The Orioles are all about pitching consistency

23Aug11

The Orioles are the worst-pitching team in baseball, and it’s not even close — they’re giving up 5.35 runs a game, half a run more than the next-worst staff in Minnesota.  The Orioles have had bad rotations for years and years, but what’s special this year is the incredible consistency.  Usually our bad rotation has [...]

Filed under: baseball, orioles   |  2 Comments

The median integer sequence

21Aug11

Meaningless question of the day: What do you think the asymptotics of a_n are, where a_n is the median of the nth terms of all integer sequences in the OEIS? Google interviewers, feel free to use this. Update:  Henry Cohn comes through in the comments!  The median sequence starts 1, 3, 7, 13….  

Filed under: math, offhand   |  6 Comments
Tags: integer sequences, meaningless, median, oeis

Holden Karnovsky on the perils of expected utility

21Aug11

I asked a while back how seriously we should take expected utility computations that rely on multiplying very large utilities by very small probabilities.  This kind of computation makes me anxious.  Holden Karnovsky of GiveWell agrees, arguing that we are constrained by some kind of informal Bayesianness not to place too much weight on such [...]

Filed under: ethics, philosophy   |  5 Comments
Tags: expected value, holden karnovsky, less wrong, rationality, utility

Should the AMS have a Fellowship program?

18Aug11

Many professional societies (e.g. American Physical Society, American Chemical Society)  have “Fellows,” a smallish class of members who for whatever reason are denoted as being more distinguished than the rest.  The AMS doesn’t.  Should we?  The membership is asked to vote this year on creation of an AMS Fellows program.  Such a vote has failed [...]

Filed under: academia, math   |  57 Comments
Tags: ams, ams fellows, fellowship

Arithmetic Veech sublattices of SL_2(Z)

14Aug11

Ben McReynolds and I have just arXived a retitled and substantially revised version of our paper “Every curve is a Teichmuller curve,” previously blogged about here.  If you looked at the old version, you probably noticed it was very painful to try to read.  My only defense is that it was even more painful to [...]

Filed under: math, papers   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: algebraic geometry, hurwitz spaces, mcreynolds

“Cremona Tables” for elliptic curves over Q(sqrt(5)), by William Stein and his REU

13Aug11

William’s REU at the University of Washington has constructed a table, in the “Cremona format,” of all elliptic curves over Q(sqrt(5)) with conductor of norm up to 1831.  More complete data in computer-readable form here. The authors of this table, besides William, are Ben Leveque, Ashwath Rabindranath, Ariah Klages-Mundt, Paul Sharaba, Andrew Ohana, Joanna Gaski, [...]

Filed under: math   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: elliptic curves, quadratic fields, tables

_________ Dave?

11Aug11

I don’t have much to say about the recall elections besides the obvious — both sides got some of what they wanted and about what they expected, it’s an interesting time to be Dale Schultz — but here’s a different Wiscopolitical question.  Why don’t people talk much about Dave Cieslewicz running for statewide office?  He [...]

Filed under: madison, politics   |  5 Comments
Tags: cieslewicz, dave cieslewicz, wisconsin

Sat. Nite Duets on CNN

09Aug11

Some criticized me a few months back for posting about obscuro Milwaukee slack-pop heroes Sat. Nite Duets, but now here they are, interviewed on CNN — and you heard them here first! Here’s “Peel Away”:

Filed under: music   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: milwaukee, sat. nite duets, wisconsin

Breeders exegesis

07Aug11

CJ’s explanation of “Cannonball”: “I think she’s going to get married to somebody, and she knows he’s a cannonball, but he’s just dressed up as a human.” He’s right, isn’t he?

Filed under: cj, music, offhand   |  10 Comments
Tags: breeders, cannonball, exegesis, kim deal, lyrics

There’s no 4-branched Belyi’s theorem — right?

07Aug11

Much discussion on Math Overflow has not resolved the following should-be-easy question: Give an example of a curve in defined over which is not a family of 4-branched covers of P^1. Surely there is one!  But then again, you’d probably say “surely there’s a curve over which isn’t a 3-branched cover of P^1.”  But there [...]

Filed under: math   |  6 Comments
Tags: algebraic curves, algebraic geometry, belyi, moduli of curves, PlanetMO