Jake

Diversity is an essential and high-priority aspect of education. Schools are not businesses. Their purpose is to educate, enrich, and give back to society. Fostering a campus with as many different sorts of people as possible serves many purposes. In the classroom, you avoid groupthink and allow people of both majority and minority viewpoints to be challenged regularly. There are other inherent benefits to being in social relationships among people that aren't just like you. Society benefits from this as well, disrupting hierarchies that are relics of a bygone era and bestowing knowledge to all classes of people rather than reserving the advantages and happiness offered by education to those who can purchase it. And trust me, people willing to pay for everything never get left out in the cold. I've borne witness to the kind of leeway these people get, not just in admissions but in academic and disciplinary policy. Some of you might prefer how some of the top private colleges do admissions, during which they claim to blind the committees to the finances of applicants. While there are other ways to glean this sort of information, its heart is in the right place. They promise a certain level of aid based on your income and they admit you and everyone else without knowing what the school's cost will be. Many people (myself included, at one point) are transfixed on only the most quantifiable aspects of a potential applicant. What is the GPA? What is the ACT? What is the number of clubs? Even when we aren't talking about social justice-oriented admissions policy, admissions committees should have other priorities in addition to those others. How will this applicant fit into the mix of personalities here? Do their materials indicate a lack of maturity? Has this applicant done something that can't be comprehended in list format that merits extra consideration? My undergraduate institution, for instance, targeted applicants who had been involved with noteworthy charitable causes as high schoolers, particularly those that spearheaded innovative efforts rather than doing the standard sorts of Key Club things.

Yeah, it seems to me that Sam should catch on somewhere. He's in that situation where he's very likely deserving, but not so clearly that we can make any assumptions about why he isn't on a team right now

It is true that you could get a lot back in trade for Quintana, but the assumption seems to be that we get a lot back without harming the pitching staff. But that isn't true - Quintana is what's good about our pitching staff.

QUOTE (nitetrain8601 @ Sep 1, 2014 -> 10:42 AM) What browser did you use before? Curious because we are implementing Macs at my job. Both Chrome and Firefox were equally poor. Firefox was my preferred browser. Apparently I'm not the only to notice this

QUOTE (JamesDean @ Sep 1, 2014 -> 12:09 PM) It seems to be a different type of game in Japan. A couple of high school pitchers threw a lot more than that this past weekend. Taiga Matsui, of Chukyo High School, threw 709 pitches over 50 innings in the semifinal match of the National High School Baseball Tournament which lasted fours days. His opponent Jukiya Ishioka, from Sotoku High School, who also lasted all 50 innings, threw 689 pitches. It wasn't all that long ago when an American pitcher might have thrown 160 pitches either. FWIW, that was a modified version of baseball in which they use a rubberized ball that doesn't travel very far. Tough to say what that would mean in terms of taxing the arm

It turns out that I do get reasonably close to promised battery life if I use Safari.

The personal disdain people have for players like Dunn worries and disappoints me

I like Noesi and expect him to be in the rotation next year

I wonder if we try to transition Sanburn into a starting role ala Bassitt

I think Dunn's an A+ human being who has put in his absolute best effort for the White Sox. I have nothing but good wishes for him.

All I know about my Soxtalk 12-team league so far is that my keepers will allow me to get Jamaal Charles and Brandon Marshall with the 11th pick in the 1st and 2nd rounds.

QUOTE (bmags @ Aug 26, 2014 -> 03:55 PM) http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/26/...e-of-diversity/ Thought this was interesting. I don't disagree with it and, as is pointed out, the "fixes" are not straightforward given their cost to the schools. What you often see at schools that stake the claim that they are diverse is that, in fact, there are lots of sons and daughters of lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople...it's just that those lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople come from lots of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

I feel like, especially given that we are talking about the White Sox, that we'll sign him for a bunch and get no production out of him as father time hits him hard and fast

I've been as big of a Bryant fan as anyone, but damn does that guy strike out a lot.

Biggest disappiontment thus far has been battery life. I'm not even getting 8 hours despite sub-50% brightness, and nothing open except Chrome or Firefox (tried both to see if it would help with battery life). I even factory reset and went back to Mavericks to make sure it wasn't just something related to the Yosemite beta. The device is rated for 12 hours and lots of reports were saying it exceeded that 12 hour claim when web browsing. I'm not power using it at this point and it's falling far short of that claim.

I always felt like Hawk kept me company during games. He says some stupid s***, but so would I. I would rather have someone that feels like another fan in the booth that makes some mistakes than someone that drones on listlessly. White Sox baseball will be less fun for me without him - there's no doubt about it. With that said, and I don't know who the guy is, but I listened to the Cleveland radio broadcast of a game of theirs against us earlier this summer. Whoever their PBP radio guy is was awesome - a ton of fun.

