Baseball History factoids

 This blog, while primarily dedicated to InnovaScapes Institute 'business data', is sometimes corrupted by my personal interests.  And those, as many of you know, include unusual historical serendipity.  And as I was composing the note about AstroVirtual in the previous post, I mentioined "Astro" and the Houston ball team, and I thought about baseball and Nolan Ryan.

So, dear reader, be patient with me, and hear me out on this (or skip ahead to more relevant stuff).

The movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, was a wonderful baseball fantasy, set in an Iowa cornfield, extolling the venerable game and its pull on the American psyche.   And it resonated in our family, a LOT actually.   It came out May 5, 1989.

My Iowa-born namesake paternal grandfather, Charles House, played Double-A ball in his youth; his younger brother Louie made it to Triple-A baseball.   My dad was the pitcher for his high school team when he met Mom.  And grandpa took my brother and me to all the Los Angeles Angels games for years circa 1950-1955, even introducing us to other ballplayers.  I got to know Warren Hacker, for example, the year that his knuckleball fooled enough batters that he vied for Most Valuable Player in the National League, with the best WHIP, and best Hits per game, and 3rd lowest ERA in the league.

When the Dodgers moved the Los Angeles, my dad took my brother and me to the 2nd World Series game ever played in the Los Angeles Coliseum.  The day my daughter Cynthia was born, I was at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine its first year, with my grandfather, father, and brother.  The scoreboard announced that I was now a new father.  Cynthia has never let me forget that.   I didn't know yet that my wife's first cousin, Jim Didion (yes, brother to the famous Joan Didion). was the realtor for Chavez Ravine, and had a box behind home plate where he intro'd me to Tommy Lasorda Opening Day 1997.

And luck be with us, my grandfather was still alive, at 96, when Field of Dreams debuted.   And he loved it.   And he knew Bob Feller, the original strikeout king, born in rural Iowa a year after my dad was born a few miles away.   Feller still holds the most 1-hitters (12) in major league history (now tied with Ryan).   Feller did hold the most no-hitter record (3) until Sandy Koufax tied him in 1964 (and passed him in 1965, to end with 4).   Koufax only recorded 2 1-hitters though in his total career.

In 1989, my dad was a golfing partner with Koufax at their local Paso Robles CA club.  And daughter Cynthia, see above, was now a marketing associate for a little Texas company, Home Sports Entertainment, which launched on 1/4/1983, airing home games for the Houston Astros.   Their star pitcher was Nolan Ryan, who had just passed Koufax with his 5th no-hitter in 1981.  

Through HSE, Cynthia got to know Nolan Ryan, and then Prime Network bought HSE in March 1989, and Ryan moved to the Texas Rangers.  And then, Ryan got his 5,000th strikeout on August 26, 1989, like 3 weeks after my grandfather saw the Costner movie.  And Cynthia got Ryan to sign a baseball for him, and sent it to him.   Wow!   Cynthia's brother Warren owns that baseball today.

I arrived at my daughter Cynthia's home in Plano (next to Dallas, and near SMU where she graduated)  to find a life-size picture of Ryan on her bedroom door, signed "To Cynthia--Love, Nolan".  Puzzled, I asked "How did this happen?"   She smiled and said, "Dad, I threw the Prime Network party for Ryan."

So, today I went to Wikipedia, and found more info than I expected, that also resonated.   Ryan was born in rural Texas, 40 miles south of Victoria.   My maternal grandfather, Henry Coates (I am Charles Henry House, named for both grandfathers), was born 30 miles east of Victoria (La Ward, a town of 189 folk todayl).  Refugio (Ryan's home) is 2,730 folk today, MUCH larger.   La Ward kids went to school in Edna (pop. 5,940), and their league included Refugio High.  SMALL WORLD, huh?  Van Meter IA to Jewell IA for one; Refugio TX to Edna TX for another.    

But how about that.  We had personal connections to three of the greatest strikeout artists in baseball history.  Only one other pitcher in the past 140 years of the sport has matched Feller on no-hitters, that being Justin Verlander in 2019 for his third while with Houston.   And Ryan for total no-hitters and strikeouts, and Koufax for 2nd most no-hitters, to go along with Feller's 3rd most no-hitters (and he missed four peak seasons due to WWII) still stand among more recent sensations such as Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and Randy Johnson, none of whom grew up near my grandparents.

