This week I did something very unusual for a life-long Mets fan: I cheered the Yankees to their record 27^th World Series triumph. I have friends not even Mets fans who complain that the Yankees don’t deserve our respect because they simply bought their way to victory. I say the Yankees deserve our praise because they do what any great team is designed to do – they win and they do so in an exciting way. Now don’t get me wrong sports fans I am not about to trade-in my life-long and generally unrequited love for the Mets. When they win on average once every 24 years it is a sublime experience. However I have to hand it to the Yankees – they are a class act.

Baseball has been much on my mind lately. When my family and I moved back to New York from London last year the move went very smoothly and we lost neither children nor pets nor most of our possessions except for one missing item: My circa 1973 Rawlings baseball mitt. Not just any glove mind you but one that had been lovingly worn-in through years of play oilings and nights tucked under a bed corner. This was no longer a stiff piece of cowhide; this was as supple as a fine Italian driving glove. But now the mitt was gone vanished into that black hole where favorite running shoes iPods and keys disappear beyond the event horizon.

So you can imagine my horror when I had to go out and buy a brand new mitt to play catch with my son Walter. I have to admit that my new glove was a bit of an equalizer – wearing what felt like a cinderblock on my left hand I dropped as many fly balls as nine year-old Walter. But as I was explaining how I would never have missed a particular catch with my old glove a new business idea came to me. How many other aging ballplayers had lost their favorite glove or had it thrown away in some over ambitious housecleaning? Might there be a market for pre-worn baseball gloves akin to the market for pre-washed jeans? Would every dad need to wait until he could no longer throw a ball just to wear-in a second mitt all the time explaining to his wife why they needed to sleep for the next five years with a filthy leather glove tied around a baseball under their mattress?

As I was just putting the finishing touches on my brilliant new business plan a funny thing happened. I found my old mitt hidden in a bag at the back of a storage closet. It was even better than I had remembered it. Soft pliable curved-up at the end to scoop ground balls. So I grabbed Walter ran to the park and put the mitt to work. Walter was a bit surprised at my new-found zeal but I have not had so much innocent fun since the Mets won the1969 World Series.

Now if the 2010 Mets could only trade JJ Putz for Tom Seaver I could stop pretending I am a Yankees fan.

This is a post about curved spacetime. Don’t worry I am not going to attempt an amateur explanation of our four-dimensional universe courtesy of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Instead this is a story of how the current generation of kids relates to time and distance in a fundamentally different way from their parents.

I was on a panel the other day with Josh Silverman the ceo of Skype and I told him the story of how my 11 year-old daughter Mariana uses the service to stay close to her friends in London. When I was growing-up in New York in the 1960s and 1970s my family was fortunate to spend our summers in France. I had a group of “Summer friends” whom I only saw a few weeks a year and with the exception of an annual Christmas card did not speak to or correspond with either. I did not dream of calling these friends because international long distance was something reserved for three-minute emergency calls.

Contrast this friendship interruptus with Mariana’s social life. When our family moved back to New York after seven-plus years in London Mariana left behind some very good friends. However rather than falling into her father’s pattern of the occasional Hallmark holiday card and an annual visit Mariana stays involved in the lives of her friends over Skype IM SMS and other modern marvels. The quality of her interactions is also far different than mine were. Mariana remains part of her friends lives in real- or at least near-time. Where I might recount in the Summer or via a card only the highlights of my year these girls stay close to one another and share the more mundane daily texture of their lives.

I think a number of important consequences flow form this change in communication – most of them very positive. First these digital natives only have a single large group of friends as opposed to the geographical clustering of my generation of digital immigrants. This is not to say that space no longer matters at all – we humans even the most modern editions still live more or less in one place. However location need no longer isolate us.

Second the cost of Skype and similar media is essentially zero. This means that communication can continue until there is nothing further to say rather than when your three minutes of phone time or ten words of telegram cost units run out. My mother still tells me that I should call Cousin X when I am in Chicago for a few hours not being able to wrap her brain around the development that time more than cost is the limiting factor when it is no more expensive to call Cousin X from New York than locally.

Third the quality of the narrative changes when neither location nor cost impinges on the message. Mariana and her friends have real conversations – their sampling rates in converting analog life into digital communication streams are high. Accordingly they do not need to fill each other in about what happened in their lives in between messages; they live more synchronously.

I don’t yet know how my children’s lives and relationships will be changed by this bending of spacetime but just as Einstein noted that the position of the observer alters his perception of motion I am just an outsider looking on in wonder.

Why did early broadcast television often show images of announcers standing in a radio studio speaking into microphones? Why did early adopters of cell phones sometimes stand in old phone booths to make calls from the street? And why did the first websites launched by newspaper companies look like electronic versions of yesterday’s paper? [Clue: because they were.]

We think a lot about these issues at Thomson Reuters. They are examples of what behavioral economists and psychologists call framing. It has been demonstrated empirically that the manner in which fundamentally identical choices are presented (or framed) to humans can result in very different outcomes (See Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman 1981. "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice." Science 211: 453-458.).

OK enough social science why is this important? I believe we humans have a marked tendency to carry over the limitations of the last era’s technology to our first applications in a new domain regardless of whether these limitations remain necessary. It is as if our imaginations remain in blinders.

