EUREKA

The plain truth is that over the years we have preferred cozy murder mysteries from Quincy ME and Columbo to NUMB3RS, Bones, and Foyle’s War, and a little science fiction. Comparing everything to ST:NG we did not like the new Picard . We found ST:Discovery compelling in Season 1 and disappointing thereafter. After 20 minutes of Game of Thrones, we were sure that we had seen it or read it many times before. That all being as it may, we are happy to have found Eureka. 

When one portal closes, another opens. Always something happening here.

It is true that being only as far as Season 2, we are pretty sure that each episode runs about two or three hours. However, this is our time together and we don’t mind the fact that this show is like a Marvel\DC comic with someone else turning the pages for us. 

Sometimes science and religion collide.

Fascinating details flash by quickly.

The theme music reminded us of The Good Place, but the composers are not the same: Mark Mothersbaugh and John Enroth for Eureka versus David Schwartz for The Good Place.

Former space shuttle mechanic Henry Deacon and Sheriff Jack Carter
Even best friends have secrets from each other.

When I brought The Big Bang Theory Season 1 home from the Ann Arbor public library in 2008, Laurel could not watch it because it was too embarrassingly like her real colleagues at the university. But she got used to it and we have all 12 seasons on disc. In fact, TV shows such as that and this are like “breaking the fourth wall of the stage.” I am a little older, so I remember George Burns and Gracie Allen with Burns escaping to his study to watch Gracie on TV. 

Deputy Sheriff Josefina Lupo is one of the putatively normal viewpoint characters.

And now I work at a university, albeit as a blue collar non-exempt. I still meet the 3,000 teaching professors, 15,000 support staff, and our 55,000 very, very special charges. Some of them do neurological research and others have an atomic reactor. Then, I come home and watch them up close. 

We like the quirky yet predictable plots.

• “I knew it was her.”
• “You didn’t say anything.”
• “But I knew it was her.”

On Wikipedia here:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_(2006_TV_series)

Fan Wiki on Fandom here: https://eureka.fandom.com/wiki/Eureka

Previously on Necessary Facts

Nerd Nation 2.5 

JAG: 10 Seasons of Military Bearing 

FanFic by ChatGPT (Part 2) [NCIS meets NUMB3RS]

FanFic by ChatGPT (Part 3) (Bones meets Sherlock)

Nerd Nation: Natalie Portman, Danica McKellar, and Felicia Day 

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY

In my early teens, growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, I was a regular reader of Fletcher Knebel’s political humor column, Potomac Fever, which ran in The Plain Dealer. So, when the film version of Seven Days in May was recommended to me recently, I knew the reference although I had neither read the book nor viewed the movie. My interlocutor had just watched the film, and on the eve of President Trump’s Flag Day 2025 birthday parade found it disturbing. “What if those 60,000 troops don’t go home?” I have since read the book and watched the movie.

You might think that it can’t happen here or maybe you think that it already has. Fascism’s militaristic vestments notwithstanding, like Communism, it is a civilian republican theory of government. While military rule survives in some nations today, the rise of republicanism after the Enlightenment made it exceptional for the head of state to be the active commander of the armed forces. (The powers and duties of the President are defined in Article II Section 2 of the Constitution.)  

The last significant example of a head of state commanding an army in the field was Louis Napoleon III of France who was captured by the Prussians at Sedan in 1870. Previously, Napoleon III had successfully commanded the French at the Battle of Solferino; the army of their ally, Piedmont-Sardinia, was commanded by Vittorio Emanuele II, later king of the newly unified Italy. Significantly, no emperors were in the field for World War I.

George Washington defined the paradigmatic corollary of a general (or admiral) becoming the head of state through civilian electoral process. Of the 45 US Presidents only 14 had no prior military service. The two short lists of exceptions  run: Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt; and then: Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Trump. 

When I read the book, the characters seemed unreal to me until I removed myself and accepted that the authors were accomplished journalists and therefore, these portrayals were derived from their own experiences, being composites or sketches of actual people. My personal experience had been that in public you call a colonel “Colonel” rather than “Jiggs” no matter how well you know them. Clearly, the previous age was a different time. 

As to whether a military coup d’etat could happen here, this story may have been influenced by the events in France in 1961, with over thirty attempts on the life of Charles de Gaulle, a military putsch in Algeria, and the threat of civil war within metropolitan France. 

“How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” 

— Charles de Gaulle.

As for the storyline of the conspiracy itself, it seemed to me that the refusal of the Chief of Naval Operations to go along would have required his removal and replacement by the conspirators. They could not have moved forward while lacking one of the other Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

The President’s summary speeches in front of the White House reporters for the major news media also encapsulated another problem with the tale, in effect asking rhetorically, “What was their plan for the day after tomorrow?” Once you have captured and isolated the President and Vice President, then what? The Constitution has no provision for that. The order of succession was fixed by law, but in this story, the generals did not intend to install the Speaker of the House. They intended to rule directly by martial law. How and when they intended to stop ruling was never clear in the story. 

