Jordan Ellenberg's Blog

Dean Kremer, the last Oriole among those acquired in the Manny Machado trade, is now a Twin. Almost the last link to the dark days of the rebuild. Ryan Mountcastle is still, tenuously here, and OK, there’s Keegan Akin, who I’d forgotten has been on this team since 2020.
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Kremer was never a star for the Orioles. But he was a guy who could more or less be counted on to show up and be a legitimate major league pitcher, so that every time he took the hill he was taking a start away from a guy of whom that could not be said. Guys like that have a lot of value. The Orioles seem to feel that, with Chris Bassitt coming back, and Cade Povich, Trey Gibson, and Nestor German ready to go, they have enough legitimate starting pitching. Does anybody have enough legitimate starting pitching? As for Trey Gibson, how did I only notice now that he has the first name of one recent Oriole and the surname of another? We should sign a Kyle Mancini.

The last time I saw Dean Kremer appear for the Orioles, he wasn’t pitching. He was catching the ceremonial first pitch, from Baltimore deli owner Marc Attman. The guy I was with said “Why’s Kremer out there? Usually a bullpen catcher does this.” Because he’s the only Jew on the team, of course! Attman’s Deli had a location in Cabin John Mall in the 2010s, my home mall, the place where as a kid I used to go to the Bagel Den, later the Delly Den. I’d always get their special, which was two mini-sandwiches, one corned beef, one pastrami. And play Space Invaders; they were the only restaurant my parents liked that had a machine, and it was tabletop style, true Space Invaders as far as I was concerned.

The game was this lousy affair, which the Orioles had many chances to win. Trevor Rogers had a sterling start but the Braves defense was equally sterling, keeping the Orioles from putting more than two runs on the board. Rico Garcia came in and Madison West High School’s own Drake Baldwin tied it up with the game’s first home run. Bottom of the 9th, the Braves intentionally walk Gunnar Henderson with two outs to load the bases — that’s a stupid move you should get punished for! Especially with Taylor Ward, who’s leading the league in walks, on deck, and a reliever who’s shaky finding the plate. 3-0 to Ward and it looks like we’re about to win. But Ward swings through one, then fouls one off, then grounds out on 3-2 and we go to extra innings. Everything falls apart, Matt Olson things happen, and we’re down 7-3. But then the bats finally wake up, or at least unexpected sensation Christian Encarnacion-Strand wakes up and hits a three-run homer (violating nominative determinism, as Tom points out, by consistently failing to strand baserunners.) But of course that’s it. Orioles lose 7-6. Weird team this year, playing roughly .500 ball but not seeming like a mediocre team at all, more like a team that’s great and terrible at once. O’s the Great and Terrible! Anyway, I got an XL Orioles Hawaiian shirt that I’m going to be wearing a lot. Anyway, I’m glad I made it to OPACY this year. Anyway, I wish there was a good place to get a pastrami sandwich in Madison, WI. Anyway, I’ll miss Dean Kremer.

The trade deadline for ancient civilizations is approaching. I am traded for Aeneas.

That’s what it looks like, at any rate. My dad says this is from the Joint Statistical Meetings.

Really nice new preprint up by Zhao Yu Ma. Earlier this year Mark Shusterman and I posted a paper which I somehow haven’t gotten around to blogging about yet. But the point (it got long, there are actually a few points, I should say a point) is that if V is a braided vector space over a field k, the sequence of homology groups fit together into a ring — let’s call it R — and is an R-module, which you’re gonna hope to show is more or less finitely generated by doing some homological algebra in the category of R-modules. This really goes all the way back to my original paper with Venkatesh and Westerland, which treats a special case of this. Anyway, a key point in this paper with Mark is that life is really good if R is actually finite-dimensional over k, which doesn’t happen in the Hurwitz space cases we used to exclusively think about. In cases like this, it turns out that vanishes in some range i < cn + d.

In later work with Tran and Westerland, we went past this point of view and treated the algebra that comes from taking for all i at once — the right thing to think about turns out to be a quantum shuffle algebra and you can recover R as one graded piece of its cohomology. But the structure is much richer than what you get by treating R alone and just thinking about the R-module for each i separately.

