The batter has to estimate the necessary position by doing an impressive amount of computation. All a batter has to go on is a view of the unfolding pitch, which you can think of as a series of pictures giving the position of the ball. From the change in position between successive pictures, the batter can estimate the speed and direction of the ball’s motion. That estimate gets refined and updated over the third of a second or so in which the batter gets to track the ball before the swing needs to start.
It’s nearly impossible to overstate how difficult a problem this is– just being able to reliably pick the baseball out of a complicated visual field is an impressive achievement. Human brains are highly optimized for this sort of task, though, which is why so many “citizen science” projects revolve around identifying patterns in images. We’re also programmed to make the necessary on-the-fly calculations to estimate the current velocity and future position of the approaching ball. While professional baseball players have honed this skill to just about the highest level possible, the basic ability seems to be wired into our brains at a pretty deep level– my three-year-old son can catch a gently tossed ball more often than not, and his failures are more a matter of imperfect coordination of his motion than a failure to correctly predict where the ball will be.
I’ve had a few snarky things to say on Twitter about the Douthat Kerfuffle, and I’d like to say more, but I’m struggling with the evasiveness of some of the key participants. Consider the letter of protest that some … well, wait: Is “protest” the right word? Look at the letter and see if you can tell what it’s asking for. Some of the signatories have denied that they’re asking the Times to discipline or silence Douthat, but if they’re not asking for that what are they asking for? “We just want to inform you that this is not what we expect of the Times but we’re not asking you to do anything about that”? It’s impossible to tell, when you give the letter some scrutiny, what its actual purpose is.
Cloudy evasineness seems to be characteristic of the Douthat critics. For instance, Katie Grimes says, “I signed the letter because I believe he has uttered several factual errors” — but she doesn’t say what any of those errors are. (Nor does the letter.) Similarly, Brian Flanagan claims that Douthat misuses the term “doctrine,” but gives no examples, so it’s impossible to tell which statements by Douthat he believes to be erroneous, or how they might be corrected.
Most troubling of all, in the screed that I called attention to yesterday, Fr. James Martin says that “Mr. Douthat can rightly be held accountable” for inciting hatred, without ever distinguishing between the points Douthat makes that he deems illegitimate and those he thinks are within bounds. (Surely he thinks that some of Douthat’s criticisms are acceptable.) But the questions I have here are: “held accountable” by whom? In what way? Martin doesn’t say simply that Douthat should be criticized; being “held accountable” is clearly more substantial — but because of the lack of specificity, also a little ominous. What would count as being held accountable in this context? Having his salary cut? Being forbidden to write for the Times about theology? Assigned penance by his confessor? What?
It’s hard for me not to see this incessant vagueness as endemic to post-Vatican II liberal theology, a tradition in which so many priests and theologians can’t simply reject magisterial teaching but don’t really want to endorse it either, and so take refuge in a cloudy verbal world which they claim to be working within the “spirit” if not the actual “letter” of Church teaching. But maybe the current vagueness has other causes that I’m not aware of. In any case, I think Douthat’s critics owe it to him and to their readers to make an effort to say what they mean.
After young adulthood, he says, the reasons that friends stop being friends are usually circumstantial—due to things outside the relationship itself. One of the findings from Langan’s ‘friendship rules’ study was that 'adults feel the need to be more polite in their friendships,’ she says. 'We don’t feel like, in adulthood, we can demand very much of our friends. It’s unfair, they’ve got other stuff going on. So we stop expecting as much, which to me is kind of a sad thing, that we walk away from that.’ For the sake of being polite.
How Friendships Change Over Time - The Atlantic. That’s my former colleague Emily Langan talking, and I think she’s right. Doesn’t make things especially easy for someone like me, who in his mid-fifties leaves a bunch of old and strong friends behind for a new job in a far-away state. (Not that those people aren’t still friends, but like all relationships, friendship thrives on proximity.) People have been wonderful to me here at Baylor, but the “rules of friendship” for people my age influence us all — even when we try to ignore or bypass them. One of the recurrent themes in the rich writings on friendship by (my friend!) Wesley Hill is the fear of being, or being perceived as, “needy.” As long as that fear is in play, deep friendships will be hard to cultivate and sustain.
