The bleak doom of all good things in this terrible psycho-capitalist hell-society we have made is to be processed and metabolized into an inert clot of blind, gray, mindless nano-goo by precisely the kind of antiseptic, hyper-rational, ahuman actuarial math on display here:
If you merely scanned today’s Darren Rovell ESPN article on a new survey of NFL fans, you might be forgiven for coming away believing that fans are leaving in droves, turned off by the national anthem protests inspired by Colin Kaepernick. If you bothered to actually read the damn thing, you know this isn’t close to…
Few things get me as angry as seeing people oppose a reform because of unrealistic concerns about imaginary unforeseen consequences. Pick a problem and propose some way to make it better, and some concern troll will immediately pop out from behind a curtain to say that there is some remote chance of chaos and so it’s…
I used to say that the dunk contest was dead. The days when the NBA’s elite players competed were long gone, I said, along with lots of basketball fans. Most of the modern dunks are rehashes of old ones. The event has plateaued.
I’m not that far removed from my last math class, and I was pretty good at it back then, but I barely remember what the equations in this demo video are trying to express, let alone how to solve them. But this is the future, and retaining what you learn isn’t important anymore.
Today’s Mathcounts national championship for middle-school mathletes aired on ESPN3, and it was definitely the best live sports anyone could be watching at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning. Edward Wan, a Washington seventh-grader, took home the title.
The Toronto Raptors played in London last week. During a post-practice media scrum, shooting guard DeMar DeRozan was asked asked about his strong offensive performances in the previous two games he’d played in London. That’s when a hum-drum interview suddenly became very entertaining.
Two years ago, Grantland's Kirk Goldsberry introduced the Kobe Assist, a new statistic that "proves that missing shots is sometimes just as valuable as making them." Goldsberry's analysis was interesting, but it left out a key component: the dunkpass. You see, Goldsberry examined what percentage of a player's missed…
Hark! The herald bloggers rank the Christmas jams. O come, let us rejoice them.
The most impactful decision in tonight's heinously boring Thursday Night Football contest between St. Louis and Arizona came with 6:10 left in the game. St. Louis, down 12-3, had 4th and goal on Arizona's 1-yard-line. In a situation where the Rams needed both a touchdown and a field goal to win, Jeff Fisher opted to…
Stephen Hawking, for whatever reason, spent some time digging up soccer stats for Paddy Power that could help nudge the English side to a World Cup win. It's fascinating, mostly for the premise of Stephen Hawking being mixed up with Paddy Power.
Here's Kings coach Darryl Sutter speaking at practice today, transcribed by LA Kings Insider and brought to our attention by Robert P. of Jewels From The Crown:
College boy Jason Garrett wants his team to spend some time in training camp brushing up on the Pythagorean theorem. His explanation is remarkably logical!
Today, draft day, is, we trust, a busy day at the NFL Network. No time for lots of things. But no time for math?
Everyone is rightly lauding Leonard Cooper, the winner of the Jeopardy Teen Tournament, as America's coolest high schooler. When Final Jeopardy came around, Leonard didn't know the answer. So he wrote something much better. He wrote,
This week the director of research at Google, a fellow named Peter Norvig, published on his blog the results of a fascinating deep-dive into the English language. If you're at all interested in letter frequency or word frequency, you owe it to yourself to at least skim Norvig's post. Essentially the researcher who in…
For just the second time, the Baseball Writers' Association of America has given its voters the option of having their Hall of Fame ballots made public. Of the 569 voters who cast ballots, only 108 chose to reveal who they voted for. (Of course, many more discussed their selections in their own columns—194 of them, …
On Tuesday, Rajon Rondo stopped by Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester, Mass., to tour the school, meet some of the students, and teach a little math. The picture above was tweeted by Rondo that morning, and Boston Magazine has more on the story behind it:
Mike Tomlin iced the kicker twice last night, but with an unfortunate twist: First, he called a timeout on his own kicker, Shaun Suisham, who proceeded to miss a 54-yarder. Then he stopped the Titans' Rob Bironas just as he was about to attempt the game-winning 40-yarder. Bironas waited two minutes and nailed the…
