or can’t, really) share. One thing, though, that I’ve returned to doing lately that relates to public writing is Twittering. It’s funny, I took about a 20-day break from it for no reason in particular, and picked it back up about a week ago—again, for no reason in particular. There’s something oddly satisfying about sharing little, inconsequential thoughts with 30 or so folks you sort of know through reading their blogs and whatnot.

Lastly, I’m kicking around ideas for a new site design. I feel like this minimalist thing is a step in the right direction, but I’m maybe 75% happy with it. That’ll be a nice weekend project, I think.

I’ve read a couple of articles discussing the scene with two ferries, one full of prisoners and one full of civilians, at the very end of the movie. The Joker’s got both rigged up with explosives, and each boat is given a remote to detonate the explosives on the other boat. However, if both boats remain at midnight, both will be blown up.

Now, a very important assumption if we were to analyze the situation using game theory is that the Joker has not lied about the nature of the detonators: they cannot be rigged to act any differently than he has stated. We also have to assume that the passengers on each boat have the same assumptions about their detonator and are acting rationally. I would say that in this case, rational action constitutes no fighting over the remote and no sudden movements to blow up the other ship.

Pure Pedantry’s analysis makes a false assumption, I think, in that the civilian ship is not allowed to press the button, when, in reality, they get a lot closer to pressing the button than the prisoner’s ship. However, the basic analysis is there, and the payoff matrix illustrates all possibilities pretty well.

The Quantitative Peace discusses a game based on Morality, which I find much more interesting and applicable than a game based on Utility payoffs. I say this with absolutely no qualification, but it seems that most humans make decisions, particularly non-business decisions, based on their morals and what they feel is right, even in situations of survival. There is very much to lose by rescuing fellow tenants from a burning apartment, but I would argue that many would do so because they feel it is important and right.

Anyway, a couple final thoughts on this are that, one, the Joker lives by no rules, so we can probably toss everything out the window anyway, and two, game theory captures only a small piece of the situation. I personally didn’t expect the prisoner to throw the detonator out of the ship, but he did. And I fully expected the volunteer citizen to blow the other ship out of the water without hesitation, but he didn’t. Still, it’s interesting to think about, and it just makes me want to see the movie again even more.