Frontispiece to Charles Howard Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension (1904), a book all about the “tesseract” – a four-dimensional analog of the cube, the tesseract being to the cube as the cube is to the square. Find out more in our latest essay “Notes on the Fourth Dimension” - [bit.ly/1Revr2B](http://bit.ly/1Revr2B)
Metalpoint was a major part of artistic
practice across northern Europe by about 1400. The fame of Netherlandish
artists such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Gerard David spread
quickly, and many young German artists travelled down the Rhine to learn in
their workshops. Metalpoint was used for recording facial types, figure
compositions and ornament designs until the mid-16th century. Albrecht Dürer’s
delicate silverpoints, made when he travelled in the Netherlands from 1520 to
1521, are among the most sensational ever produced.
The ultimate draughtsman of the German
Renaissance, Dürer experimented throughout his career with every type of
technique. His earliest recorded drawing is in metalpoint – a self-portrait
made at the age of 13 (now in the Albertina,
Vienna). Inspired by the Italian ideal of classical beauty from his visit
to Italy between 1505 and 1507, this sheet demonstrates a highly colouristic
use of the technique, achieved with white bodycolour brushed over silverpoint
to emphasise the sculptural quality of the face. The strong tone of the
prepared paper is reminiscent of the Florentine artist Filippino Lippi. In
later life, Dürer employed the sensitive restraint of metalpoint to make
portrait drawings, especially of his brothers Hanns and Endres, his wife Agnes,
and his close friend Willibald Pirckheimer.
This article reports the results of a nationwide audit study testing how Christian churches welcome potential newcomers to their churches as a function of newcomers’ race and ethnicity. We sent email inquiries to 3,120 churches across the United States. The emails were ostensibly from someone moving to the area and looking for a new church to attend. That person’s name was randomly varied to convey different racial and ethnic associations. In response to these inquiries, representatives from mainline Protestant churches—who generally embrace liberal, egalitarian attitudes toward race relations—actually demonstrated the most discriminatory behavior. They responded most frequently to emails with white-sounding names, somewhat less frequently to black- or Hispanic-sounding names, and much less to Asian-sounding names. They also sent shorter, less welcoming responses to nonwhite names. In contrast, evangelical Protestant and Catholic churches showed little variation across treatment groups in their responses. These findings underscore the role of homophily, organizational homogeneity, and the costs of racial integration in perpetuating the racial segregation of American religious life.
Worse, calling people names is disgraceful. Especially in the name of religion. These ad hominem attacks—an attack not on the argument but on the person–has no place in theology. It doesn’t matter if you’re attacking Pope Francis, Antonio Spadaro, Massimo Faggioli, John O’Malley, me, or anyone else. It’s completely unchristian. Feel free to disagree with us, but questioning our fidelity is out of bounds. Speaking of doctrine, one of Jesus’s lesser known teachings, and completely ignored because it’s so hard to adhere to, is his admonition against calling people names. “If you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Mt. 5:22)
Theology and Hate | James Martin, SJ. Fr. Martin then goes on to explain that the people who disagree with him are guilty of “mean-spirited invective,” “malicious slandering that passes itself off as thoughtful theology,” “mean-spirited personal attacks that pass themselves off as Christian discourse,” “hate being passed off as charity,” “ad hominem comments, thinly veiled attacks on people’s fidelity to the faith, snide insinuations and malicious twisting of words.” Did I mention “hate”? “Hate piled on hate piled on hate… And hate. An endless river of hate…. You are reading hate.“
I am gateful for this post by Fr. Martin, because it shows me so clearly what respectful disagreement unsullied by mean-spirited invective and ad hominem comments looks like. Verily, a model for us all.
