Fastballs&Curves

Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh on Baseball ⚾️: “Sometimes ya Win, Sometimes ya Lose, Sometimes it Rains. (Think about it)”

“So long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans.” Bertrand Russell

Here’s clip from my chat with the great @thewarrenhaynes. We started talking about playing with The Dead, and the origin story on how he linked up with Phil Lesh in the late ‘90s. Phil told Warren “don’t play like Jerry” and bring his own personality to the music.

Wild statistic buried in here — a majority of Americans, across all ages and political affiliations, think AI will “do more harm than good” to their everyday lives. There’s only ONE group that thinks AI will make their lives better, not worse: those who make $200k/yr and up.

TEN GUITAR INSIGHTS FROM REAL LIFE Work deeply with your material, both original and cover. Memorize everything. You will be rewarded. Don’t let yourself off the hook. Learn your songs well, make sure all your gear works, have backups for everything, be on time, play like a house on fire, and look cool doing it. In time, you’ll become a legend. Be more studious. New wisdom is always needed. There’s a reason why most Musicians Wanted ads say “must have car, must have own gear.” Don’t be that guy. lol Cultivate an inner life. Music is one of those things that can’t be mastered by technique, alone. The word “soul” gets thrown around a lot in our circles; find yours. Wear a clean shirt. Seriously. lol Get over your stage fright by being onstage until it gets comfortable. It’s the only way. I never struggled with SF but I was surprised when I first started teaching by how many students did. First and foremost, become a great rhythm player. Learn to think like a drummer and create a pocket. Be part of the ensemble. Soloing skills will build in time. Practice your basics and theory until they’re as good as your noun and verb agreement skills. In playing situations, you’ll need to be able to react, not think things over. When you perform, some people will tell you that you’re the best they’ve ever seen. Other people will tell you that you’re the worst. Disregard both opinions.

This is why I’ve said It’s Now Or Never. Zero emotional bandwidth left if it doesn’t happen this time around.

Tom could easily have won 350 major league games. Just had to settle for a mere 311.

@readswithravi Sorry folks, i’ll take my “lessons” from a better human than Bobby Knight. Beyond simply “temperamental” He choked a player, lied about it, destroyed the players family, & threatened folks whenever they tried to hold him accountable for his arrogance & many tirades

“The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win. Everyone wants to win but not everyone wants to prepare to win.” ― Bobby Knight

If you're wondering how Seattle's new 2-line train works over Lake Washington, this gfx really helped me... Eastside to the Mariners game? Cross the lake and get off at the Int'l District Chinatown station, then walk 6 blocks. OR Get off at Int'l District Chinatown and switch trains to the 1-line south and get off at the next stop. (Stadium).

High school gym teacher Leonard Skinner holds the latest album by a band of his former students Lynyrd Skynyrd.

@ThatEricAlper Neighborhood Schools as well.. 80% of those public buildings are empty for 12 hrs daily… public access 7pm to 10pm would be a win-win

i think this is a great idea

@TPNdustries He’s revered here in my music space.

How is it that this dude could found a band that influenced just about every artist to come after, be romantically linked to Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, & Bonnie Raitt, former member of Zappa's Mothers, produced Shakedown Street for the Dead, yet he is not a household name?

No one on Twitter talks about Little Feat but this is secretly one of the best live albums ever released

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” — Pablo Picasso

'Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist' - John Coltrane #jazz #art #quote

A MIT professor who spent 50 years studying how people solve problems said something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. He wasn't giving a commencement speech. He was being interviewed about a book he wrote after decades of teaching at one of the most meticulous institutions on earth. His name is Richard Larson, and MIT knows him as "Dr. Q" the world's leading expert on queuing theory and complex systems. Here's what he said: "Many of us in the age of instant Google searches have lost the ability or perhaps the patience to undertake multistep problems." That sentence diagnoses something most people feel but can't name. We've optimized for answers and completely forgotten how to think. Here's the framework he spent his career teaching MIT students instead. He calls it "Model Thinking," and the core insight is that every person on earth already uses mental models constantly without realizing it. When you plan the most efficient route for your errands, you are solving the traveling salesman problem from operations research. When you decide how much food to buy at the grocery store, you are running an inventory management model in your head. The question is never whether you use models it's whether you use them intentionally or accidentally. The first skill he drills into students is problem framing. He argues that most people fail not because they can't solve problems but because they frame the problem wrong from the start. Before you attempt any solution, your entire job is to define what the actual problem is using first principles, not assumptions. The second skill is accounting for uncertainty in every decision. He uses a simple example: if the ferry leaves at 2pm and the drive takes 30 minutes on average, what time do you leave? Most people say 1:30. Model thinkers account for traffic outliers, the asymmetry of consequences, and the difference between an average and a guarantee. They leave earlier, not because they're anxious but because they understand how uncertainty compounds. The third skill is the one he says matters most: doing the thinking yourself instead of immediately searching for an answer. He marks every exercise in his book with a pencil and blank paper icon, because the act of working through a problem is where the actual learning happens. Reading a solution teaches you nothing. Struggling toward one teaches you everything. His most powerful line came near the end of the interview: "Teaching a difficult topic is our best way to learn it ourselves." MIT doesn't just train students to find answers. It trains them to understand problems well enough to teach them to someone else. That gap is where most people's thinking stops, and where MIT students are just getting started.