How much does the average not-that-good European pro make? That is, after the guys like Mirotic who are paid top dollar on top teams

It's all pretty simple. Our top 2 are better than any guy they've got and they're elites in MLB. Rizzo is very good and is their only close to surefire good-to-great MLB guy. They don't have a guy like Quintana who is so proven, either. The Sox boast Eaton as another member of the core and Avisail Garcia as young, highly talented, and with some MLB success. I also believe Carlos Rodon is on par with ANY prospect out there. With that said, the collection of Bryant/Soler/Baez/Russell is loaded with talent that the Sox don't have in position players after Abreu and Avisail. What the Sox do have going for them is that while the talents near the MLB for us don't have amazing ceilings, they are very close to MLB and in the case of a guy like Semien have a high floor. Time will tell. The Cubs could blow us out of the water, but as of today the smart money is on the Sox.

I must be a bummer because that looks like it could only be fun if very drunk. I understand that that's kind of the point, but still

My first real interaction w/ OS X was (I think) Mountain Lion, so by then it was a lot like the OS it is now. And, of course, by then (just about 5 years ago) the irritations associated with moving away from Microsoft weren't all that significant. They still aren't. My gripes are very far from dealbreakers. As someone who is locked into MS Office, my main hope at this point is for Microsoft to deliver on the promised Office for Mac 2014 update. Not only do I not have much choice in regard to using Office, I really quite like Office 2013 on Windows. I'm also missing the smooth OneDrive integration w/ Windows 8.1, as I'm basically locked into that via the 1TB of storage I have with them through my Office 365 subscription. I'm thrilled that Microsoft brought OneNote to Mac and it really shows that it isn't built on decades of old code. I hope that is suggestive of how they'll deal with the next Office for Mac iteration. My absolute favorite Mac feature, which is also something that Ubuntu/Linux Mint/others have been implementing, is the notification center. Likewise, I think it's among the biggest flaws of Windows 8. They brought in these wonderful toast notifications, but once they've happened, they're just gone.

"I would go 0-30 before I would go 0-9. 0-9 means you beat yourself, you psyched yourself out of the game." - Kobe Bryant

Somewhat luckily, I do have some prior experience owning a Mac so it isn't a total paradigm shift for me. Both OSes have their pluses and minuses and in this case, it was the hardware as much as anything. I knew that this hardware and software combo was an incredibly safe choice - and that I couldn't afford what I consider a safe choice on PC right now. My next step is setting up an external monitor for my home office, once the money for it materializes. And I downloaded Yosemite on this bad boy - totally worth it for the interface refresh alone, as I found the prior iterations to be rather dated. This sucker is beautiful.

At this point, his health is less of a challenge. It's really hard to be away from the game for as long as he has - it will be tough to declare when he's officially "back" because it could take a really long time for him to get back into prime basketball condition, which isn't purely physical.

Also, got myself a Macbook Air today 13" base model today. I thought hard about some other machines, most notably the following: -Surface Pro 3 -Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro -Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga In the end, the main reason I went with the Mac was...price. Yep, you heard that right. I was/am in love with the Surface Pro, especially because I see a lot of value in active stylus input, but to fork over that amount (recall that the keyboard cover is separate and $130) for the same specs just wasn't working for me. This is particularly true because in my experience the same specs tend to run better with OS X than Windows. The Yoga 2 Pro had a better specs-to-price ratio, but I couldn't find a configuration that I wanted and I've heard bad things about the battery life. The 12 hour battery life of MB Air vs. 6 of Yoga 2 Pro is meaningful to me. Some of them use god-awful single-band N wireless cards as well, which is something meaningful to me after I invested in a top-end router. The Thinkpad Yoga is a really interesting device, but not exactly in the mainstream. It was difficult not being able to see one in person to go for it. I had the opportunity to get it refurbished for $700, but I didn't have a good way of knowing whether it had a well-documented (among owners) monitor ghosting issue that was fixed in later production runs. So I have a MB Air and at least 14 days to vet it and make sure it works for me. I'm not a specialist but I am a heavy multi-tasker who runs some statistics software and isn't eager to lug a charger to work with me every day. I'm considering doing Boot Camp w/ W8 since I can get a license for only about $10 via my employer. Anyone here use Parallels? Any tips for someone who is a bit of a Microsoft fan who is moving over to Mac?

I thought about getting TiVo so as not to pay rental fees to Time Warner, but found that it was actually a far worse deal to get TiVo given the subscription fee. Disappointing.