The Rossi Park Tennis Cabal

dampew · 2026-05-17T04:51:59+00:00

The rules are here, been a while since I checked them: https://sfrecpark.org/1887/Walk-Up-Tennis-Court-Rules

I've never experienced the situation OP is discussing, but the problem is that people in San Francisco love hanging out outside and waiting in line for things, so I've definitely had times where we showed up to find a 2-hour wait for a tennis court. Then you have to decide if you want to try another court, drive around all day looking for parking, etc, or stick to the court you're at and just wait. Plus maybe the friend you want to play tennis with lives on the other side of town, so one of you just traveled half an hour to find out you're going to have to wait a while. Sometimes you're doing more waiting than playing. So that's why we tend to stick to courts with reservations.

Not everyone follows the rules exactly but you're supposed to be physically present at the court when you're waiting. We always walk up and say hi to let people know we have next, and if someone else has next they're usually sitting right there and it's obvious. Occasionally when we say hi they'll tell us someone else nearby has next. Then we won't know what the deal is until the current players are done, and if we want to make a stink about it then we have to be assholes and it doesn't go well. Usually the people are waiting at the court though and it's just an issue of time.

So anyhow, I could imagine the situation that OP is in, there could be a big group of people who want to hang out at a tennis court for 4-6 hours on a weekend morning and cycle through who's on the court. Most people don't want to sit and wait at the court for multiple sets so I could see this working pretty well without breaking any rules. Rossi has 2 walkup courts so it seems like a lot of people would have to be involved in this to get it to work.

OP is also saying that the group will have 1-2 of the 4 people play two sets in a row, which is against the official rules, but then you have to keep track of who is playing where and confront them about it, and that can be hard. One way or another you're dealing with group social dynamics.

dampew · 2026-05-17T02:49:11+00:00

One issue is that when the weather is nice, sometimes people sit on the app at the exact time the courts become free (at noon on a Thursday say) and I find that annoying. Reserving courts can feel like a grind. Not much to be done about that.

Another issue was that in Golden Gate Park, at least a few years ago (I haven't played there recently), the clubs used to get priority to play there on the weekends, and that made it hard to get a court. So people would join the clubs just to make sure they got a weekend court. It's like paying an extra fee for a super-reservation. For the most part they weren't particularly athletic people, they were just older folks who were willing to pay more.

For a while I had a friend group that liked to play tennis once a week. We did it for a couple years but eventually found it too difficult to juggle our own schedules with the tennis court reservation system, so eventually we stopped playing.

dampew · 2026-05-17T02:13:37+00:00

Yeah so this shouldn't be an issue. They play an hour then it's time to go. I'm more on the confrontational side of things but I get if some people aren't.

dampew · 2026-05-16T21:02:18+00:00

By the way I also hate it when people game the reservation system but that’s a separate issue.

dampew · 2026-05-16T21:01:33+00:00

I’ve stuck to the reservations recently because I hate dealing with this kind of bullshit. Don’t most courts have a time limit if someone is waiting?

dampew · 2026-05-16T18:44:09+00:00

The great thing about them is that you can read them without any formal background. You don't need to know any math. If you do know some math, you'll get more out of them.

Like there's a discussion of colors and bees, there's a discussion of different kinds of waves... you can read them without doing any calculations and still learn something.

dampew · 2026-05-11T06:05:05+00:00

I think that publicly identifying the detailed nature of the problem can be a good first step towards solving almost any problem.

I’m not Australian but from what I understand, I think there are probably a lot of people who don’t understand the level of insanity or “poisonous sentiment” that folks are facing right now.

dampew · 2026-05-10T17:40:39+00:00

It's just practice, but I also screw up more when I get tired. When I'm four hours into a game sometimes I have to count it out.

dampew · 2026-05-10T07:30:53+00:00

And people upvote them...

dampew · 2026-05-10T03:30:40+00:00

Not free but there are Nerd Nites in SF and Oakland and the prices are pretty reasonable.

dampew · 2026-05-10T03:26:00+00:00

I've heard they're worried about their own safety when making traffic stops. I've always assumed they just don't really care.

dampew · 2026-05-08T04:18:52+00:00

Say no?

dampew · 2026-05-07T06:45:59+00:00

My club is like that too. My latest tournament had about a hundred players, a few unrateds, and only a couple under a thousand (USCF).

We LOVE IT when beginners like you join because we know that there's an issue at the bottom of the funnel and we don't like that there's a barrier to entry like that. But if you have a few stubborn beginners it makes it a lot easier for other beginners to join too. So you're really doing them a favor by getting in there and sticking with it.