Here is an example from the professional information world I inhabit. The first versions of many professional database products such as our Westlaw required the user to first choose the specific database she wished to search before entering her query Google does not require this so why did we? Framing. Prior to electronic legal search researchers like I used the law library. If I needed to research an issue under Delaware law I went to the appropriate shelf in the library and then chose the relevant authority. So when this user workflow was carried over to the first electronic systems it seemed simple enough to require the user (often the librarian in the early days) to first identify the appropriate database (the “shelf”) and then formulate his query.

Old habits die hard but I am glad to say that the latest version of Westlaw now in beta has been freed from these old restraints. All the complexity resides in the sophisticated search algorithms and the interface is blissfully simple and elegant. A great deal of what we think of as innovation is really an exercise in removing our inherited blinders or jumping out of our frames. But if it were that easy the the first cell phone would have been an iPhone.

I shall turn 50 tomorrow which does not worry me at all. Not having set goals financial or personal that needed to be achieved by a date certain I am free to pursue my open-ended objectives: a happy marriage kids who seek success for their own fulfillment and not for the greater glory of their parents friends who share universal values but present them in novel and fun packages a dog who is always happy to see me and the sort of work at which one does not eagerly count the days to retirement.

As the philosopher-poet George Santayana wrote “For these once mine my heart is rich with these.” There is but one aspect I fear. In the Pyrrhic battle against aging but not age I put in my time at the gym and its sweaty blend of weights and technology. I have long since resigned myself to punching my true body weight into treadmills cross-trainers and stationary bicycles and I had little trouble entering “49” this time last year. However I can’t quite yet see myself entering “50” tomorrow. Perhaps for all sorts of good reasons I should get to the gym still tonight.

I like to play and to watch tennis. Roger Federer has been and remains my tennis hero because of his outstanding record of achievement on the court and because of the classy way in which he wins – he is the most complete and the most elegant player of all time. No one before him has combined both power and grace in such a potent competitive package.

I greatly admire Rafa Nadal’s huge power speed and ferocity (at least when he is not playing injured); I warmed to Andre Agassi over the years as immaturity gave way to pure heart; Pete Sampras and Rod Laver occupy their rightful places in my pantheon of tennis gods; Bjorn Borg and Pancho Gonzalez deserve special mention; and Arthur Ashe while not among the greatest players was surely among the greatest human beings to win a major.

In addition to the pure fun and physical exertion of playing tennis I enjoy the personal challenge of self-mastery and quest for self-improvement. Two mathematical functions describe my game. The first is the downward sloping curve of physical ability speed and power as I approach 50; the second is thankfully the upward sloping curve of experience court time and muscle memory. For the time being the slope of the latter exceeds the former and thus their point of intersect has been rising.

I also enjoy the mental and competitive aspects of the game marking my progress by epic matches with close friends with the satisfaction of a rare win over a better player far outweighing any disappointment at a loss. The parallels between sport and business are overused to the point of being hackneyed; however the focus drive and control required to perform at world class levels are similar.

It was thus with a tinge of sadness that I watched Roger Federer self-destruct Monday evening at Flushing Meadow. He coasted seemingly effortlessly through the first set and a half and then seemed to grow complacent. He let an imposing Juan Martin Del Potro back into the match and then could not take back up his game as so often in the past. I have seen businesses do the same including one I have spent much of a career getting back into the game.

I see this year’s US Open final as less of a passing of an era although Del Potro will all but certainly mature into a potent force over the coming years and more of a cautionary tale for all of us on the court or in business. We are at our most vulnerable when we achieve our greatest success and acclaim. A bit of healthy paranoia and humility so long as it does not bring on self-doubt and paralysis is no bad thing.

Federer has had a very good year in tennis and more importantly a very good year in life with the birth of his twins. His place in tennis history is assured and the next time they meet I have a hunch Del Potro will need more than his huge forehand to win.

My son Walter’s spring soccer season ended today – under the rain. It’s as if we never left London. Now I understand how prescient these kids were to name themselves the “Aqua Dominators” at the beginning of their blue-shirted season. The good news is that Walter age 9 really learned how to play the “beautiful game” during his seven plus years in the UK. He does not quite yet bend it like Beckham but neither does he sport any manly tattoos.

Passing the ball must be like underarm hair something that boys must await puberty to master; however there are glimpses of glory. The diving header (or as his English godfather Ed calls it “ ‘it me on me noggin mate”); the deft weaving through three defenders to score; or the diving penalty defense in goal. It’s great to watch your son score the goals you had planned to score yourself but somehow never did. It is also gratifying to watch teammates grow through the season and come to know their foibles (“Oh no not another pass across your own goal mouth”) and their triumphs.

Some of the fathers do get a bit carried away. Pacing the sidelines like frustrated Alex Fergusons (we Barcelona fans like our Fergusons to be frustrated) barking out useless commands to their children (“center the ball” “look for the open man”) or loudly overruling the hapless referee. The best invention in youth soccer is the “silent week” the team played earlier in the season. In those matches no noise is permitted from the sidelines including from the coaches. The idea is to let the kids organize themselves and learn in effect to coach themselves on the field. Not only did the team play well on its own but the parents (yes there are some moms) also learned that a marionette’s string does not invisibly connect their larynxes to their sons’ feet.

Some of the better kids are off to soccer camp for the summer. Walter has his own version –a daily regime of full field one-on-one against his dad. Judging by the spring season this may be the year that son starts to beat dad in one sport after another.