Thank God for Pittsburgh

18Jun10

Tom is right about Terry Crowley but wrong that the Orioles are “the worst team of 2010 and potentially the worst team of modern times.”  The Pirates are 4.5 games ahead of us, sure.  But they’ve scored the same putrid number of runs we have and allowed 20 more.  They’re a titanically crappy team that’s [...]

Filed under: baseball, orioles   |  3 Comments
Tags: tom scocca, unwarranted optimism

Men in science

17Jun10

This from Katherine Reynolds Lewis in Slate, in an interesting article about why men lie to social scientists about how much childcare they do: Take Jorge Torrico, 29, a bank manager who lives in Burke, Va., with his wife, Yoonji Kim, and their two toddler sons. Coming into marriage, his idealistic goal was to be [...]

Filed under: academia, children, cj, economics, slate   |  4 Comments
Tags: childcare, fatherhood, fathers, parenting, workplace

In which John Tierney continues to annoy me: featuring reader survey!

13Jun10

John Tierney has annoyed me before on the subject of women in science.  And now he’s back, this time recapping the conventional wisdom that math departments like mine are 90% male because of the inborn boyish math power we men possess.  He styles this as “daring.”  The chutzpah! Anyway, this time around he presses some [...]

Filed under: academia, bad statistics, education, math, psychology   |  51 Comments
Tags: daring, john tierney, prodigies, psychometrics, reader survey, sat, women in science

Adverb placement and probability

13Jun10

Just a weird and somehow illuminating syntactic trip-up:  per the odds of the moment at 538, it is correct to say both that England, the United States, and Slovenia will all probably advance and England, the United States, and Slovenia will definitely not all advance. There’s no paradox here, just a reminder to take care [...]

Filed under: language, math   |  1 Comment
Tags: adverbs, probability, soccer, world cup

My name is Cesar Izturis and I’m slugging .244

13Jun10

How amazing would Izturis’s defense have to be to make up for his hitting this season?  Like, let’s say he was so good that he could play both shortstop and third base and the Orioles could stick four guys in the outfield.  Would that make him an average player overall? In other weak hitting news, [...]

Filed under: baseball, cj, food, madison, orioles   |  2 Comments
Tags: banjo hitter, cesar izturis, defense, grilled cheese, madison mallards, thought experiments

In which I try to find a way to follow the Orioles without crying

10Jun10

Does anybody know who the best prospect in baseball is, just in case somebody you know might have first pick in the 2011 draft?  Somebody who seemed finally, after years of self-sabotage, to be turning things around and doing things right, but who can’t catch a break and seems hated by the powers above?  Oh, [...]

Filed under: baseball, orioles   |  5 Comments
Tags: anthony rendon, bill rowell, cal ripken, draft, weepiness

Happy birthday, Dick Gross

07Jun10

Just returned from Dick Gross’s 60th birthday conference, which functioned as a sort of gathering of the tribe for every number theorist who’s ever passed through Harvard, and a few more besides.  A few highlights (not to slight any other of the interesting talks): Curt McMullen talked about Salem numbers and the topological entropy of [...]

Filed under: academia, harvard, math   |  6 Comments
Tags: benedict gross, bhargava, birthday, dick gross, entropy, gross, McMullen, number theory, serre

What if political scientists covered the news?

05Jun10

Any scientist who has ever written for the popular press has experienced the tension between the academic’s natural inclination to say “here’s what we know, here’s what we might know, here’s what we don’t know” and the demands of journalistic convention that you offer something more like “A says X, B says Y, I have [...]

Filed under: politics, slate, writing   |  5 Comments
Tags: political science

Coulis fail

01Jun10

I like an artful swirl of sauce on the plate as much as the next high-end diner, but a cheesecake should not appear to have just skidded to a halt.

Filed under: food   |  2 Comments
Tags: dessert, morimoto, philadelphia

Reader survey: what open question would you ask Dick Gross?

01Jun10

I’m speaking on an “open problems” panel in honor of Dick Gross’s 60th birthday.  I’ve got 10 minutes.  I think I know what I’m going to say, but I was just informed that the panel is to be allowed to run late if audience interest demands it.  So I thought it would be good to [...]

Filed under: harvard, math   |  3 Comments
Tags: benedict gross, gross, number theory, open problems, reader survey