August 2015 linkdump

• There’s a new biography of Grothendieck, this one in French.  Any chance it’ll be translated?
• Let felons vote and let them carry guns — the ultimate left-right compromise reform?  Why not?  Everybody believes there’s some core of constitutional rights an American doesn’t give up, no matter what they do.  Felon or no felon, you have the right to free speech and the right to a trial by jury.  I think voting belongs in that inner circle.  I don’t really feel that way about gun ownership, but I get that a lot of people do.  And — purely as a practical matter — the typical felon who’s served his time is surely more correct in feeling he needs a firearm to protect himself than, say, I do.
• “Pinch my cheeks and call me gorgeous — it’s Raven!”  This panel has been floating in my memory for about thirty years.  CJ really likes the Teen Titans show that’s on Cartoon Network now, and watching him watching it inspired me to see if I could actually find an image.  Thanks, tumblr.
• Indietracks Compilation 2015.  As always, a great collection of songs.
• At some point I will try to find time to think more seriously about the claim by Josh Miller and Adam Sarjurjo that the famous Gilovich-Vallone-Tversky study finding no evidence for the hot hand in basketball actually found strong evidence for the hot hand in basketball.  The whole thing comes down to screwy endpoint problems when you average results of a bunch of short trials.  It has some relation to the perils of averaging ratios.
• Pretty sure this cartoon calculus book is the very one that was sitting on the shelf in Mrs. Levin’s 6th grade classroom, which I became absolutely obsessed with.
•  Do you think the most Shazammed songs are the most popular songs, or songs that best combine popularity with being a song no one knows the name of?  I like that you can see the country-by-country charts:  here’s Thailand, where they love Meghan Trainor, or don’t know her name.
• Good-looking conference at the Newton Institute about large graphs.

August linkdump

• 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.