Oh, yes, Cynthia, the girl for whom I missed the birth, took me to my 2nd World Series game, in San Francisco against the Texas Rangers, the 2nd game of the 2010 World Series.   Cynthia showed up, in a 95% Giant fans stadium, in Texas Ranger clothes--and I said, "Whoa."   And she replied, "Don't you realize that Nolan Ryan owns the Rangers now?"  Touché

Launching AstroVirtual Inc (AVI)

 My goodness, where did the time go?   My last post to this blog was in December, 2022.   Actually, there were five posts that month, the only ones for 2022.   And NONE for 2023.  Have you nothing to say?

Well, in truth, there is plenty to say, but seemingly 'no time to say it'.  Ever have that problem?   People in the middle of crisis don't generally take time out to describe it or write a book about it--they just ACT.  

Well, we've been acting.   My partner, Scott Futryk, and I formed a corporation last year, to little fanfare but with a lot of enthusiasm and hope for a couple of elder citizens.   Its name--AstroVirtual--says much.  It aspires to be "heavenly" or "star-struck" or whatever you'd imagine with an "ASTRO" prefix.  No, not the baseball team, although they've had some remarkable records over the past few years.   (Yes, Nolan did pitch for the Houston Astros, and serve them as an advisor years later).   More about Ryan and baseball in another post; this one is about our new company.

The posts of December 2022 describe our fledgling prototypes in modest detail.   Those have been updated, and some signal events have occurred along the way.  Here's a quick unverified chronology:

1. We filed a slew of patent claims early in 2023; these were 'fast-tracked' by the USPTO (US Patent and Tranemark Office), with the happy result last week that we've received advance notice of a major patent award for a sizable number of claims, along with encouragement to file additional materials (as funding permits, we'll certainly do this).    I don't know about you, but we've discovered that patent work is often a bit of an expensive hobby all by itself, and start-ups are usually lean mean machines (meaning cash starved--"oh, really?").

2. In July, Chuck was invited to SIGGRAPH '23, which was actually the 50th anniversary for SIGGRAPH.  He went as a "pioneer" thanks to his pioneering computer Display, the HP 1300A, from 1966, eight years before SIGGRAPH began.   It was heady, sitting alongside Don Greenberg, Andy van Dam, Jim Blinn, and Alvy Ray Smith in the "Memories" sessons.  And Don and I were invited to have the 'front row seats' for Nvidia's keynote by founder Jensen Huang, and then escorted by his aide to see him privately at the end.  WOW!!!

3. Huang's talk was amazing, and it is up on YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2VBKerS63A.  Because it is on YouTube, we have permission to 'play with it', and we took the opportunity to post it into our "Network Control Diorama environment".  Here's our AstroVirtual four minute extract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv--Why9LLo&t=244s  This extract essentially indexes multiple speaking points within his talk with separate video screens in the diorama--try that with your standard YouTube version!

4. We added two new environments to our "Standard" repertoire, raising the number of screens for an environment from 22 in the Standard Diorama model to 55 for an Exposition Center, and more than 100 in an EIS (Executive Information Center).    Every screen is dynamic, interactive, synchronous, with real-time pixel streaming.   The compute power to deliver this performance is stunning, but amazingly available at reasonable cost from compute streaming services (we're using a bank of top-end Nvidia servers to make all this run seamlessly).  

5. We unveiled the Exposition Center at the United Nations General Assembly in NYC on September 27.  This was an unexpected and terrific opportunity to showcase both the AstroVirtual environment and its visual power, with the three year COVID-19 Dashboard analytics that InnovaScapes Institute pioneered with the complex Dashboard designed earlier by Scott Futryk's "AnywhereAnytime" LLC.  The UN General Assembly, held twice a year with multiple focused workshops, has included a focus on Digital Health for the past three years.  For InnovaScapes to be invited to speak was a real privilege.  Here's the key talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z63I88yOUIc

There were other highlights, but this list is adequate for now to give you a taste of our progress.  Thanks again for taking time to read and comment.  All the best for 2024

Chuck

A busy quarter

So, NOW WHAT?  We've been experimenting all year with different presentation styles, a set of other 'settings' instead of just the Museum 'walk'

We call the museum walk, "An Exposition" or "Moments in Time" or "A Gallery".  You can imagine a number of screens celebrating historic athletes (high school, college  or Pro).  It's equally easy to imagine featuring prominent donors to a college--for example, for Named Chairs.  The one here honors Computer Scientists who have won ACM Awards.

