Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
by Chris Voss, with Tahl Raz
Quite possibly the best book on tape I’ve listened to. Gives a how-to guide to negotiating on things big and small. Going far deeper than discussing opening offers, it details voice inflection, tactical empathy, mirroring, and how to handle deadlines. Maria also thought it was incredibly useful, and we’ll buy a hard copy for reference.
Chris Welsh has it covered, unlike THom and Jeff on the broadcast.
It’s nice that the Reds maximized their advantage and the umpires called it correctly.
Sports:
“Tuesday, he said he got 24 balls total – 17 in batting practice, two tossed from the dugout during batting practice, one from a Brewers player near the bullpen before the game, a warm-up ball from Billy Hamilton and the three home runs.” From The Athletic.
Energy:
Lopsided growth of wind power in the US.
Installation costs so much that it’s better to use expensive solar panels.
Sports:
First pitcher in baseball history with at least eight strikeouts in a game during which every out he recorded was a strikeout. With a generous strike zone. The Athletic subscription req’d. More words about Hader.
Energy:
Portugal’s renewable production exceeds total consumption in March. Wow. “Hydroelectricity and wind energy accounted for the lion’s share of renewable energy production, with 55% and 42% respectively.”
Last year, oil and gas companies in North Dakota flared over $220 million worth of natural gas.
First Solar expanding operations in Ohio.
It is comical that today’s XKCD deals with bloated Python installations. I am in the midst of torching my old installation(s), which no longer seems to work.
I have previously advocated using Eclipse and PyDev as a Python development environment. But, as Java/Python/Eclipse updated and screwed up my workflow for the billionth time, I’m fed up with it. I’m switching to the Anaconda environment. It’s supposed to be good for data science related tasks, and seems to have an interface similar to RStudio. I’ve already learned that it’s important to install this environment locally instead of “for all users”, as it’s terrible at handling admin permissions.
Academic Minutiae will be my new Monday post series until I get bored of it. I’m sure there are an infinite amount of administrative or tedious tasks I can joke/complain about.
New video from INFORMS.
What happened to “The Science of Better” as a tagline?
Sports:
The Reds Have a Baseball Unicorn, so Why Aren’t They Developing the Next Shohei Ohtani?
Superstars in the NBA playoffs, and the heightening of income inequality. Speculative, as Tyler Cowen would say.
Nobody had any idea what was going on in the Pacers-Cavs Game 4 finish.
Energy:
Tech firms like Google, Amazon push power companies toward solar and wind, a blow to coal. “It’s become such a movement that last year, U.S. corporations bought more renewable power than utilities did.”
The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry
by Irving Rein, Ben Shields, and Adam Grossman, 2014
This book was among the conference swag at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference a few years ago. I finally got around to reading it. I was expecting it to focus more on analytics and strategy in on-the-field performance, but it is actually about managing professional teams and athletic departments off-the-field. Overall, perhaps 2-3 of the chapters kept me riveted, but the other 8-9 dragged on. The best part was the call-out boxes that took deep dives into topical anecdotes, such as how the Dayton Dragons (class A minor league team) have a 1000+ game sellout streak or how the Tennessee Volunteers handled Pat Summit’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. Worth reading and referencing if your are in a management, marketing, or public relations role in a popular company or for a sports organization.
Sports:
Little 500 weekend.
Energy:
Rocky Mountain Power’s planned shift from coal to renewables. Rocky Mountain Power is one of my numerical examples in an upcoming paper.
How Google and Walmart work with utilities to procure clean power.
Other:
Cryptocurrency startup with a 12-year-old CEO, Pocketful of Quarters, wants to let you transfer in-game money across games.
From USENET to Facebook: The second time as farce.