Borel Dice Edition - Brute Forcing Experiments

 

Borel and Borel: Dice Edition are educational games about probability. I picked up a copy of each because I thought they would be useful in introducing some ideas of probability and gambling without the cultural baggage of better known games.

 

I'm biased because it's my field, but Borel has a lot more play value than most games of its kind. The dice edition, which is much easier to find, and easier to get into and play, has a set of 7 dice (four 6-sided, and one each of a 10-sided, 20-sided and 30-sided die), and a deck of 100 "experiments", like Experiment 001:

 

T1B: Goodhart's Law and Baserunning

When I was about 11 years old, I was good at running, good enough to represent my elementary school as the anchor in a relay at a district track meet. This prompted all the grown-ups in my life to coach me on running. They told me all sorts of tricks about keeping my hands flat and remembering to breathe and to keep in a straight line and to keep from dragging my feet and to start early to get the baton.

The race came and I did all those things – hands, breathing, straight line, no dragging, start early. I forgot, however, to run. I blew a huge lead by running in perfect form, but in slow motion.

What's the lesson here?

Lost Chapter: Writing for your Career

 This is one of the 'lost chapters' of the textbook "Writing for Statistics and Data Science", which was removed because information changes too quickly. This chapter covers data science resumes, describing class projects to businesses, and writing letters of introduction to potential grad supervisors.

Textbook: Writing for Statistics and Data Science

If you are looking for my textbook

Writing for Statistics and Data Science

here it is for free in the Open Educational Resource Commons.

Writing for Statistics and Data Science is given out under the Creative Commons 3.0 - Attribution license. That means you and anyone else has the right to copy it, change it, even sell your version of it, as long as credit for the original continues to be attributed to me. In short, it's open source, have fun. 

There were a few chapters that I didn't include because they were either too niche or too prone to becoming obsolete. I'll be posting them here on the blog, with links being added in this post as those chapters go up. Details after the break.

 

Review of The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic

 

There are two reasons why I read Review of The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, Second Edition (2009), by Richard A. Epstein, which dictated which of the text's 440 pages I paid attention to and which I skimmed.

 

First, to learn more of the fundamentals of betting strategy for my current job at Sportlogiq. Second, to get material to include in a possible future Statistics and Gambling course.

Fantasy League Sports Cards

 

The sports card industry (specifically baseball cards) crashed in 1994. Fantasy sports existed as early as the 60's, but really caught public attention around 1995. That timing is not coincident.

In both hobbies, fans get to have  surrogate ownership of players, and the market value of those surrogates goes up or down with the performance of those players. At the casual level, being in a fantasy league is just a more publicly acceptable way to collect and play with cards. At the serious level, fantasy is a more viable, faster way to make a profit with your expertise than cards were.

In short, fantasy is just trading cards for grown ups.

But what if physical cards let you draft players?

 

Soccer-to-Hockey Translation Guide

Hockey and soccer (ice hockey and football) are similar enough from a fan or analytics perspective that if you’re familiar with one, it’s easy to become familiar with another. There could be a whole new world of sport you’re missing out on!

In this article I’ve organized many of the parallels and contrasts between hockey and soccer so that you can watch a few games and of either one and confidently say that "hockey is just like soccer except X instead of Y".

 

The Price of Carbon Absolution

Worrying about everything else is wearing down my sanity. Worrying about climate change feels like a welcome, familiar distraction because the solutions are so linear. We can literally money our way out of this one, but it's a lot of money? How much, exactly, is the personal price of carbon absolution?

Statistics, Gambling, and Games of Chance

This is a proposal for a survey course on statistics that uses gambling extensively in examples. The target audience is senior undergraduates with a non-statistical background, but quantitative students will also find enough novelty to be interested. The goal of the course is not to encourage gambling, but to use it as a vehicle for a broad range of otherwise difficult statistical topics.

Cheating vs Innovation in Sports

Why do some changes in sports end up being considered cheating, and others innovation? Let's look at some historical examples for patterns.

 

In baseball, "the shift" is a strategy in which defensive players deviate, or ‘shift’ from the default locations for their positions to locations closer to where they expect the ball to land. This practice has had a measurable statistical effect on the game; hits other than home runs have become rarer, and the hits that do happen are more often singles compared to seasons before 2010. The shift is simply data-driven strategy and yet the practice is still controversial.

It seems like such an arbitrary thing to call out as unfair

When to use "the" or "a" in scientific writing

A.K.A. : "The", the definitive definite article article.

"The", while making up about 7% of all written and spoken English words, is the hardest word to get right. The rules surrounding "the" are so difficult to define that comprehensive dictionaries can spend 5 of more pages trying...

R Packette - Fraction Matrix Operations

Open up any linear algebra textbook and have a look at the matrix entries. Are there all integers? Are they all written as decimals? There's probably at least some that are fractions. Matrices in computer programs are almost always in decimal form. The exception is symbolic mathematics programs like Maple and Mathematica. That's because computers store non-whole numbers as floating-point values instead.

Floating-points are fine most of the time, but they're often not exact. What happens if we work the fractions directly?

First impressions of the new XFL

In 2001, the XFL, short for the X Football League* started as a sort of college-level alternate to the NHL, the premier gridiron football league in the United States. Establishing a new team is hard, let alone an entirely new league, and the XFL shut down after only one season and a ton of controversy.

In 2020, somehow, it came back.