Here's a different use of the Museum metaphor.   Here we are portray 20 Screens, each  representing work or an activity that is part of a career--we call this one the "Chuck House Virtual 3D Exposition"

We call another one a Diorama.  You may think of Dioramas from Natural History Museums where they would try to simulate a forest setting or a savanna with appropriate flora and fauna.  We think of it as a curvilinear expanse of screens clustered around a topic, such as this one around COVID analyses.  Here's one with 22 screens that feature stories around the past three years of the worldwide COVID pandemic.

And here's another one, intended to portray a person's career and achievements.

Here is yet a third one, built around a Mission Control Center idea, symbolic of NASA's Mission Control headquarters or the AT&T Network Management Center

.

We can also model a Lecture Hall, as found at many universities

As these pictures illustrate, many different scenes / settings can be created in Virtual 3D space.

Maybe we have something novel here, novel enough that we ought to think about . . .                 A. Figuring out how to build a product                                                                                            B. Figuring out if any of this is novel enough to worry about, or decide to, try patents

In that connection, we met with a semi-retired patent attorney who had been a kind 'friend of the court' for the Dashboard work in early 2020.  And, as things have a way of happening sometimes (not often, but hey, enjoy it if it does) . . . 

We together concluded that there were several elements of the adaption of "real environments" that we have been playing with, that merit filing some patent claims.  So, anon, we had to learn the jargon of lawyers.  Eventually, we filed a bevy of claims--numbing in some ways, gratifying in many.   Now we can truthfully and with pride say "Patents pending"

Doesn't that sound wonderful?  Wacky?  Improbable?

So, who knows--or as the old radio show had it, "Only the Shadow Knows"

As they say, "Stay Tuned"

A couple of Prototypes

The ACM HC workshop wound up featuring my work on video interviews, but I did include one slide from the possible Award prototype as a discussion primer.    Several attendees at the workshop offered names of historic Computer Graphics folk who might be able to offer suggestions.

Spent most of the rest of October trying to put together the "Chuck House 3D Virtual Exposition Center.

By October 23, we felt we had enough storyboards put together to make a YouTube film version, and I taped the first Voice-Over via a Zoom session, that Scott merged into the video.  after several tries, we had a version that we kinda liked, on October 27.  Lengthy, 17:43 minutes.

By November 5, we had a 'finished' version, 21:49 minutes.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkarQkMpmiE

I put together a note something like this:  

Here’s some ideas along the lines we talked in the late spring

The metaphor is.’walking through a museum’ and viewing various exhibits, screen by screen

Each screen can be “live” with a deep PowerPoint deck, a YouTube video, any web call, etc. 

The whole thing is dynamically compiled,.

What I am showing you here is “a film” rather than actively dynamic, but we can do the latter at your discretion.

The video is a tour of InnovaScapes Institute and Chuck House projects over the years

I’d be interested in your thoughts

I am including Scott Futryk on this email.  He actually is the ‘developer’ of all of this.

Best,

Chuck

Who got this missive, and how did we 'cast it'?

Sent  to carefully selected friends, family, and colleagues who 'might know the field'.  Those gave us some very nice comments.

Within five days, we had received phrases like:

1. Format lends itself nicely to “moments in history.”

2. WOW!  those are great videos. I like the idea of a virtual museum
3. "I think the tool is phenomenal"

4. This clearly is a great and very flexible platform 

5. it is very cool!   this gives a far more pleasing viewer experience. 

6.wow, what a fun and interesting way to look at data; it’s captivating, with drill downs, etc.

Meanwhile, we have been considering patent coverage or trademarks?

Which will have to wait for the next post.

In Just 3 Months . . .

 3 MONTHS -- not all that long, measured in career terms.

From September 16, 2022 to December 16, 2022, it was kind of a whirlwind with the discussions described in the previous post.

Scott Futryk with his Dashboard company and I with InnovaScapes decided to construct a prototype Museum not to exhibit Art, but to extol Award winners for an international computer society, the Association for Computing Machinery (yeah, well, the name is certainly anachronistic now).  It is the largest Computer Society for computing professionals in the world, and they give many prestigious awards annually.   And InnovaScapes Institute has had the privilege of interviewing many of the winners over the past few years.

And I shared the link in the last pose, but here it is again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RINmCtL6-K4

This prototype is very capable of some extraordinary things.   Every Screen--20 of them--is individually selectable, and able to be interactive.  So we can select any individual, or any award, or any year, or any country, just as an example.  And then, for every person with an oral/video interview on file, those can be accessed as well.   So snippets from their life, whether challenges they faced, school choices they made, help and support they received from their parents or friends. .... you get the idea.

