In case you’ve ever wondered exactly what to say in a first message, OKTrends (the blog from the dating site OKcupid) has compiled just the data you need to review.
Wrong Tomorrow
Wrong Tomorrow is a site that tracks significant predictions by pundits of politics, finance and information technology, over a maximum 5 year time span.
Thomas Friedman: “Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won’t be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.” 2004-11-11
Jim Cramer: “Google goes down every day and that’s wrong. I don’t believe it’ll stay here long at all. It’ll be back to $500 in no time.” 2008-08-08
Bill Gates: “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” 2004-01-24
It turns out, the trend is that most experts’ predictions are worse than chance.
Did You Know?
The suggestion to watch this informative video came via email from an unlikely source—my mom!
Hit play or watch Did You Know at YouTube.
New Visitors
I had a small flood of new visitors to the site yesterday—about 34,000. Welcome.
Update: Looks like most of you came from here.
NBA Team Heat Maps
Heating up or cooling down? Obsessionism.com graphs NBA teams by their last five years of stats. This appears, at first glance, to be a pretty good indication of how the teams will do this year.
The Whitburn Project: 120 Years of Music
Using data from the Whitburn project, Andy Baio of Waxy.org just wrote an extensive entry about one-hit wonders and pop longevity.
For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.
Did pop songs stay on the top 40 charts longer in decades past? Were there more one-hit-wonders in the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s? He’s done some great parsing of some really big data sets, and the results are very interesting.
Geometry Saved Him Money
Quick, which is more pizza: two 8" pizzas or one 12"?
The story of how a little bit of (what turns out to be easy) geometry saved a guy some money (and who says you’ll never use math in real life?)
P.S. If pi seems too difficult to multiply, just round down to 3, it’s close enough.
Fermat’s Last Theorem
As a follow-up to the recent Malcolm Gladwell speech at the New Yorker 2012 conference, here is a documentary all about Fermat’s Last Theorem (wikipedia) and its proof by Andrew Wiles in 1994.
BBC Horizon – Fermat's Last Theorem from mmenchu on Vimeo.
Even if math isn’t your thing, there is something intriguing about following Wiles’ seven year struggle to solve the mystery. In general I get a bit of a rush out of the beauty of mathematics but watching Wiles create a proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem was just magical.
Deal or No Deal
The American version of Deal or No Deal is airing its 100th episode. When I first watched the show, sometime close to it’s premiere, I was quite bothered by the fact that the game doesn’t really have much strategy to it. You don’t have to know anything, you just pick random cases—something that anybody could do.
Nevertheless, despite the aggravating stalling and the fact that I judged most of the contestants to be greedy morons, I found myself compelled to watch, at least for the first few weeks—each episode hoping that tonight would be the night someone goes home a millionaire.
The greed aspect used to bother me because at a certain point the risk involved in continuing far outweighs the statistical chance of gaining more money. I suppose that’s what makes the show so compelling and I have to admit that within every negotiation, there is a time to get out and a time to stay in, and success hinges upon selecting that sweet spot between too early and too late. I tend to admire those with the sense to get out early more than the romantics who go for it, because I’m not a high roller. Betting tens of thousands of dollars, even when the odds are on your side, is astonishingly reckless. I suppose though, either way it turns out, the suspense is very good for ratings and allows us at home to play vicariously—wondering what it is we would do when put in that same situation.
The following is a YouTube clip from British version of Deal or No Deal that aired last January. The host, or presenter, is a man named Noel Edmonds. The differs from the American version in that there are no lovely models to open cases. Instead they bring in 22 contestants and each choses a case at random. Then one person is selected to play the game and, like the American and Canadian versions, choses cases to open to eliminate from play.
It’ll all become clear in the clip but the main thing you need to know is that the folks opening the cases in lieu of the models are contestants who weren’t selected to play this round. Also, of course, the top prize is in pounds—it’s £250,000.
As of this morning the British pound was worth a hair under two bucks in American money so 250,000 of them is the equivalent of just under half a million US. If that seems horribly lower than the usual top prize in Canada and the States (a million dollars in our respective currencies), remember that on the North American shows, the top prize is in one out of 26 cases, not 22, so the odds are a little different.
Also note that, unlike the States, the winnings in the UK and Canada are tax free.
.002 Cents != .002 dollars
Math skills are not Verizon’s strong point. A man patiently relates his bill problem to Verizon Wireless for 22 minutes, but unfortunately Verizon doesn’t know the difference between .002 cents and .002 dollars. It would be funny if it wasn’t so aggravating. Listen and despair.
Archive link of his blog.