It’s addictive – like eating peanuts. I enjoy reading, and posting on, Slashdot.org.
Since the vast majority of what I submit is shot down, I thought I’d post it here as well.
As a diehard Phillies fan (my wife is watching them play Baltimore right now, via streaming video on her laptop) and a dedicated Yankee hater, I look for any possible edge to confirm my faith is not misplaced. Now, there’s an objective mathematical method to show you who is the best at mid-season, regardless of won/loss records. Some teams are playing over their heads while others have suffered from bad breaks. The theory says those anomalies will probably even out over time. From the NY Times: “Known as the Pythagorean standings – more on the name later – they rank teams not by the more traditional measure of victories and losses, but by their building blocks: runs scored and runs allowed, which cumulatively prove to be a better indicator of future team performance than just about anything else. The full story (free registration required) is enough to make a Phillie Phanatic smile, or give some glimmer of hope to downtrodden Red Sox fans. Unfortunately, the online version doesn’t have the chart, showing where everyone stands at the moment, which is included in the actual print version of the newspaper. Nice as I am, my site doesn’t have the bandwidth to host it. Maybe one of the posters here will.
Recently, I had an email conversation with my Statistical Climatology teaching assistant (quite an important person, as she controls my grades!). We talked about Innumeracy, the book by John Allen Paulos.