So, we designed it so that if we "walked" linearly down the hall, we'd come upon each Award, with its description on the first page, along with the names of all of the winners of that Award.  If you switched to Interactive Mode, you could click on any name in that Screen, and it would transport you to the information on file for that person.   So, for example, if we are on the screen for Past Presidents (yes, I was one once), the top screen looks like this

And clicking on that gives pictures of some (this is a rough prototype, so not fully loaded)

So, for an ACM HC workshop scheduled for Sept 30, I showed a page illustrating the idea.  

So, it'd be fun to claim "success" at this point, but a lot of work remains, especially in terms of how the video interviews we've been collecting get incorporated smoothly.

More in the next post . . . .

Happy Anniversary

 A late-life romance?  Does Jenny know?  (before you get worried, yes she does, and she approves)

Scott called yesterday (December 16) to say, "This is our 3 month anniversary!"

Indeed, it was three months ago that I asked, "Could we use that 3D Art Gallery simulation for a project that I am working on, for ACM?"   And yesterday, we 'delivered' an updated edited version of what we call a prototype ACM Award Archive Museum.   

See it here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RINmCtL6-K4

As Scott said on the phone, "We had a great solution for a problem no one had, just sitting there.  And you said, 'Hey, what about . . . . "   And the succeeding three months have been a bit of a whirlwind.

It was way back in April when we first discussed gaming engines and super computers.   Scott had just bought a new Nvidea machine, and was cross-eyed from how blinding fast it was.  From the days when I was Chancellor at Cogswell College, this resonated. 

I was already embarked with Scott on the COVID-19 Dashboard work, started 2 years earlier.  It had been used by a number of friends and colleagues, and we were still modifying it, adding capability, and also performing some significant analyses (many reported in this blog).

But that work was mostly static, not obvious how this might or would be beneficial.

A week later, we'd animated the North and South Dakota data around the Sturgis motorcycle rally, and Scott had expressed his excitement for the AT&T control center.  "Couldn't we do this?"  

By May 1, Scott had embedded a scene similar to this, and we were exploring ideas.  The first was to construct a webinar using such a setting around Situational Awareness (SA).   This led to some time designing a couple of modules for that topic, which we modeled during May.   

We also did some exploratory work with Lee Blackstone (old HP colleague for both of us), and the Evans Control Systems products (derived from the old Evans & Sutherland Computer Graphics corp)

By May 20, we were able to mock up a Virtual Classroom, with COVID, SA, and DDDM (my old acronym for Data-Driven Decision Making.

And then, I took six weeks 'off' to move into a new home in Portland, Oregon.  Yes, work went on, but it was sporadic.  Scott and his London friend concentrated on building 'true' overlays for the COVID maps that could show roads and towns, not just county outlines.   And I 'chased' the questions of who made what decisions when (and why) in the early days when so much was uncertain, and folk were scared.

By mid-July, we'd examined the Cave 2 work, had expanded the COVID material, and we'd gone deeper into the bicycle company data.  In short, we were examining all of the Dashboard work that Scott had done for possible applicability.   Scott wanted to show my 'career'

I was not in love with this idea--it seemed (and truthfully still seems) boastful, and "who cares?"

So I changed the focus to trying to build a Dashboard for the HP Bilzer data, which is a lot of detail.

This was operational for the Instrument Group from 1980-1986 by July 20 (my birthday)

A month later, we'd populated the Chuck House Exposition a little more (August 15)

By August 30, this had progressed

And, to demonstrate that these could be 'live' as in a Sketchpad sense

So, lots of work, lots of promise, but in reality, not much clarity of any singular focus.   A little frustration even, creeping in around the edges on September 12, 2022

And then, a fateful question, on Sept 15, that drew this response

So, THE ANNIVERSARY, yesterday, December 16, is from this statement--"will BEGIN"

Within two days, solid progress

And, AS THEY SAY, THE REST IS HISTORY

We'll trace that 3 months of history in the next post

Hope this hasn't been too boring for you

Chuck

1,024 Days of COVID-19 Dashboard

 

Wednesday April 29, 2020.  Two and a half years ago, I posted my first blog post at http://innovascapes.blogspot.com/ about COVID-19, describing  my personal experience with this pandemic that had, in truth, just begun.  That struggle caused my to create the "InnovaScapes Institute Dashboard" with help from an old HP colleague, Scott Futryk.