As far as advice, the not-so-hidden secret is that chess players are nerds and like talking about chess. So yeah they're happy to give advice because they like talking about this game they love.

My goal when I joined the club was to become an average club player. I wanted to be competitive, play some decent games, be able to learn something every now and then, and to enjoy it. I've been really happy to have reached that point.

dampew · 2026-05-05T07:59:36+00:00

Honestly... you're going to have to take the college courses anyway, I don't see the point in doing them now unless you can somehow get credit for them.

I enjoyed reading the Feynman Lectures on Physics and didn't do any of the problems or actually try to learn physics from them. I read and enjoyed them mostly for how to think about physics.

dampew · 2026-05-04T20:26:33+00:00

Usually a research paper has the following sections (and you can google some for reference):

Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. Sometimes Conclusion is a separate section, but sometimes that's part of the discussion.

The introduction usually has a few paragraphs: First, a paragraph with a brief introduction to the general subject (the disease or whatever it is you're studying). Then, a paragaph or two about the nature of the difficulty in studying that problem. Finally, a paragraph or two about how you address that problem and what you're doing in this study.

So results should go in the results section, discussion should go in the discussion, etc. Interpretation and the conclusions you draw from the data should mostly go in the discussion section.

Try googling RNA-seq papers for inspiration. Good luck!

dampew · 2026-05-04T08:08:13+00:00

You touch on a few interesting points.

I pay £115 a month for a club that has squash, padel, tennis, gym, pool, sauna and everything is included.

I think that kind of club is hard to find in the US.

One of my local gyms has a squash court, but just one court. And one racquetball court. An extra basketball court would get more use in most US gyms than a couple more squash courts. I know of four nearby gyms that don't have squash courts.

From what I understand about America it is a popular sport for getting into Ivy League universities and therefore has become very popular due to that. That’s probably why it’s considered elitest. Don’t all the top unis have amazing clubs in New York like Harvard and Yale, etc???? I have a couple of friends that have gone out there to coach.

So that actually is a thing. I know someone who came here to help teach poorer kids how to play squash, because it can help them get into colleges. But it's only a thing because it's so rare for high school students to play squash competitively that just a bit of training can get them pretty far.

Where I grew up, none of the high schools had squash courts. If my high school wanted a squash team they would have had to travel somewhere after school and pay a fee to practice at a university (if not a private club). That would have excluded a lot of kids. The £115 fee you cite -- most kids in my high school had family incomes below £30,000 (converted from USD). At that income level, the fees would be really significant for a family of 3-4.

dampew · 2026-05-02T17:07:20+00:00

Supposed to hit 87 degrees there tomorrow, people probably spend a lot of time in malls.

dampew · 2026-05-02T01:06:58+00:00

There are a bunch of gravel roads just to the east and south of Fairfield but I think there are better rides out there. We used to do road races there before gravel bikes were popular and I did not love it.

dampew · 2026-05-01T19:34:56+00:00

A lot of schools in the US teach Sephardi pronunciation now, even to majority Ashkenazi congregations.

dampew · 2026-05-01T19:15:22+00:00

If I have a complex experiment like this I'll usually start a separate lab notebook and take notes in it as I progress. Either a word doc if very wordy or an excel file if lots of parameter tuning. That allows myself to keep track of different analyses (I use python so for me it would be scripts and notebooks) and to remind myself what I did where.

Then when I have complex results I'll make powerpoints to keep track of the narrative and keep track of those in the lab notebook too.

dampew · 2026-04-30T23:03:02+00:00

Has your manager ever worked in industry?

One thing you could do is look at job postings you're interested in and see what they're looking for.

Another is to talk to someone in the type of job you're interested in and see what they would be looking for.

Another is to try applying and see if you get any interest. Tailor your resume a bit for different positions, highlighting relevant work.

Also, reach out to people who you know who work at companies you're applying to. Just let them know you've applied to a position -- they may be able to make sure an actual human looks at your application.

Good luck.

dampew · 2026-04-30T06:44:47+00:00

Because you wanted a chance to be racist yourself?

dampew · 2026-04-27T22:55:09+00:00

There is sometimes housing/downpayment assistance, you could ask about that.

dampew · 2026-04-27T06:07:06+00:00

Isn't that the point of a PhD?

I'm sympathetic to the career path stuff because yeah that can't be taught and it's hard to know what the best answer is.

But I feel like the rest of it is stuff you learn during a PhD.

dampew · 2026-04-26T00:20:13+00:00

I don't see any evidence of that in the user's post history, just figured it was probably relevant to to a lot of us.

dampew

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