your daily dose of sabermetrics
Matt recommends: A Journey to Baseball’s Alternate Universe
Archive for March, 2008
NetNewsWire style to load links directly for selected feeds only
If you read many blogs at all, you really should be using an RSS reader, and one of my favorites for OS X NetNewsWire.
One annoying thing is that some RSS feeds don’t display any useful information in the body text, so you have to go to the web page to see anything more than the title. This is evil (that means you, del.icio.us/popular). Oliver Boermans made a style sheet to show the linked webpage directly inside of NetNewsWire, but it does this for all feeds (even the non-evil ones). So I decided to throw together a quick style that does this only for selected feeds, and to share it with you, dear Internets:
[Download: YKLoadLinksDirectlyForSomeFeeds-NNW-Style.zip]
Enjoy.
the best film critics
Intelligent Life’s list of the best film critics. Good thing David Edelstein made the list, or I was going to have to boycott the Internet.
related: Introduction to the series, book reviewers
A Buffalo!
Parse this sentence:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
try it yourself before you look at the solution
Identical Twins
The Claim: Identical Twins Have Identical DNA – New York Times
It is a basic tenet of human biology, taught in grade schools everywhere: Identical twins come from the same fertilized egg and, thus, share identical genetic profiles. But according to new research, though identical twins share very similar genes, identical they are not.
The Geometry of Music
Dmitri Tymoczko, Composer and Music Theorist. (Time article, Science article, supplementary material)
Economics: the final frontier
Matt, this is for you:
Paul Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade
Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved… This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.