One of the books I’ve most been looking forward to is Michael Lewis’ book on how the Oakland A’s baseball team is run, Moneyball. I’m a huge Lewis fan in general, and I’m a fan of baseball in general and the A’s in particular. Anyway, Lewis does a great job of explaining why the book is important in an interview with ESPN”s Rob Neyer:

This will sound strange but it is completely true: I was far more certain of the importance of the subject while working on this book than I was when I wrote Losers, which is about people running for President of the United States of America. I could talk a week without exhausting the argument, but the nub of my conviction was this: if professional baseball players, whose achievements are endlessly watched, discussed and analyzed by tens of millions of people, can be radically mis-valued, who can’t be? If such a putatively meritocratic culture as professional baseball can be so sloppy and inefficient, what can’t be?

I’m down two wisdom teeth today, so I doubt I’ll be posting much of anything.

Kurt Vonnegut strikes again. (via BoingBoing)

Anybody think that gunning down looters and other criminals in Iraq will somehow warm the Iraqis more to our presence than our current policy of ignoring criminal activity altogether? I thought that we were supposed to be better than the regime we deposed.

Kevin Werbach has a good point to make about LinkedIn, which is that it’s not yet a killer app, but that as it evolves, a killer app may emerge. I think he’s right on the money here. In many cases, it makes sense just to build something and hope to be in the right place to get run over by something great. The challenge they face is getting the people who are early adopters to find the application useful, and eventually indispensible. I’d be curious to learn what people with massive rolodexes think of the application. My work doesn’t really revolve around contacts, so having a network at all is an improvement. For people who work their networks all the time, I wonder what it will take to get them to rely on LinkedIn.

I originally wanted to sign up for LinkedIn because it looked cool and to see if I could stoke my ego by seeing how big my network could become. I’m one of those people that, for good or ill, pretty much sees anything where a score as kept as a game, and LinkedIn does a great job of keeping track of the growth of your network. Seriously, though, I’ve already dredged one useful contact out of my network, and I expect that there will be more. Considering it’s only been live for a week, I give it high marks for effectiveness.

John Udell has an interesting item on when it’s right to use J2EE/EJB. Like I said awhile back, the most important thing I learned reading Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans is that I’ve never worked on a project where EJB would have helped.

Best story I’ve read so far on the Jayson Blair issue: Farai Chideya’s discussion of being a black reporter that discusses the impact of race on newsrooms and how liars get ahead.

Molly Ivins sees the big picture when it comes to lying about Iraq’s WMD.

Imagine that there’s a guy who’s worked for his entire professional career to reverse the idea that nuclear weapons are a last resort, indeed, that we need more of them and we need to think about using them in a wider variety of situations. Would it surprise you that Donald Rumsfeld would drag this person out of the think tank ghetto and give them an important civilian position in the Department of Defense?