That  raises the deeper question of whether and to what extent the People would accept military rule. The movie version did show Gen. James M. Scott being wildly popular among some factions, especially at a mass rally of  the American Veterans Organization. The cinema version opened with a scuffle between pro-Gen. Scott and pro-Pres. Lyman supporters picketing the White House. It is easy to transpose that to January 6, 2021. Following the dreamland fantasy in which the rioters succeeded in hanging Vice President Mike Pence, certifying their own election results, declaring Donald Trump the President, following which he rides down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and assumes office—then what? How long could that situation have remained stable? 

If Seven Days in May echoed the crisis in France, that model depended specifically on the personality of Charles de Gaulle, who had been a public literary figure and a charismatic politician within the military even before World War I. Of Gen. James M. Scott, we had only a sketchy portrait of a decorated air ace. In the book, more context was developed to set the story a few years in its future, from 1963 to 1972, following a military failure in Iran and its partitioning. To me, that was not enough to sell Gen. Scott to the reader as the Man of the Hour, though in the book, the line is offered that every twenty years, we seek a man on a white horse.

It Can’t Happen Here

It Has Happened Here

In our world of 1968, Gov. George Wallace received 46 electoral votes. That was perhaps the only modern challenge to mainstream politics until the ascendency of Donald Trump. Wallace’s choice of Gen. Curtis LeMay as his running mate was problematic on several grounds and did little to help the campaign. (See Wikipedia on the 1968 Wallace campaign.) Furthermore, it is salient that Donald Trump’s vice president was, indeed, the very person who refused to certify his 2020 election and thereby became a target for the January 6 rioters, perhaps personifying the distinction between traditionalist and populist conservatism in America. 

Contrary to the plot of Sinclair Lewis’s warning, the actual attempt at a fascist coup in America came not from a populist groundswell but from a Wall Street cabal, the 1933 "Business Plot." Now, our hillbilly Vice President starred at Yale Law School and worked for a venture capital firm before entering Ohio politics. So, comparisons and contrasts are at once parallel and skew, depending on your perspective. And four dimensions might not be enough for an accurate projection onto our political Flatland. 

The State of Texas just enacted a law to require that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom. It was quickly challenged in court by self-identified Christian leaders. 

In other news, the State House and Senate passed a new bill to ban marijuana gummies and drinks and the Governor vetoed it, calling them back into session to write a law that can be enforced to the benefit of the State via taxes and regulation.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Book Review: Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” 

I Stopped Listening to NPR 

The GOP as Pushy Beggars 

Morality and the Philosophy of Science 

Against Gulching 

Late to the Game: Moneyball (and Ted Williams)

Growing up in Cleveland, of course I was an Indians fan, reading the box scores and Gordon Cobbledick every morning, collecting Topps cards, listening to games on radio and watching on TV. In college, I got away from it all. Working a contract in Cleveland March 96 to May 97, I picked it up again while the Tribe was hot and I actually attended a game but drifted away after Mike Hargrove was fired for winning division and league titles but never the World Series. Here and now, later this month, The Red-Headed  League is taking a multigenerational tour of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago just to buy peanuts and crackerjack. To keep up with the news while they tour, I have been reading books.

• Strike Four: The Evolution of Baseball by Richard Hershberger
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning and Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (also watched the movie twice)
• The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia (2000 pages of statistics)
• The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams

With Strike Four as background, Moneyball was fascinating. Although Billie Beane fought, won, and lost his battle in 2002, the concepts of alternative statistics had deep roots. The book and the movie both nod to Bill James, of course, and of necessity, the book reveals more of the otherwise hidden history. 

So, Ted Williams drew from me a wry smile when I read this:

“Now, if a .250 hitter up forty times gets 10 hits, maybe if he had laid off bad pitches he would have gotten five walks. That’s five fewer at-bats or 10 hits for 35, or .286. And he would have scored more—everybody has been crying for more runs—because he would have been on base more.” (Page 26).

It is just a glimpse of the theories that Beane was pursuing in Moneyball but it indicates that some professionals who thought deeply about the game had ideas that most others never considered. 

Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts is often cited in Moneyball as having been cited by others. James was not alone and it should have been surprising if he had been. Our common culture has been influenced by scientific thinking at the same time that baseball was evolving. The first rule book was published in 1845 and older (partial) publications are known. Also, unlike other games with simple tallies of points scored, wins and losses baseball is a game of statistics. In Moneyball, Lewis followed James in insisting that followers do not copy but develop new theories and test those with not just new data but new kinds of data. 

