Higgs Boson - Forget Science, What Do Bookies Think?

Jul 25 2011 | 12 comment(s)

The LHC and its lower-energy counterpart in the US, Tevatron, have reported some important Higgs news this past week - details of six searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson at CERN and another in Chicago coming up.

Finding Alice In The Quaternion Looking Glass

May 30 2011 | 25 comment(s)

Batting Avg. for Pitcher's Opponents: Not a Linear Relationship

May 22 2011 | 3 comment(s)

As most baseball fans know, batting average is simply the ratio of the number of hits to the number at bats. That makes it a linear relationship: for any given number of at bats, a .400 hitter (hypothetically, since there has not been one since Red Sox slugger Ted Williams did it about sixty years ago)will have obtained twice the number of hits as a .200 hitter. But consider a similar statistic known as the batting average of a pitcher's opponents. Strange as it may seem, if you plot the number of hits given up by the pitcher per game versus the opponents' average, you will notice a non-linear relationship!

Here's why:

Let A = batting average for opposing hitters

Survival Of The Stupidest

Apr 05 2011 | 121 comment(s)

Is stupidity rising? Are we witnessing an alarming proliferation of irrationality and an exuberance of ignorance?

A pi in the face of Republicans

Mar 24 2011 | 7 comment(s)

A new bill, sponsored by Alabama Congresswoman Martha Roby, is going up before Congress - HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, which declares the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be precisely 3. Here's a blurb from the article:

"That long-held empirical value of pi, I am not saying it should be necessarily viewed as wrong, but 3 is a lot better," said Roby, the 34-year old legislator representing Alabama's second congressional district, ushered into office in the historic 2010 Republican mid-term bonanza.

What's So Spooky About Action At A Distance?

Mar 15 2011 | 7 comment(s)

This is a very short note, just to help me get a feel for how this editor works.

What's so spooky about action at a distance?

Entanglement of separated electrons seems no more odd to me than a parameterized hyperboloid of two sheets

. Change the parameter and the curvature and other properties change identically in the two sheets.

March Madness - Trust The Math To Win Your Betting Pool

Mar 08 2011 | 0 comment(s)

If you want to win the NCAA College Basketball Tournament office pool and know nothing about basketball, the good news is you have just as much chance as devoted college basketball fans unless you get all crazy about it.

One solution is to try and play it safe by picking all the top seeds in the brackets to make it to the Final Four and then using a back-azimuth strategy to determine the winners among the early games. But upsets are almost a guarantee in the NCAA Tournament. So what is the optimum strategy for people without a clue?

Who Is Numerically The Best Tennis Player Of All Time?

Mar 02 2011 | 9 comment(s)

Comparing athletes across generations is always difficult - in football, for example, players are bigger and stronger but before the hashmark changes of the early 1970s, when the field truly had a strong and weak side, a running back like Gale Sayers could make opposing defenses look silly despite an ability to break through a nose tackle.

Statistical Mechanics Of Saturn's Rings

Feb 13 2011 | 1 comment(s)

How does something made of loose particles sometimes behave like a solid, liquid or gas? For example, dry sand acts like a solid when you stand on it but like a liquid when you try to scoop some up in your hand.

Or how Saturn's rings act like a fluid. Dr Nikolai Brilliantov from the University of Leicester Department of Mathematics is intrigued by the maths of things like that and is going to give a free lecture on February 15th in the University’s Ken Edwards Building, Lecture Theatre 1, at 5.30pm titled ‘Statistical mechanics of granular matter: simple concepts and complex phenomena’.

How To Simulate Your Own Baseball Game

Jan 28 2011 | 3 comment(s)

Fantasy baseball as fans understand it today began in the 1980s but actual fantasy baseball, beyond kids trading baseball cards, began 50 years ago. Hal Rickman, an accountant in New York City, started finalizing work on something he had begun when he was much younger. It was Strat-O-Matic Baseball.

Rickman told USA Today's Mike James that as a young boy he rolled dice 5,000 times to make a table of probabilities and looked at baseball statistics in the newspaper to match probability to performance and see what would happen. In 1961 he started producing the game and later the year Roger Maris would eclipse the ghost of Babe Ruth for the single season home run record.

Mathematics