Jack Whalen

former: sustainable fishing, uni prof, info sys designer, 9-1-1 dispatcher, community organiser, Philly cabbie, Jerz boy; now ft grandparent 🇺🇸🇮🇪

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

40 years ago in Isla Vista - a rough looking venue, yes? so hard for us to to play in that challenging environment, keeping my mind focused on my drums instead of that unnerving scene behind me....

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@Jimfrombaseball Boswell had it right, 100%

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@aliciaandrz Last? You have thoughts about making full prof? I had thoughts both ways at U of O, but solved dilemma by leaving the uni for a private research lab before I was to go up for promo

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@tangotiger It is interesting how many - to me, observing games but yeah, anecdotal - low pitches are unsuccessfully challenged by catchers - more common for them to fail on these than on pitches inside, outside or above the zone? is there data on catchers (or batters) more common fails itr?

[UN Human Rights Council Investigative Bodies @uninvhrc]

Israeli forces have killed over 20,000 children & injured 44,000 more since 7 Oct. 2023, Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the @UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory & Israel, told reporters today. #HRC62

More on their new report ➡️ https://t.co/gK2KhtlgFb

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@susanslusser It is interesting, the way Vitello switched leadoff hitters and actually pretty much all lineup slots - depending on opponent and pitcher or who has been getting on base a lot lately or…? Chappy is actually not an OBP-type guy, strikes out over 20% (sometimes well over)…

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

This report is haunting even for someone who has documented the most horrific aspects of this genocide - which too many world leaders pretend not to see.

I commend the Commission of Inquiry for its effort to bring about accountability and make the truth accessible.

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@moorehn Yes, precisely the commonality
The Times, as a bulwark for the liberal establishment, is always keen (by default, really) to dismiss anything on/from/by the Left as ‘Upper-Middle Class’ and thus by definition comfortably elitist, politically naive, strategically immature, etc

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@thefriscobay Same same (albeit for a few more years)

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

I would like to see more politicians say this.

[Reuters @Reuters]

Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, and war crimes in the occupied West Bank, an independent UN inquiry said https://t.co/61poVhRzmR

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

Buena Vista Social Club is impossible not to love.

[Breaking the Silence @BtSIsrael]

"Never before have such serious accusations been leveled against an Israeli government and the entire defense establishment, certainly not by someone who once held ultimate responsibility for Israel's security. But after a long and painful period of restraint, there is no choice but to say these things plainly and in full"

An op-ed by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
https://t.co/GUvZXOSZUS

[Sarah Langs @SlangsOnSports]

Important

[Jeff Young @BaseballJeff1]

Logan Webb is 2nd among all pitchers with 1.1 fWAR in June. He is up to 1.9 fWAR on the year (tied with Landen Roupp for the team lead among pitchers) and is 'on pace' for another 4-fWAR season despite missing nearly a month this season.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Keir Starmer was not merely a disappointment. He is a mendacious figure of ethical decrepitude, a man who won the Labour Party leadership based on promises that he jettisoned five seconds after winning - a Labour leader who dared banish from the Labour Party not only his predecessor but also remarkable human beings like director Ken Loach - the gentleman who has taken the historic Labour Party and transformed it into a vessel for the very oligarchy it was elected to restrain.

Consider the litany of Starmer’s moral and logical failures. He promised a 'different Britain', yet his actions were a masterclass in Tory-lite politics—using the same maxed-out credit card analogies that once served the austerity brigades to justify his own failure of vision. He promised a human rights lawyer’s approach but he embraced a racist-lite version of Farage.

On Europe, Starmer promised Brexiteers that Brexit is Brexit yet stood before those who yearn to rejoin the European Union, winked at them to make them feel that Britain would gradually reconnect, even rejoin, with the EU while offering nothing of substance. This is not leadership; it is a fraud.

