In the 1960s, I used to watch an early morning show called The Modern Farmer. It was mostly about tractors, tilling machines, milking machines and other labor-saving equipment. And soybeans. When we moved to farm country, our old house and barn was a trove of rusty hand tools, but all the working farms were doing modern farming. As I sci-fi fan, I saw nothing wrong with advanced machinery, but Peak Oil Hausfrau thinks they were full of manure:

What we call "efficiency" is actually the height of inefficiency. The foundation of modern agriculture is mostly just the addition of more energy to the system, and any fool can do that. Our current food systems are only made possible by massive wastefulness, ruination of natural systems, and unbridled use of our inheritance of fossil fuels. These are the costs that our economic accounting does not take into account.

David Seaton's Inside Baseball article/podcast reminded me of something I wrote on rec.sport.swimming back in 2003:

I just read three books in a row. One involved a boy wizard with a scar on his forehead. The other two were about men taking a new approach to their sports using ideas that were not new, but that had languished because they challenged the conventional wisdom. In both cases, their teams showed significant success due to the contributions of athletes that were not obviously gifted.

Moneyball, the bestseller by Michael Lewis, concerns the application of the Bill James' sabermetrics to the big money team sport of baseball. Briefly, "working with either the lowest or next to lowest payroll in the game, the Oakland A's had won more regular season games than any other team, except the Atlanta Braves. They'd been to the playoffs three years in a row and in the previous two had taken the richest team in baseball, the Yankees, to within a few outs of elimination."

The Yanks out-spend the A's three-to-one; they can afford to pay top dollar to get the best free agents available. The A's use James's ideas to find less expensive and overlooked players that have succeeded in ways that many scouts overlook. Unfortunately, the featured players from the 2002 draft (where A's GM Billy Beane, a failed "can't miss" prospect himself, completely embraces James' ideas) have yet to mature and really prove the premise. It is possible that A's have chosen a course that will always bring them a sound team but will never provide the players for a great team. I don't know squat about baseball, but given that they cannot match the Yankees payroll, the A's are definitely doing something right.

Long Strokes in a Short Season, by Art Aungst, concerns the application of Bill Boomer's ideas about technique and streamlining to the no money sport of girls' swimming at a public high school. For twelve weeks each winter, Coach Aungst coaches a mix of gifted swimmers, less-gifted swimmers and athletes that are simply swimming during the offseason between their primary sports. There is no recruiting, so he doesn't face teams with enormously greater or lesser talent, but he does face teams whose coaches still adhere to 'more is better' training philosophies (How do we do it? Volume!).

Already one of the better teams in the league, Aungst's team improved markedly in the six seasons following his addition of Terry Laughlin's Boomer-inspired, Total Immersion-style training to his regimen. His greatest competition seems to come from two teams whose coaches have followed his lead in using TI-style technique with their teams.

Orchard Park has great depth because even their seasonal swimmers, who might be kayakers or lacrosse players for the rest of the year, do learn to swim fast. Orchard Park does particularly well in the relays at the NY State Championships, finishing first or second at all eighteen relays over those six years with significant contributions from those seasonal athletes.

Like others at TI these days, Aungst is clearly fascinated with Eastern philosophy. There are quotes from the 'I Ching', 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' and a description of Japanese rock gardening from the novel 'Shibumi'. But he doesn't wallow in profundity; he can also be very funny, whether at his own expense or quoting Homer Simpson.

Coach Aungst was kind enough to answer a few of my questions:

Q - How does your Win-Loss record compare before and after 1997?

A - "... I don't mention this much, but in the last 5 years we lost one meet, and that was by a combined total of .14 seconds in three races. We have always been very successful and have only lost 5 divisional meets in the last 20 years, but ... I think the only valid comparison of program is us to us."

Q - What else might explain the better results since 1997? A particularly gifted swimmer? Better funding, better facilities, sunspots, or anything else that you changed? A decline at other schools?

