[ExI] baseball for the first time and voting machines again, was: RE: META: Humour: Sex?

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of Mike Dougherty
...

>...This has similar problems (and solutions?) as spike's voting machine (I
know the voting machine is not spike's per se, but that that rant was due to
resurface soon anway, eh?)

HAH!  Thank you a hundred times Mike for opening this discussion, and do
keep in mind that it was our old pal Mike Dougherty who started it this
time.  Yes Mike, that rant is due to resurface soon, but not in this post,
for this post isn't about voting machines.  Rather, it is a parallel
principle.

For the benefit of Europeans, the great American pastime is baseball.  In
recent years, a big deal has been made about steroid use in professional
baseball players.  We have professional baseball players in big legal
trouble for secret steroid use and subsequent false testimony in that
regard, bringing up the weird possibility of a rich guy going to prison for
using advanced technology to play a game.

OK then, in the game of baseball, a Feller hurls a ball, and another feller
attempts to hit it if it passes over the plate within a theoretical square
region known as the strike zone.  A third presumed-neutral feller stands
behind the plate and decides, like a judge, if the ball is inside or outside
that strike zone.  Consequence: the feller behind the plate has arbitrary
power to decide in favor of whichever team he wants, the feller batting or
the Feller hurling the ball.

Here's the reason I wrote all that: for perhaps half a CENTURY now, we have
had the technology to install a machine to make that call, half a CENTURY!
With lasers, it would not be at all difficult to make and install such a
machine, and it would be a lot cheaper than the alternative, for the feller
known as the umpire is a professional, so he must be paid with each game,
particularly the high-stakes professional ball games.  All along, we have
had the technology to make those calls, or failing that, in measuring how
accurate is this umpire feller.  Yet...

Yet, as is the case with voting machines, that tech is being conspicuously
not used.

Why?

With the great American pastime, they are intentionally keeping the decision
on who wins every ballgame in the hands of a feller who is presumed neutral.
They don't even try to measure this neutrality.

With recent advances in high speed video photography, we could even take the
judgment factor out of deciding when a feller slides into a base.  They
could have video-analysis, realtime.  But they don't do it.

Why?

I don't follow sports, but to an outside observer, it looks to me like the
sports world is intentionally keeping the outcome of the game in the hands
of these presumed neutral judges, the umpires.

Sports fans and otherwise, what do you make of this?  Can you see why this
question is parallel in principle to non-auditable voting machines?

spike