And then there's the manner in which Starmer and his government rushed to offer Israel unequivocal support in pursuing its genocide in Gaza, sacrificing precious political and civil liberties in the UK by imprisoning grandmothers, priests and peaceful activists who dared support Palestine Action, an organisation that Starmer and his minions proscribed as terrorists for practising the usual activist tactics of trespassing to spray paint military planes that had demonstrably aided in the genocide. To add insult to injury, Starmer performed the diplomatic pantomime of recognising a Palestinian state, in a manner that ensured it would never happen.

But above all else, this is a government that has learned nothing from the post-2008 era. Starmer and his Chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the Finance Curse perpetrated by the City of London, throwing in forgood measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a "Strategic Defence Review" . It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers.

History will remember Mr Starmer as a man without conviction, a Prime Minister who offers not a shred of honesty, but merely the cruel illusion of change. He is ethically decrepit because he had chosen, consciously, to abandon principle for power. And for that, history will indict him. Good riddance, I say.

https://t.co/sGfebPkDXR

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@thorn_john @OTBaseballPhoto Amazing how many years passed before Bunning pitched another one - and how many many many (relatively speaking of course) we’ve had since then

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@aliciaandrz Was same for me (just sub Weber/Marx/Durkheim for Shakespeare lol)

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@timkawakami I have loved your scapegoat lists. This first one for the Giants is a worthy add. Where almost everyone uses scapegoat(ing) to rage, call for cutting off heads, you write quite thoughtful comments/analyses, make me think (when howling is the default). They’re fun to read too.

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@aliciaandrz She lived in a condo in one of those big retirement communities in Florida, few if any of her friends knew any sociology (& my topic of 60s student activists was, well, very likely not their fave), but she did not care - ‘my son the author’

[Jack Whalen @jjw415]

@aliciaandrz mom and dad emotionally supported me (even if they could not offer $) all thru grad school, despite odds of succeeding in academia being poor (esp in sociology, altho not as bad as eng lit lol), & when I saw my mom kept a copy of my book on top of her coffee table my heart lept

[Brady Long @thisguyknowsai]

A German psychologist proved in 1885 that cramming erases what you learned within 48 hours. He published the fix in the same book. Almost no school on Earth has adopted it in 140 years.

His name was Hermann Ebbinghaus.

He had no lab. No funding. No colleagues.

He worked alone in a room in Berlin and ran every experiment on himself. He spent years memorizing thousands of nonsense syllables — made-up combinations like DAX and BUP, strings with no meaning — so that prior knowledge could not contaminate the results.

Then he tested his own recall at intervals. Twenty minutes. One hour. Nine hours. One day. Six days. Thirty-one days.

What he found became one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology.

Two-thirds of everything you learn is gone within 24 hours if you do not return to it. Within a week, the curve flattens near zero. The brain does not store what it does not revisit. It treats unused information the way it treats everything else it does not need. It discards it.

He drew this curve in 1885 and called it the forgetting curve.

Then he found something else in the same data.

Students who spread their study sessions over multiple days retained far more than students who spent the same total hours studying in one block. Not slightly more. Dramatically more. The brain needed time between exposures to consolidate the material into something durable.

He called this the spacing effect.

Same information. Same total hours. Completely different outcome depending on when you spread the hours out.

The finding has been replicated over 250 times. A 2006 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covered 254 studies across every age group and every subject. The effect held every time.

A German journalist named Sebastian Leitner built a physical flashcard system around it in 1972. An open source app called Anki turned that system into software in 2006. Medical students who use Anki to pass board exams are not working harder than everyone else. They are working in the only pattern the brain actually responds to.

The most uncomfortable part of all of this is what happened after Ebbinghaus published.

Educators read the research. They understood what it showed. They kept the cramming.

The school calendar was already built around it. Semester exams. Finals week. One concentrated block of review before the test and then nothing. The entire architecture of how most schools schedule learning is optimized for the forgetting curve, not against it.

The lesson is not that you need more time to study.

It is that the same time, distributed differently, produces a completely different brain.

Ebbinghaus proved this in 1885 with no budget and no institution. He ran the experiment on himself because no one would run it for him.

The fix has been available for 140 years.

Almost nobody who designs schools has used it.