- The company that makes OldReader, the RSS reader I fled to after the sad demise of Google Reader, is from Madison! OK, Middleton. Still part of Silicon Isthmus.
- I never new that Mark Alan Stamaty, one of my favorite cartoonists, did the cover of the first They Might Be Giants album.
- Hey I keep saying this and now Allison Schrager has written an article about it for Bloomberg. Tenure is a form of compensation. If you think tenure is a bad way to pay teachers, and that compensation is best in the form of dollars, that’s fine; but if California pretends that the elimination of tenure isn’t a massive pay cut for teachers, they’re making a basic economic mistake.
- New “hot hand” paper by Brett Green and Jeffrey Zweibel, about the hot hand for batters in baseball. They say it’s there! And they echo a point I make in the book (which I learned from Bob Wardrop) — some of the “no such thing as the hot hand” studies are way too low-power to detect a hot hand of any realistic size.
- Matt Baker goes outside the circle of number theory and blogs about real numbers, axioms, and games. Daring! Matt also has a very cool new paper with Yao Wang about spanning trees as torsors for the sandpile group; but I want that to have its own blog entry once I’ve actually read it!
- Lyndon Hardy wrote a fantasy series I adored as a kid, Master of the Five Magics. I didn’t know that, as an undergrad, he was the mastermind of the Great Caltech Rose Bowl Hoax. Now that is a life well spent.
- Do you know how many players with at least 20 hits in a season have had more than half their hits be home runs? Just two: Mark McGwire in 2001 and Frank Thomas in 2005.
It’s good to know the hot hand exists. I wish the Dodgers would have another 42-8 run.