A - "I really have examined this from every angle I can, and objectively there is no other explanation other than the new path we took. I have always had great kids who worked hard, were easy to discipline and who came in knowing how to swim, which makes my job a piece of cake. ... A prime example is that our medley relay had the same four girls in it and won the states in '98 and '99. All four graduated and we won again in '00 and '01, and finished second this year only because our backstroker slipped off the blocks. As far as the athletes go, they are by far the best I have ever coached, but I attribute that to technique-based programs."

"I used to coach age group and had many kids all year round, and I had lots of kids who identified themselves as swimmers, and that was their main focus in life. I think I squandered many opportunities with these kids in my earlier days. Now, (our) athletes see something that challenges their athletic ability, and not just their ability to endure."

"I left much of the book purposely vague, because I don't think I have many answers to things. I wrote it mostly anecdotally because to me it is much more about mindset, and how the nuts and bolts come together are going to differ from program to program based on all the variables you mention. To me it has been a much more rewarding process, and I think it has been for the kids as well. I only included times in the book to give people some frame of reference so that people can see that it also produces some very fast swims as this was the big reluctance for me to move to a technique based program. It is a hard leap for an old-school, grind-it-out guy like me."

"The main thing I would like coaches to carry away is that while it does make really good athletes very fast, it also makes terrible swimmers become so much better even if they will never be fast and it makes kids so much more involved in the process while giving so many more positive accomplishments than just times or championships."

I still don't follow baseball, but I believe a lot of baseball teams, notably Boston, and even teams in other sports have taken a serious look at sabermetrics.

In a related vein, Malcolm Gladwell just wrote a piece on a successful girls basketball team made up of relatively short and inexperienced players. The coach decided to have them defend the entire court, the "full-court press," against every opponent on every play, rather than let taller teams easily move upcourt into positions to execute their carefully-practiced scoring plays. His team made it to the national championships, where they ran into an official that decided any sort of defense was a foul.

All of which makes me wonder if we are entering an era in which, like Obama, we will have to pay a lot more attention to fundamentals, teamwork, small advantages and efficiency over swagger, individualism, overwhelming superiority and cheap energy - if we want to be successful.

Gaudeamus igitur
Juvenes dum sumus
Post jucundum juventutem
Post molestam senectutem
Nos habebit humus.

Ubi sunt qui ante nos
In mundo fuere?
Vadite ad superos
Transite in inferos
Hos si vis videre.

Vita nostra brevis est
Brevi finietur.
Venit mors velociter
Rapit nos atrociter
Nemini parcetur.

In between preparations for a low-energy future, Sharon Astyk ponders what she would put into a commencement address:

It is, I believe, conventional at college graduations to begin from the premise that those graduating are about to embark upon life in the "real" world - a venture that is supposed to be radically different than their carefree college years. The assumption is that the institution in question has given you what you need to embark upon a meaningful and productive future - you are wiser than when you came in, and perhaps more ethical, certainly fitted to the world of work. Now, I have been chosen to give you your very last bit of wisdom, something to carry with you into the future. So here is the sum total of that wisdom

"Everything you have been taught to expect is wrong."

Let us rejoice therefore
While we are young.
After a pleasant youth
After a troublesome old age
The earth will have us.

Where are they
Who were in the world before us?
You may cross over to heaven
You may go to hell
If you wish to see them.

Our life is brief
It will be finished shortly.
Death comes quickly
Atrociously, it snatches us away.
No one is spared.

In addition to writing for the Atlantic, Richard Posner is guest-blogging on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish this week. Seems as if he will mostly be defending his book:

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression

There is no basis for drawing the line between "recession" and "depression" at a particular percentage rate of decline. One month of 10 percent unemployment cannot be thought more serious than ten years of 9 percent unemployment. What marks our current economic situation as a depression in a meaningful sense, though not one likely to match in severity the Great Depression of the 1930s, is the intensity of the anxiety that it has aroused, the enormous costs that the government has incurred to try to stop the downward spiral of the economy, the possibility that those costs will bite us as the economy begins to recover and by doing so will knock the recovery off its path, and the further possibility that the recovery will be extremely protracted because of long-term changes in consumer preference.