According to Hershberger, among those other researchers were Ken Mauriello and Jack Armbruster of AVM Systems. Later, Bill James worked with Dick Cramer to establish Stats, Inc., which was eventually sold to Fox News in 1999 for $45 million. (See, also, When Big Data was Small: My Life in Baseball and Drug Design by Richard D. Cramer; University of Nebraska Press, 2019.) Meanwhile Paul DePodesta met AVM and then was hired away from Cleveland by Billie Beane in 1998. However, as early as 1977, Dan Okrent bought his copy of Baseball Abstracts #1, and took the knowledge to his friends who met to talk baseball at La Rotisserie Française and hence, “Rotisserie Baseball” as the start of fantasy leagues. It must be noted, also, that in Moneyball, James is cited as having played “tabletop baseball” as a youngster. That would have been an expected (if not wildly popular) hobby at time when kids built large scale “soapbox racers” and miniature “slot car racers, flew powered model airplanes and model rockets.

That being as it was, it was not until 1981, that Okrent was able get Sports Illustrated to write about Bill James, Okrent’s first submission having been rejected by “proofreaders” two years earlier by for contradicting “known facts.” Even more to the point, also, in Moneyball: Mike Gimbel was a statistician for the Boston Red Sox; Craig Wright did the  job for the Texas Rangers; Eddie Epstein worked for the Baltimore Orioles; and none was successful in their roles. Today, things are different. Whether Beane was the prime mover or an agency of something else is for historiography to explore. 

Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers is about the astronomers (astrologers) between Galileo and Newton who came close to but never touched the relationships between measuring the area under a curve, the slope of a curve at a point, and the motions of bodies falling on Earth and the orbits of planets around the Sun. (See Copernicus on the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies here https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2017/11/copernicus-on-revolution-of-heavenly.html

In a science fiction novel (perhaps Neuromancer or Count Zero), a European clucks that Americans think that everything was newly invented in their own generation. In baseball, we now (2023) have a 20-second pitch clock on the field. In fact, baseball always had a 20-second rule. 

“The 1901 season saw the implementation of a predecessor to the modern-day pitch clock. When no runners were on base, a one-ball penalty would be imposed if the pitcher did not deliver a pitch within 20 seconds of the batter taking his stance at the plate.^[11][12] The rules were tightened before the start of the 1955 season, and the 20-second timer now started once the pitcher received the ball. However, these 20-second limits were hardly ever enforced, and were left to the umpire's judgement.^[13][14]”. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_clock

Major League Baseball does acknowledge the new science of statistics and at the same time grants the importance of the fantasy leagues of fandom. 

• MLB Standard statistics here: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/standard-stats
• MLB Advanced Statistics here: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/advanced-stats

“In the past several decades, the baseball industry has become more enlightened -- thanks to an assist from advanced metrics.

Although standard statistics remain quite valuable, advanced formulas and figures have played a pivotal role in the creation of championship teams -- both in Major League Baseball and fantasy leagues around the world.

Today, each big league franchise relies upon advanced stats to some degree, with a growing number of clubs employing complete staffs devoted to their study, development and deployment in decision-making processes.

Many advanced stats have long been tied to sabermetrics -- a reference to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) -- a term defined by Bill James as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." James, widely considered the face and most influential advocate of sabermetric study, has helped shape the lens through which the game of baseball is viewed.” (Ibid)

Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? Along Interstate 35 over downtown Austin is a billboard with a motivational message: William Shatner and “Boldly go.” Everyone knows what that means. So, it would be unusual, perhaps, if over the course of the past 35 years, science had no equal and opposite attraction for baseball.

“As in baseball, the discovery of bacterial diversity has experienced a transition from relying on the subjective judgment of experts to objective and universal statistical methods. Originally, discovery and demarcation of bacterial species required a lot of expertise with a particular group of organisms, involving difficult measures of metabolic and chemical differences. To make the taxonomy more accessible, decades ago the field complemented this arduous approach with a kind of idiot’s guide, where anyone could use widely available molecular techniques to identify species—for example, a certain level of overall DNA sequence similarity.” — “Science Needs More Moneyball” by Frederick M. Cohan, American Scientist, May-June 2012, Vol. 100. No. 3, page 182. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/science-needs-more-moneyball

George Carlin on Baseball vs Football

This was often part of his show and the content changed for different venues and  audiences. The easy narrative was that football is bad and baseball is good.

• Football is a 20th century game of technology. Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game.
• Football is played on a rigidly defined gridiron field. Baseball is played in a park where the foul lines widen out to infinity and every park is different.
• In football you wear a helmet. In baseball, you wear a cap. 
• Baseball is so civilized that the uniforms have pockets. 
• Football proceeds by downs. In baseball you are “up.” 
• Football has penalties. In baseball, it is just an error, (oops).
• Football is a game of land conquest. In that, we are Europe Junior. We advanced on the Native Americans ten yards at a time: Ohio down; Midwest to go. 
• The object in football is to drive through your enemy’s defenses with an aerial assault, a ground assault, a blitz or a shotgun. In baseball, the object is to go home, to be safe at home.
• In every other game, the offense controls the ball. In baseball the defense controls the ball.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Hail to the Spartan Victors? 

