That's the title of a chapter (PDF) excerpted from Picturing the Uncertain World. Even if you're not a statistician by trade, it's an interesting read. The subject is De Moivre's equation, and the author makes a great argument that people's misunderstanding of the equation has led to “billions of dollars of loss over centuries, yielding untold hardship.”
A long discussion of the chapter is here at Metafilter.
Via Kottke, an analysis by Katie Baker of why pick-up artists' game might not work as well in Denmark. Avert your eyes now if you're sensitive to some colorful language:
Don’t Bang Denmark—note the dramatic title change—is a cranky volume that (spoiler alert!) probably won’t help any Roosh acolytes score. Roosh calls it the “most angry book” he’s ever written. “This book is a warning of how bad things can get for a single man looking for beautiful, feminine, sexy women.”
What’s blocking the pussy flow in Denmark? The country’s excellent social welfare services. Really.
...
As Roosh himself admits in Don’t Bang Denmark, Nordic social democracy doesn’t support his kind. His guidebook concludes with a resigned “bottom line” acknowledgment that his time in Denmark “liberalized me when it came to a government taking care of its citizens….Denmark sucks balls for women, but it kills the United States when it comes to having a higher standard of living.” Still, he won’t be going back anytime soon.
Beneath the craziness lies a potentially interesting economic argument about the forces driving transactions in the mating market.
The great Kirk Goldsberry has pulled back the curtains on a new measure of basketball shooting prowess which he calls ShotScores.
By overlaying players' shot constellations, we can estimate the expected total number of points that an average NBA shooter would produce, based on where he took his shots; then we can compare a particular player's actual yield against it.
When you put it like that, it sounds so basic, yet it's been difficult until now to measure something like this. But no more. We can finally factor in degree of difficulty when judging a player's shooting ability.
Goldsberry ran the numbers for last season, and the top three players in ShotScores were the following:
Always helpful when you create a new statistic and it passes the eye test. Counter-intuitive results are more intriguing, but it's helpful for adoption when your results mesh with the opinion of NBA scouts and analysts.
Incidentally, the NBA signed a deal with STATS Inc. to install SportVU cameras in all of its stadiums for the upcoming season, so we're about to enter a Golden Age of basketball analysis. I'd argue that the NBA, of all the major U.S. sports leagues, has released the most comprehensive set of statistics to the public through its website. I could spend hours just combing through that stuff, and it will only get better if they include SportVU data.
As an example, Henry Abbott of Truehoop highlights a few new basketball strategies that have become accepted wisdom in the past few years thanks to new analysis.
Most people I know and correspond with already have given up voicemail for good, but I do still get the occasional voicemail, enough so that it's useful to formally debate whether it's time to just shun voicemail for good. It's hard to find something that you need to communicate via voicemail that isn't more effectively transmitted another way (SMS, email, some other form of mobile message like WhatsApp, Twitter DM, Snapchat, to pick a few popular ones).
By the way, let me tell you kids, it was hard to send a selfie back in the day. Selfies really meant something. First you had to take a self-portrait with an SLR mounted on a tripod, then you had to take a completed roll of film and get it processed, then you had to copy the photo to paper on a copy machine, then you had to fax that image from work when your coworkers weren't around. From the time you began that process to the time the image finally was received on the other end, you weren't feeling too Carlos Dangerous anymore.
One of the things many visitors to Spain are bound to notice is the peculiar daily rhythm or schedule, with an afternoon siesta and really late-night schedule. One reason for the mid-day siesta might be as part of a more efficient sleep schedule, namely the "siesta" program of polyphasic sleep:
This sleep cycle is actually pretty common around the world in warmer countries such as Latin America, where the temperature is so hot during the middle of the day that people retire to take a short nap after lunch. It involves 6 hours of core sleep and one short 20-30 minute nap. You will find in these countries that most shops close during the early afternoon, as everyone is ‘busy’ taking their siestas!
The first time I visited Madrid, I remember visiting a night club at around midnight and finding it largely empty, even on a Saturday night. I was about to leave after a half hour when suddenly the crowds started flocking in, and the place was packed until 5 in the morning.
It turns out Spain's late-night schedule may have its roots in World War II, when many European countries under German control switched their clocks to synchronize with Germany.
Now the Spanish government is considering switching back to British time.
Until the 1940s, Spain was on the same time as Britain and Portugal, which are on roughly the same latitude. But when Nazi-occupied France switched to German time, Spain's Franco dictatorship followed suit.
"The fact that for more than 71 years Spain has not been in its proper time zone means ... we sleep almost an hour less than the World Health Organization recommends," the lawmakers wrote. "All this has a negative effect on productivity, absenteeism, stress, accidents and school drop-out rates."