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My favorite summers were in middle school and early high school, when a few friends and I would monopolize three consecutive backyards to play a version of baseball with a pitcher, batter, and one or two fielders. We used tennis balls. Once our metal bats made it too easy to hit balls in the swamp, onto roofs, or over the tree line into the fourth consecutive backyard of the Harley’s1 we switched to a heavy wood bat I bought at a hardware store years prior. ...

I recently finished helping a small online high school create a new data science course, the foundation for which was Stanford’s youcubed Explorations in Data Science. It’s a snappy curriculum that is thoughtful and modern in its topic selection and a bit ragged at the edges of its resources. Its lesson layout is clear, its tools of choice are accessible and modifiable, and in the spirit of decades of statistics-oriented education, it helps students be wary of practitioners who lie and misrepresent either through thoughtlessness or malice. While I wrote this course to run in a format that relies heavily on self-directed work, wholly different from what youcubed anticipated, the curriculum was an excellent base that created ample opportunity for differentiation. By all accounts, students are loving the results. ...

Hey, Pokémon Go. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Come on over here, I have something to say. Look, you’re a good game. I like you and your whole deal. Walking around, catching Pokémon, getting outside with friends, creating fun styles for my trainer. It’s all great. But I’ve hated this since the first day. The Rattata wasn’t just caught. It didn’t happen to walk sidelong into the waiting maw of a Pokéball that was hanging around in the air. ...

What a great video. Destin is always captivating, and I enjoyed the crossover into one of my favorite sports. My only comment is near the end, where he takes issue with the terms “overstable” and “understable” to describe different disc flights. While it’s the opposite of what one might consider as stability for aerodynamics, it makes perfect sense in the context of the sport: an “overstable” disc is extremely stable in different wind conditions and forgiving of angles.

With the World Baseball Classic coming up, I pulled every baseball player in the Lahman Database whose name perfectly matches a country. Here are some simple statistics among the country representatives with a batting record. Country Name Total Hits Total Homers Total AB Batting Average AB/HR Jordan 5669 450 21717 .261 48.26 Chad 3854 384 15903 .242 41.41 Germany 2569 56 10346 .248 184.75 France 662 74 2514 .263 33.97 India 482 63 1905 .253 30.24 Chile 142 0 627 .226 NA Holland 127 3 618 .206 206.00 Jersey 111 2 727 .153 363.50 Portugal 89 2 450 .198 225.00 Poland 39 0 211 .185 NA Israel 33 6 132 .250 22.00 Monaco 2 0 13 .154 NA Ireland 1 0 7 .143 NA Ceylon 0 0 18 .000 NA Total 13780 1040 55188 .250 53.07 Here’s a fun bit of trivia about these Jordan folks: Until 1999, every player matching Jordan had it as their last name. Since 1999, all but two have the first name Jordan. ...

What a delight. Musical instruments exist at an intersection of craftsmanship and engineering, and this competition gives an outlet to people who want to travel to the far reaches of those axes. It asks wonderfully inventive wackos to build fun and genuinely new instruments that they also need to be able to play. As a percussionist who has always been delighted by ratchets and vibraslaps, and was enthralled by a theramin in high school, the finals for this competition will now be on my radar as a ridiculous excuse for a quick trip to Atlanta.

I enjoy hosting trivia, and have now done so twice over Zoom for a core group of friends back in San Francisco. I thought I had shared the first batch on here back in 2024, but evidently not. So, here are both rounds, obviously geared towards my interests and inside jokes among these friends. They are provided as slideshows without the answers, so test yourself and have fun. November 2024 ...

Core to my effort to improve this blog and my writing more generally is a better revision process. I now use tools to catch mechanical errors or to point out when I’ve slipped into passive voice accidentally, but that doesn’t address the flow of prose, the feel of the words washing over the reader. Reading out loud is a superb way to improve, but I’m not always in a position to do that. ...

We were lucky to see Lisbon during a “coastal event”, as our weather apps described the inclement system to us. Serpentine cobblestone streets glistened in the aftermath of an afternoon shower, the sun that much more appreciated for the damp and cold that threatened our plans. Wicked gusts whipped through the narrow, curving streets and pinch points like someone testing for leaks in the plumbing, a few catching us head-on as we headed uphill. All of this added to the character of our visit and further reminded us of San Francisco, a familiar city with its own set of hills and odd streets, cable cars and coffee shops and eccentricities. San Francisco also has a cool tower, though Lisbon has a thousand-year-old castle. Parallels abound, except for Lisbon’s lack of parallel streets. I won’t further debase Lisbon by comparing it to a city so far its junior. ...

I last edited this draft back in 2020. I vaguely recall wanting to write more here and probably revisit the diagrams, which were made entirely using Asymptote. But it’s a good post and worth publishing. I made my first Möbius strip during my sophomore year of high school in math class. Since then, I have been fascinated by their construction and mere existence. I share them with every person I can, basing my own presentation on a mix of my math teacher’s introduction, provided so many years ago, and a wonderful talk given by Matt Parker at the Royal Society. ...