Why a Level Playing Field? 

Shrugging the Stigma of Success 

The Legacy of Vannevar Bush (Part 3: Conclusion)

The response to Pres. Roosevelt’s request closes with Appendix 5: “Report to the Committee of Publication of Scientific Information.” It is short and to the point: except for considerations of military necessity, all scientific publications must return to their culture of sharing and openness. Appendix 4: “Report of the Committee on Discovery and Development of Scientific Talent” addressed the immediate shortage of scientists and projected that demand into the future. Moreover, science exists within a wider culture  so the committee insisted that nothing recommended here should interfere with the recruitment and development of talented people in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. 

“Table 8 shows that for every four able boys in the upper quarter, there were six able girls. Table 11 shows that the ratio of able boys to able girls in the upper quarter enrolled in college was 6 to 4.5. Thus, it is clear that the greatest social and personal loss of human resources comes in the ranks of able girls in the upper quarter” (Page 198) 

Persons who receive benefits under the plan should be selected solely on the basis of merit, without regard to sex, race, color, or creed. -- Page 170.

“Likewise proposals for recruiting more college students into the physical and biological sciences and enlisting more graduate students for training in research in the physical and biological sciences should be viewed in the light of the over-all needs of the country and of the requirements in other fields of research and in the several professions. If too many of the limited number of high quality students are absorbed by fields of scientific research, research in the social sciences and in the arts and humanities may be jeopardized with probably unfavorable reactions upon scientific research.”  — Page 204

“As said in the general preamble to this report, we think that plans for the discovery and development of scientific talent should have a limit related to the needs of the Nation as a whole for trained talent in all activities that are necessary for the national welfare. We think, also as stated, that while we have no fears that too much top ability can be found and developed there is some danger that too many scientists of less than top ability may be trained, thereby debasing the currency of scientific training to the point where scientific careers may not look attractive either to the best or to the second best.”  — page 168

“The findings of this study, in harmony with the findings of other studies, show that approximately as many of the ablest high school graduates are out of college as are in college. 

“On the basis of the sample (of 1,754 cases), the upper quarter of the State’s 16,000 high school graduates would contain a minimum of 4,000 of the ablest individuals, the type of students who really do well in college. Forty-nine percent of 4,000 is 1,960 individuals with high potential college ability, who for some reason or reasons, did not enroll in college. From the point of view of the colleges, as well as of the individuals and of society, the loss in human resources indicated in these data is highly significant.”  Page 197-198

[Citations above are from —“The Utilization of Potential College Ability Found in June 1940, Graduates of Kentucky High Schools,” by Horace Leonard Davis. Bulletin of the Bureau of School Service, College of Education, University of Kentucky. Vol. XV. No. 1. Sept. 1942. — given on page 198]

Total probable deficit due to war 1941 through 1955. Chemistry, Engineering, Geology, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, and Biological Sciences: 16,870.

“… it takes at least 6 years from college entry to achieve a doctor’s degree or its equivalent in science or engineering.”— page 3, and the fact is repeated on 27, 156, 166, 177-9, and 182.

"No matter how capable and gifted boys and girls may be, if they do not have opportunities to complete elementary and high school, they cannot go on to college and thence to graduate school for research training." -- Page 192 

“All economic groups, except the highest salaried group, are represented the highest one percentile class.” — (Page 198)

“Brightest seniors are not going to college." (Page 199)

An Indiana study published in 1922 showed:

If we compare the records made on our tests by the group of seniors representing the richest and the poorest homes, we find that there are proportionally more children possessing the highest grades of mental ability among the poorest class than among the wealthiest class, and more individuals with high average grades of intelligence among the wealthier than among the poorer group. The wealthiest group ranks high on central tendency. The poorest salaried group ranks low on central tendency and also has a larger percentage of individuals possessing the lower grades of mental ability.

But there are individuals in this class who obtain the highest intelligence rating made by high school seniors. * * * (Page 161) 

"It is still more significant that so many of this most superior group of high-school seniors will not attend college, while those with the most inferior grades of intelligence are planning to attend, in ever increasing numbers. Twenty-five percent of the brightest seniors found in the entire State said they were not planning to attend college at all, while 65 to 70 percent of the dullest seniors had definitely decided to go to college, most of them having already selected the college they expected to attend."

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARYFACTS

The Legacy of Vannevar Bush (Part 1) 

Vannevar Bush’s Legacy Part 2) 

The Scientific Method (2016) 

The Scientific Method (2021)