@jwhittenbergK5 I agree with you Jake This “quest for perfection” in sports calls is “fools progress” - 1 thing slightly better, but several other things, decidedly worse. Turning MLB into a stop & go video game is not “better”

Unpopular opinion..but so far, I’m not a fan of the new ABS in baseball. Just when they got the flow of the game right last season, they’ve now moved a very herky jerky model of baseball that distracts from the game itself. Please convince me otherwise.

🚨 Brown University researchers tested what happens when ChatGPT acts as your therapist. Licensed psychologists reviewed every transcript. They found 15 ethical violations. Not 15 small issues. 15 violations of the standards that every human therapist in America is legally required to follow. Standards set by the American Psychological Association. Standards that can end a therapist's career if they break them. ChatGPT broke all of them. The researchers tested OpenAI's GPT series, Anthropic's Claude, and Meta's Llama. They had trained counselors use each chatbot as a cognitive behavioral therapist. Then three licensed clinical psychologists reviewed the transcripts and flagged every violation they found. Here is what they found. ChatGPT mishandled crisis situations. When users expressed suicidal thoughts, it failed to direct them to appropriate help. It refused to address sensitive issues or responded in ways that could make a crisis worse. It reinforced harmful beliefs. Instead of challenging distorted thinking, which is the entire point of therapy, it agreed with the distortion. It showed bias based on gender, culture, and religion. The responses changed depending on who was talking. A therapist would lose their license for this. And then there is the finding the researchers gave a name: deceptive empathy. ChatGPT says "I see you." It says "I understand." It says "that must be really hard." It uses every phrase a real therapist would use to build trust. But it understands nothing. It comprehends nothing. It is pattern matching on your pain. And it works. People trust it. People open up to it. People believe it cares. It does not. The lead researcher said it clearly. When a human therapist makes these mistakes, there are governing boards. There is professional liability. There are consequences. When ChatGPT makes these mistakes, there are none. No regulatory framework. No accountability. No consequences. Nothing. Right now, millions of people are using ChatGPT as their therapist. They are sharing their darkest thoughts with a product that fakes empathy, reinforces harmful beliefs, and has no idea when someone is in danger. And nobody is responsible when it goes wrong. Not OpenAI. Not Anthropic. Not Meta. Nobody.

@RyanDivish @A_Jude Every Decision that doesn’t work out => Wilson’s Fault Every Decision that does work out => Player’s Credit Mgr Dan Wilson will likely be scapegoat for all 65+ #Mariners Losses this 2026 Season Playoffs? If this team doesn’t reach World Series, M’s fan base will skewer Wilson

Thought Dan Wilson would go to Gabe Speier, who was up and warming.

A Harvard professor who has written 9 books and spent 40 years studying how language works inside the human brain just gave the most important writing masterclass I've ever seen. Here's what he said that broke my entire understanding of writing. Steven Pinker, the professor, opened with a single question: why is so much writing terrible? Not just academic writing, but corporate writing, government writing, and even most blog posts. His answer had nothing to do with effort or intelligence. He called it the Curse of Knowledge. The moment you understand something deeply, you lose the ability to remember what it felt like not to know it. You stop seeing your own blind spots because the blind spots feel like common ground. He watched a brilliant molecular biologist destroy a room of 400 people at a TED event. The man launched straight into jargon without ever explaining the problem he was solving or why anyone should care. The biologist had no idea it was happening. That's the curse. Then he said something I haven't stopped thinking about. Bad writing is not a character flaw. It's a failure of empathy. You cannot get inside your reader's head by trying harder. You have to actually find a real human being and watch them read your words in real time. He showed his drafts to his mother. Not because she was unsophisticated, but because she wasn't a cognitive psychologist. She was smart, well-read, and completely outside his world. When she lost the thread, he knew something was wrong. The second thing he said changed how I think about every sentence I write. Language is a delivery system, not the destination. What your reader actually understands is not the words. It is the image, the sensation, the concrete thing those words are supposed to summon. If your reader cannot picture it, they have not understood it. He asked: what is a paradigm? What does a framework look like? What color is a concept? Nobody could answer. Because abstractions produce nothing in the mind's eye. The writers from two centuries ago who still feel alive today were forced to think visually because they had no abstractions to hide behind. They had to say the spirit of the hawk tore into our flesh instead of aggression. The image did the work that the jargon could not. The third thing he said was the one most people ignore completely. Brevity is not about word count. It is about removing every word that makes the reader work harder without rewarding them for it. He quoted a line he had memorized for 40 years: omit needless words. Three words. An instruction that is also an example of itself. He said the best thing that ever happened to his writing was editors who gave him an 800-word limit and wouldn't budge. The constraint always improved the piece. Always. The curse of knowledge is real. The fix is simple and most people never do it. Find one person outside your world. Show them what you wrote. Watch their face, not the page.

'If you play Music for the right reasons, the rest of the things will come. The right reason to play music is that you love it. The Melody is The most important thing that must stay in the minds of the people who listen to you.' - George Benson #jazz #art #soul