USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010810.1007 (On Screen): I'm a big fan of baseball. Baseball has been played for 130 years, and at this point the baseball rulebook is huge and reads like something written by Congress. A couple of nights ago in a game I watched, a player hit a grounder which skimmed just fair past first base, then rolled foul (and thus was a fair ball) and into the corner of the stadium. There it encountered a large beer cup some fan had dropped over the edge of the grandstand and rolled into it and got stuck. The fielder ran over to it but rather than trying to wrestle it clear and play it, he stood there and pointed at it. The first base umpire ran over and looked at it. (Meanwhile, the batter had rounded the bases and gone home.) Then the four umpires huddled over it for quite a while, and then ruled that the play was a double because of "interference". The announcers read the relevant portion of the rulebook which described how if a ball became entangled in ivy then it was a double, and said that this was clearly the same thing.

But of all the rules in baseball, the two most important are these:

1. The umpire is always right.
2. When the umpire is wrong, please consult rule #1.

The last election is over, folks. The wrong man won, but the umpire has made his decision and it's time to get on with playing the game. The voting system is flawed and needs to be upgraded, but we already knew that and that's going to happen. Rehashing the details of the last election at this point is useless.

Sometimes on a close call the umpire has to make what amounts to a random decision. A pitch on the edge of the zone might be in or out; but it has to be called a ball or a strike. A throw may arrive at the same time as a runner; but he's either out or safe. The umpire (Supreme Court) makes a decision and the game goes on. In the long run the calls even out. (discuss)

Update: Perhaps one of the reasons I'm not as upset about this as some people is that I know that it is inevitable. In 1954, Kenneth Arrow proved mathematically that it is impossible to create a truly fair voting system. Setting out a list of six axioms about fairness, he proved that no system existed which satisfied all six. This was such a startling and pernicious result that a lot of people scrutinized his proof looking for errors, and no-one has found one. In 1972, Arrow won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. In other words, it was never a question of whether our system would malfunction, only a question of when.