What Zhao Yu does is to combine these two ideas — but it is really much more than that. What he finds is that you get stronger control of the vanishing of if you have vanishing results for with all j < i, not just j=0 as in our paper. But what that allows him to do is argue that if, for some c,d it is true that vanishes in some range i < cn + d, then you can prove a homological vanishing statement with slope arbitrary close to the true c by some finite computation computing cohomology for appropriate j and n. (This is Corollary 1.4 in the linked paper.) It had not even occured to me that something like this would be possible! Very cool. And lots of nice applications in the paper to natural questions in arithmetic statistics over function fields.

Correct outcome, but imagine if Argentina had won this on penalties without taking a single shot on goal in 120 minutes of actual play! That could easily have happened, and what an embarrassment.

My proposed rule change: the number of penalty kicks a team gets is either five or the number of shots taken on the field of play, whichever is fewer. Couldn’t mount a serious attack the whole game and only made two shots on goal? Too bad, so sad.

Dream. I’m giving some kind of lecture to grad students with not fully prepared slides. There are slides that I made some time ago and have forgotten whe I meant by them. But what feels important is an image that’s just the number “7”, in black, sans serif font, against a plain white background; this is meant to suggest an unequivocal decision, something that just is a certain way, without ambiguity.

When I woke up this morning I found this dream and its central image puzzling. But it’s actually very transparent. I had to decide when to have surgery to repair my torn rotator cuff. Oh did I forget to mention that when I knocked my shoulder out of the socket I also tore my rotator cuff? So it has transpired. Apparently this happens a lot.

I worried a lot over the optimal date to schedule the surgery. Eventually I decided on August 7. The other option was today.

I have trouble sleeping — trouble staying asleep, not trouble falling asleep. I have found that the best way to get back to sleep at three or four in the morning is to listen to a podcast on a 10-minute fadeout timer. But the podcast has to land in a very specific zone: interesting enough that I don’t actively mind listening to it, but not so interesting that my braid maintains awakeness in order to catch what’s next. After a long process of trial and error I have found that millennial dating advice podcasts are perfect. Getting these little glimpses into the lives of the young and confused is never dull, but at the same time, anything you miss is going to happen again to some other hapless millennial single in a week or two, so it’s OK to drift off.

Anyway: Jared Freid, one of the hosts of my go-to millennial dating podcast, U Up, has a book out, called Walking Red Flag. It’s really good, even while being of no practical relevance to me! I like it, Dr. Mrs. Q likes it, AB likes the parts I’ve read to her. Presumably actual lonely millennials like it too. Freid is a stand-up comic, and as such has a deep feel for words and sounds. Pardon this coarse language, but I will never forget him describing his small sad NYC apartment with the sentence “I fuck next to the sink.” That is writing! That’s what you learn in poetry class! If it’s a good poetry class.

And not to be corny, but as the father of a son, I appreciate that Freid can be out there being a straight man who both wants to date women and also clearly actually likes women and is relentlessly normal about it. Bizarrely little of this in the male advice space!

Anyway, this is probably the only comic millennial dating advice book I am ever going to recommend on this blog, but it really is — there’s no other way to put this — a hoot.

Big screen, big crowd to watch USMNT against Belgium. Team USA, sadly, didn’t do much to make it festive. The three North American host countries knocked out in three straight days. Sure was a nice night by the lake, though.

I love the 1812 Overture as much as the next man, indeed substantially more, but I think it’s weird that Peacock’s “Star Spangled Sunday” baseball broadcast is celebrating America’s 250th birthday with a song about the Russian army repelling a French advance just short of Moscow.

Oh, hmm, apparently this is a thing.

Happy birthday, USA! Millennium-wise, I guess this would be the Q1 reporting deadline.

My old July 4 post about the Museum of the American Revolution.

Flag is out in front of the house. Went to the farmer’s market and forgot I should have put on my flag tie. When did I buy an American flag tie, for what occasion? It seems to me I’ve always had it.

On the way back from the market, saw kids decorating their bikes with flag streamers for the annual bike parade. My kids, when they were small, used to do this too. There will be a fire truck at the end and some years they spray the big hose in the air and the kids dance under the resulting shower.

No fireworks over Lake Mendota this year — budget? The surrounding towns have theirs. Monona is hosting the Wisconsin Wife Carrying Championship.

Wearing the American flag tie, 4 July 2024, listening to some American music, probably.

I might have been listening to this

or this

two songs for which — like my country itself, I guess — I maintain an unreasonably boundless affection and loyalty, and always will.