Posts

Posted on

The Lyttle Lytton Contest

This delightful contest celebrating the command of language by constructing concise opening sentences to hypothetical novels bursts into my awareness each year as internet denizens share the best (worst?) entries. Nominees display subtlety and nuance by brazenly breaking as many written and unwritten literary rules as possible with fewer than 200 characters.

This contest appears built for social media, despite starting in 2001. It drives to the core of good and bad writing by isolating a single sentence, perhaps two, given only the context that it begins a book you’ve just plucked off the shelf. The analysis of each worthy submission is deep and, most importantly, funny.

Read about this year’s winners and chuckle along.

Posted on

Indiana Pi Bill and Irrelevant Authority

There are better sources for exploring exactly how the current political regime’s actions rhyme with other populist and fascist movements. Instead, let’s consider a story that is tamer while also being emblematic of current policies.

In 1897, a state representative in Indiana attempted to legislate that a disproven mathematical statement was true and, in the process, implied that π is equal to 3.2.1An excellent, detailed account by Arthur Hallerburg at Valparaiso University can be found here.

Continue reading “Indiana Pi Bill and Irrelevant Authority”
  • 1
    An excellent, detailed account by Arthur Hallerburg at Valparaiso University can be found here.
Posted on

Tapestry

Tapestry by Iconfactory has significantly improved my internet experience. Similar in some ways to feeeed, which I wrote about last fall, Tapestry combines my social media accounts and RSS feeds into a single timeline. While feeeed separates itself by a larger number of built-in source connections and its “magazine” approach of curating recent items, Tapestry is focused on a linear display that holds place. You don’t scroll back to find older items you may have missed; instead, your position is held, and you scroll forward in time to see what has happened since you last opened the app. It’s the only sensible way to interact with news and media, and matches what I and many others love about the Mastodon client Ivory.

Tapestry has been a mainstay on my home screen since it launched in February 2025. I know it hasn’t landed for everyone, particularly those who actively participate in social media, but I’ve found it to be an excellent companion app in my journey to effectively use my phone uninhibited and undistracted by algorithms designed to capture my attention. I choose the sources I want and stop reading when those sources run dry. It is thoughtfully designed with customizable pops of color and the option to group feeds into categories, and they recently added post interaction for several social media sources for when I want to like a post.

I backed this project on Kickstarter on a whim, and Iconfactory delivered.

Posted on

A Quick Note on “Sports Fan”

I don’t recall what I was listening to when this popped into my head, but I was curious about the origin of fan used to mean a “supporter” or “devotee.” I recently installed Terminology across my devices and set the Online Etymology Dictionary as a preferred resource.

According to them:

1889, American English, originally of baseball enthusiasts, probably a shortening of fanatic, but it may be influenced by the fancy, a collective term for followers of a certain hobby or sport (especially boxing)… Fan mail attested from 1920, in a Hollywood context; Fan club attested by 1930.

I’m pleased that the best-guess origin is with baseball.

Posted on

Zero-Sum Series Splits of One Run

The San Francisco Giants and San Diego Padres split their four-game series last week, with each team winning two games by one run. In our #social-baseball slack channel, my coworker asked:

any data whizzes wanna figure out how many MLB 4 game series have ended 2-2 with all one-run games?

I put myself on the case.

UPDATE JULY 6, 2025

I finally took the time to do this properly. I exported game-by-game data from Retrosheet since 1900 and (with the help of Claude) used pandas to analyze the data for these split series decided by one run each game.1The weirdest part about debugging code made by an LLM is interrogating their odd assumptions. Claude was exceedingly cautious in how it identified a four-game series. It originally allowed for a gap of up to 7 days between games of a pair of teams, which makes no sense. In baseball, a series is nearly always played on consecutive days. Once I corrected this error, my final count went from 32 to 49.

The list of 49 such series can be found here. The most recent occurrence before 2025 was a 2019 series between the Reds and Mets.

ORIGINAL APPROACH

I had no clean way to run a single query that pulled these because Stathead does not allow “OR” qualifiers in their search. So, this took slightly more manual work. This is what we do in the quest for knowledge.

This Stathead query contains the longest streaks of at least four regular season games such that every game’s run differential was between -1 and 1. I was only interested in streaks of exactly four games, so I went straight there.

I then sorted each page by total streak run differential, which is necessarily zero when both teams win two games in the series. Sorting by streak end date, I was able to peruse each page for consecutive rows with matching start and end dates—if the home team had one of these streaks, so did the visiting team.2There is a slight issue with this approach: what if one team had a streak of 4 games, but the other team had a streak of 5 or more because they had the necessary run differential before or after the four-game series? I only realized this problem while writing this post, but I’m too far into it to fix it this moment. I then manually checked that there wasn’t a coincidence in the matching dates, and also confirmed for older dates that it wasn’t part of a five-game series.

All that led to a list of the following four-game series3Again, I’m probably missing some because of the issue I pointed out above. I’ll try to fix that at a later point. where the teams each won two games, and all four games were won by exactly one run.

HomeVisitorStart DateEnd Date
SFGSDP2025-06-022025-06-05
CHCHOU1995-09-281995-10-01
BALCLE1991-09-121991-09-15
LADSDP1986-04-071986-04-10
NYYBAL1979-08-031979-08-06
MILWSA1971-07-301971-08-01 (2)
SDPNYM1970-05-011970-05-03 (2)
HOUCHC1962-08-171962-08-19
PHISTL1961-08-29 (1)1961-08-31
NYYDET1957-07-261957-07-28 (2)
CLEBOS1938-09-15 (1)1938-09-17
STLBSN1929-06-141929-06-16 (2)
BOSCHW1920-05-151920-05-19
BROPHI1904-06-211904-06-24
  • 1
    The weirdest part about debugging code made by an LLM is interrogating their odd assumptions. Claude was exceedingly cautious in how it identified a four-game series. It originally allowed for a gap of up to 7 days between games of a pair of teams, which makes no sense. In baseball, a series is nearly always played on consecutive days. Once I corrected this error, my final count went from 32 to 49.
  • 2
    There is a slight issue with this approach: what if one team had a streak of 4 games, but the other team had a streak of 5 or more because they had the necessary run differential before or after the four-game series? I only realized this problem while writing this post, but I’m too far into it to fix it this moment.
  • 3
    Again, I’m probably missing some because of the issue I pointed out above. I’ll try to fix that at a later point.
Posted on

Tulsa Sandlot Baseball

I don’t know Isaiah’s age or last name. He’s a stocky, tanned, thickset Sooner with a thick mess of curly brown hair and the same twang as all his teammates. His acned baby face and constant smile endear him to everyone around, which wouldn’t matter without that naturally generous and hospitable attitude, a tremendous work ethic, and an easygoing manner that brings everyone together. Most importantly, for the weekend I spent in Tulsa, Isaiah fully understands what Sandlot Baseball means and embodies it in a time when polarization emphasizes the importance of everything he, the Tulsa Breeze, and every other Sandlot Baseball team works for.

Continue reading “Tulsa Sandlot Baseball”