Too Much Time?

Recently, while crudely writing a message from Dynamo to me on an orphaned sock in green permanent marker ("Me want c Hitman - Sherm") to prove my point that he wanted to see Hitman with me, I realized it's been 6 months since I've held a full time job, and I'm still managing to survive. But first, I realized I may have too much free time on my hands. I mean, not only did I have the time to engineer and carry out this masterful plot, but I was able to also blog about my exploits.

Minaya's Lasting Mistake

On Friday, Met's GM Omar Minaya decided to spice up the off-season with a boneheaded move, trading away 22-year old prospect Lastings Milledge for much older and scrubbier players, Ryan Church and Brian Schneider. Way to go!

Marty Noble, Mets beat writer who usually tells it how it is, claimed this falsity:

Milledge remains highly regarded because of his quick bat. But he wasn't as good a fit as Church for the Mets -- at least for 2008 and perhaps '09 -- because he bats right-handed. With Schneider, a left-handed hitter, catching and Church playing right field, the Mets now can have three switch-hitters (Jose Reyes, Luis Castillo and Beltran), two right-handed hitters (David Wright and Moises Alou) and three left-handed hitters (Carlos Delgado and the two new men) in their most regular lineup.

The Mets have trouble hitting lefties...the solution, apparently? Trade for a lefty who can't hit lefties. While Church hits well at Shea, he also hit .229 last year against LHP. At 29, he's in his prime, and that's the problem. A still developing Milledge will post similar numbers to him this year, at 7 years his junior.

In addition, the recently acquired Johnny Estrada is as bad an offensive option as Schneider, but cheaper by a million or two per year. While it's true that Milledge is a better center fielder than corner outfielder, judging by his remarkably superior play in center while filling in for Carlos Beltran, but won't get to play that position for many years, he's still a better option than Church.

Lastings was once mentioned in trades for Manny Ramirez, Roy Oswalt and Dontrelle Willis. Coming off a subpar year, Milledge's trade value had plummeted, but trading him for two scrubs has left the Mets without many bargaining chips. Or Utz chips for that matter. Lastings used to pick them up from the corner bodega on game day. Without proper nutrition derived from crab chips and without good young players, I'm afraid Minaya will be forced into signing subpar Livan Hernandez in an effort to corner the market on old Cuban pitchers named Hernandez.

Mr. Noble, bucking the trend of his fellow writers who denounced the trade, believes that both Schneider and Church will be good fits for the Mets, "the kind of players that make the whole greater than the sum of it parts." Sorry Marty, but sometimes crappy player plus crappy player really just equals a lasting mistake.

Black Boxes

Recently, Human Dynamo got a job as a software engineer at a company that manufactures radio frequencies and puts them into scanners so the supermarket can figure out how much that pear you want to buy costs. He admitted to me that he didn't really understand how RF works, but he doesn't need to; to him, it's a black box. The black box principle is explained in detial here: black box explained, in detail. I admitted to him, I didn't really understand how his job worked, so it was a black box to me, just like the whole black box principle was a black box to me.

It was with this intense scientific background that the following conversation more or less occurred Friday night when Dynamo somehow decided to discuss with me and his lady friend a problem he was working on at work.

Dynamo: So I'm working on this problem at work, and I'd really like to talk to ya'll about what I do every day, since I figure you two, with your sound scientific backgrounds, will understand quite easily. I'm trying to get this machine to emit something or other and so I need a clock pulse to make it happen. See, the way it works, is there's this digital signal. It looks a lot like a sine curve, or the graphs used on the back of transformers figures to denote power ratings, but they're square instead.

Then Dynamo made a drawing, showing us how you can fit a bunch of small, tiny digital signals in the space of a larger, digital signal. Whatever the peak sine thing is called, and all that. I'm still not quite sure why.

Me: Are you having trouble due to the black box theory?

Dynamo's lady friend: What's the black box theory?

Me: It's like when there's a cat inside a box, and you're not sure if it's dead or alive, but it probably isn't alive. Because live cats tend to crap everywhere and make a general mess of things. Or maybe that's Shroeder's principle. Which would probably help clear up the backyard problem.

Dynamo: No, that's not what it is, it's...

DLF: Oh, it's like back in math class, when you have a math problem, and it's 2 + box = 3, and you don't know what's in the box and it could be anything.*

Me: Well, it's always going to be 1, or some form of it at least, like 16 over 16. See, what it actually is, things go into a hypothetical black box, and then come out, and you don't know why they came out as they did or how, but it doesn't matter. You just know that it did. Kinda like a really complicated paper shredder or pasta maker where someone else put in the ingredients.

Dynamo: Ok, yes...well, at least you two didn't talk about parallelograms or wolves. So I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this, and while L Bo I know you're curious about why you can't just create the code once and copy it over and over, attenuator.

Me: What's an attenuator?

Dynamo: Also, actuator.

Me: ....?

Dynamo: It can be anything. It actuates things.

Me: So once you come up with the code, how do you add that onto the computer chip?

Dynamo: See, there's gates, and you can open or close different ones for a reason you won't understand. I use VHDL** to make the program, and then...well, since you probably already know how it's done, why don't you explain?

Me: Ok, so when you're done with all the programming, a giant stamper, similar to the flavor gun used on Cinnamon Toast Crunch, is used to impart all the knowledge onto each individual computer chip that is created, right?

At this point, we went off on a bit of a tangent and discussed the benefits of a stranger...which Dynamo kindly demonstrated the preparation for. Then proceeded to watch Tivo like a stranger. Dynamo's lady friend told us to stop being 7th graders. But honestly, 7th graders don't yet know about the stranger, as they're still infatuated with regular.

Dynamo brought the conversation back on track by explaining to me why a clock pulse was needed to time the increments that his machine emitted something or other, and what a clock pulse (which he had started to explain 2 hours prior at the beginning of the conversation) was.

Dynamo: Ok, well picture a clock...tick, tock, tick, tock.

Me: Oh, so it's like a clock. With a pulse. Hey, that's why they call it a clock pulse. Makes sense.

Dynamo, lying on the floor after falling off the couch: Ouch.

*DLF stands for Dynamo's Lady Friend. And she almost always speaks in mathematical symbols.

**"VHDL clearly stands for Voltron Hyper Markup Text Language," I knowingly interrupted with at that point.