Over at Backreaction, Bee takes up the eternal question of scientists vs. journalists in exactly the manner you would expect from a physicist: she makes a graph. Several of them, in fact. It’s generally a good analysis of the situation, namely that scientists and journalists disagree about how to maximize information transfer within the constraints […]
Category: Sports
Olympic Physics Chat
I spent a while on Friday morning talking about the physics of the Olympics with a couple of science classes in Tennessee and Lawrence Norris from the National Society of Black Physicists, organized by Adam “@2footgiraffe” Taylor. This was done via a Google hangout, so the video is recorded on YouTube: The recording seems to […]
On the Steering of Sleds
In the previous post about luge, I mentioned that there was one thing that came up when Rhett and I were talking about this, namely why there are differences in times between racers. The toy physics model I set up last time suggests that the difference between riders is only a matter of aerodynamics– two […]
The Physics of Crazy Sleds
In the Uncertain Dots hangout the other day, Rhett and I went off on a tangent about the physics of the Olympics, specifically the luge. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s basically psycho sledding: people riding tiny little sleds down a curved track at 80mph. The “featured image” above shows Erin Hamlin of the […]
Sports Are Science
Unless you’ve been marooned on a desert island for the last couple of weeks– or, you know, foreign— you’re probably at least dimly aware that the Super Bowl is this evening. This is the pinnacle of the football season, and also the cue for lots of people to take to social media proclaiming their contempt […]
Fantasy Physics Season Preview
While I was away for the weekend, intending to mostly ignore the Internet, Steve Maier tweeted: #FantasyFootball ? What if #FantasyPhysics existed–who would be your picks? This, of course, ended up sucking up a huge amount of mental energy for the rest of the weekend, because it’s such perfect blog fodder. If I’d had a […]
Wanted: The Hoosiers of Science
I’ve been revising a chapter on collaboration in science for the book-in-progress, making an analogy to team sports. And it occurred to me as I was trying to find a way to procrastinate, that while science is a highly collaborative endeavor, most of the popular stories that get told about science are not. There’s no […]
Baseball Is Pretty Random
After Thursday’s post about sports and statistics, a friend from my Williams days, Dave Ryan, raised an objection on Facebook: There’s an unstated assumption (I think) in your analysis: that there is some intrinsic and UNALTERABLE statistical probability of getting a hit inherent in every hitter. If that is the case, then yes — a […]
Sports and Statistics: Nobody Deals Well With Randomness
One of the chapters of the book-in-progress, as mentioned previously, takes the widespread use of statistics in sports as a starting point, noting that a lot of the techniques stat geeks use in sports are similar to those scientists use to share and evaluate data. The claim is that anyone who can have a halfway […]
Disappearing Quotes: Sophisticated Sports Coverage
One of the great frustrations of my intellectual life, such as it is, is the problem of the disappearing quote. This is a function of having acquired a broad liberal education (in the sense of “liberal arts college” not the sense of “person to the left of Rush Limbaugh”) in a somewhat haphazard manner. My […]