For 2020, as the pandemic raged, I was religious about keeping the posts going--some 44 posts in 9 months.  Many friends got a bit tired of the incessantly poor news, and as the vaccines began working in early 2021, I backed off--only posting five notes from January thru May.  It has been quiescent since then, although I have created some analyses posted elsewhere.

You might recall that the early months were traumatizing.   The outbreaks in Seattle nursing homes caused a panic that went nationwide about oldsters.   Fully half the Confirmed Cases for folk over 80 resulted in death; meanwhile no one under 40 was more than a little sick.  Quipsters in Texas (like the stupid Lt. Governor) said that the oldsters ought to "die for the Dow" rather than force lockdowns on "the rest of us."   Soon we found that some clusters--e.g. prisons, nursing homes, meat packing houses, ski resorts, Las Vegas and Mardi Gras, and cruise ships--served as natural petri-dishes.   College students elected to have "COVID parties" -- until some of those turned deadly.   

As the lock-downs spread, so did anxiety, followed soon enough by backlash, and in our polarized society at the moment, by anti-vaxxers and 'end the lock-downs' rallies.  Lest you think these were emblematic of a uniquely American bizarreness, these scenes played out in Western Europe, and are just now causing major unrest in China even.

The surprises kept coming.   The first spike, noticed primarily on the Eastern Seaboard in terms of deaths (averaging 7 to 10 percent for infected folk in NYC, CT and parts of NJ), hardly registered anywhere else in America, except Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Seattle.

The second spike spared the East, but spread on a per capita basis all across the Midwest (PA, OH, MI, IL, for example).   The third spike, by far the highest in terms of total cases, engulfed the whole country, surprising those rural areas that hitherto had ignored it (MT, SD, ND, ID, WY).    Tracing how this all happened has been educational, to say the least.

Meanwhile, we kept collecting data:

So how about that--100 Million official US cases, two-thirds of a Billion cases worldwide.   And thankfully, deaths are down by anywhere from 3 to 10x the rates at the beginning.  So, we're 'sort of' out of the woods.   Tell that to the families of the 1 Million dead Americans, though!

Today, Monday December 12, 2022, is to serve notice that we are suspending new updates for the dashboard.  It will be active at https://anywhereanytime.us/covid19c, hopefully for years to come.   It contains an immense amount of material.  The daily updates were nearly 4,000,000 data elements, covering confirmed cases, deaths, both in absolute numbers and per capita for 3,143 US counties, 50 US States and D.C., and 196 nations.

It has several key features that are very difficult to find in other sources.  A key feature is the date-range selector, which can be done for any county, state, or nation, or any collection of those.  Another key feature is the geospatial choropleth map, giving incredible insight for otherwise obscure data in a table. https://datavizcatalogue.com/methods/choropleth.html

Three changes have reduced the desire for continuation of the accumulated data.  First, USA Facts (our primary source for the three years) has become intermittent with some unfortunate data errors.  Our back-up source, Johns Hopkins, has been great on States and Nations, but weak on history and on local counties and other county-like jurisdictions.   Second, with vaccines now more prevalent, the initial fearsome death-rates have been reduced to the point that public interest has waned.  Third, and maybe most important, the primary driver--confirmed cases--has become vastly under-stated with the advent of home test-kits.    Finally, of course, our own time, effort and costs seem better placed elsewhere.

In some subsequent posts, I will provide some analysis of various key points that we've been able to recognize through this work.  For example, the curious case of NO DEATHS in either Nebraska or Florida after mid-year 2021.   Nebraska outlawed such deaths on May 8, 2021, and Florida's asinine governor agreed with such an idea on June 2, 2021.   Nebraska stopped with 2,030 deaths, and Florida with 36, 973.   USA Facts put up with this absurdity, but Johns Hopkins has persisted, and today lists Nebraska with an unofficial 4,672 and Florida with 83,201.   

This is not to say that every death listed as COVID during the three years was correct, nor that all of the COVID-impacted deaths were included in other venues, but it is symbolic of our politically crazed times that these kinds of actions have taken place.

I don't want to disappoint those of you who have used this dashboard periodically--it will still be available, and maybe even to stimulate you a bit, I promise to complete the COVID-19 Diorama illustrated below in our AstroVirtual 'Control Center' in the near future.