Archive for September, 2011
CJ grabs his left thumb in his right fist and tugs his thumb straight down. “What are you doing?” “A kid on the bus told me this is sign language for poop.” The best part is, the kid was right.
Filed under: children, cj, offhand | 1 Comment
Tags: asl, poop, sign language
The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art has a superb exhibit of Chicago Imagism up through January 15, 2012. I saw the Roger Brown exhibition at the Hirshhorn in DC when I was in high school, and his paintings have stuck in my mind ever since. He’s sort of a cross between De Chirico and a [...]
Filed under: madison | Leave a Comment
Tags: art, bill mcclain, chicago, imagism, mmoca, painting, roger brown
No! Despite my generally positive outlook when I posted this question back in February, and despite the wholly satisfactory last three weeks of the season, the Orioles did not win 77 games, as the CAIRO system projected, let alone go .500, as some of the more optimistic projections had it. They won 69, just three [...]
Filed under: baseball, orioles | 2 Comments
I have often heard mathematicians complain — most recently, last night — about their work being mangled when it gets covered in the press. Why don’t science journalists check with their sources to make sure that the science is presented accurately? There’s a great discussion of this issue at PLOSBlogs, featuring many well-known science writers [...]
Filed under: ethics, magazines, math, writing | 3 Comments
Tags: fact-checking, journalism, PLOS
Arg max
Does everybody except me know the notation “arg max?” I learned it in an applied math talk today. I had never seen this before. It means “the value at which the maximum is achieved” — e.g. . Slick.
Filed under: math | 10 Comments
Tags: notation argmax
From The Economist: Michael Spence, another Nobel prize-winning economist, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs agrees that technology is hitting jobs in America and other rich countries, but argues that globalisation is the more potent factor. Some 98% of the 27m net new jobs created in America between 1990 and 2008 were in the [...]
Filed under: bad statistics, economics, magazines, math | 2 Comments
Tags: percentages percent economist
Happy Jim Traber Day
Twenty-seven years ago today, Jim Traber made his major-league debut for the Orioles. And he sang the national anthem before the game! Heroic. When I think about Jim Traber I think about the three weeks in 1986 when he looked like the next great Oriole slugger. He came up in the middle of July, age [...]
Filed under: baseball, movies, music, nostalgia, orioles | 1 Comment
Tags: Home of the brave, Jim Traber, Laurie Anderson
I’m truly excited that the remaining American League playoff races are going to come down to “Who has to play the resurgent Orioles the least?”
Filed under: baseball, orioles | 3 Comments
Tags: unjustifiable optimism
New York City passes on B-cycle
I had no idea this blog was so powerful, but a few days after I posted my somewhat critical take on Trek’s bike-share program, New York picked the other guys to run theirs. Also, I meant to link to Letter From Here on B-Cycle.
Filed under: madison | Leave a Comment
Tags: b-cycle, bicycle, bikeshare, cycle, trek
I like bikes. I like cities that support bikes. But I don’t think I like Madison’s new B-cycle program. Before the program started, my understanding was that for a small fee, I could check out a bike at a station and drop it off at another station. Pretty useful if I needed to get quickly [...]
Filed under: madison | 12 Comments
Tags: b-cycle, bicycle, transportation, trek
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