Posts

I adore niche corners of the internet. Small projects, independent developers, targeted publications, and so much else can only exist because the internet helps them connect to a sufficiently large captive audience. So many companies and industries view the internet as a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos—who can capture the most delicious little spherical bits of yummy data? My kinds of people aren’t trying to win capitalism and aren’t pushed by metrics besides “Am I making something cool?” and “Can I find just enough people who also think it’s cool?” ...

I volunteered to revive the newsletter for the Connecticut “Smoky Joe Wood” chapter of SABR, and successfully sent out its first new edition last week. You can access it here. This was so much fun to create. I had minimal guidance and effectively carte blance from our chapter president. That was a bit intimidating, but I started with editions from the previous editor to guide my design. More directly, I ripped it off as closely as I could in Affinity. I had to relearn the basics of desktop publishing while I figured out how badly I wanted to do this “the right way” with master pages and repeatable formatting. I made mistakes, learned how to fix them, and am pleased with the overall design. Graphics and layout are not my passion nor my strong suit, but I got the job done. ...

As of last September, Netlify uses “credits” to measure hosting use. On their free tier, I get 300 credits each month. Each deployment—as far as I can tell, every time I update the site whether it’s for adding a whole post, or making a tiny edit—costs 15 credits. That means I can make 20 changes to my blog each month for free. It’s actually slightly less than that because there are tiny bits of usage for traffic and other boring hosting miscellany that, at my scale, don’t matter. I’m only noting this because: ...

I moved my blog from WordPress.com to Bluehost and the open-source version of the WordPress engine back in 2018. I wanted more control, and wasn’t willing to pay the Automattic folks for the right to add more plugins to my blog. Instead, I probably paid even more money to a different corporation because, well, it felt better. Technology has evolved, and I’ve decided to move backwards and save some money. With three or four hours of work, I migrated my entire blog off WordPress and into Hugo, a lightweight static blogging engine that relies directly on Markdown. The files live in GitHub (for free) and are subsequently hosted on Netlify at their free tier, saving me a couple of hundred dollars each year.1 ...

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.