okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Good questions
Bill James on writing:
The key to doing a book like that [the old Baseball Abstract] is to find good questions — find things to write about which are new and interesting. A bad article about an interesting question will have much more impact, in the long run, than a good article about a boring question.
I thought Randy wrote some really good questions (I'm not saying he wrote a bad article!) in his latest post.
To me, the really interesting questions Randy posed are:
1. What control did I boom?
2. Is it obvious from the map?
He's getting at an issue I've thought about a fair amount -- can you predict booms by looking at the map?
For what it is worth, when I first looked at Randy's questions, my answers were:
He must have boomed 3 or 7. It isn't obvious from the map. I picked 3 because I thought it looked tricky because it was fairly flat and the rocky footing might cause some difficulty. I picked 7 because it flattens out a bit and the leg requires you to run along a hillside but dropping a couple of lines. I think that can be tricky to do. But, I couldn't decide which of the two controls, 3 or 7, that Randy missed.
posted by Michael |
8:50 PM
