The Bottleneck Retirement Plan

I do not have a voluntary retirement plan or a pension. I have the means to put money away specifically for retirement, but I choose not to. Instead, I use an investment strategy that has been described as "the most and least insane thing I've ever heard". Here is that strategy:

 

T1B: Goodhart's Law and Baserunning

When I was about 11 years old, I was good at running, good enough to represent my elementary school as the anchor in a relay at a district track meet. This prompted all the grown-ups in my life to coach me on running. They told me all sorts of tricks about keeping my hands flat and remembering to breathe and to keep in a straight line and to keep from dragging my feet and to start early to get the baton.

The race came and I did all those things – hands, breathing, straight line, no dragging, start early. I forgot, however, to run. I blew a huge lead by running in perfect form, but in slow motion.

What's the lesson here?

Lost Chapter: Writing for your Career

 This is one of the 'lost chapters' of the textbook "Writing for Statistics and Data Science", which was removed because information changes too quickly. This chapter covers data science resumes, describing class projects to businesses, and writing letters of introduction to potential grad supervisors.

Fantasy League Sports Cards

 

The sports card industry (specifically baseball cards) crashed in 1994. Fantasy sports existed as early as the 60's, but really caught public attention around 1995. That timing is not coincident.

In both hobbies, fans get to have  surrogate ownership of players, and the market value of those surrogates goes up or down with the performance of those players. At the casual level, being in a fantasy league is just a more publicly acceptable way to collect and play with cards. At the serious level, fantasy is a more viable, faster way to make a profit with your expertise than cards were.

In short, fantasy is just trading cards for grown ups.

But what if physical cards let you draft players?

 

Soccer-to-Hockey Translation Guide

Hockey and soccer (ice hockey and football) are similar enough from a fan or analytics perspective that if you’re familiar with one, it’s easy to become familiar with another. There could be a whole new world of sport you’re missing out on!

In this article I’ve organized many of the parallels and contrasts between hockey and soccer so that you can watch a few games and of either one and confidently say that "hockey is just like soccer except X instead of Y".

 

The Price of Carbon Absolution

Worrying about everything else is wearing down my sanity. Worrying about climate change feels like a welcome, familiar distraction because the solutions are so linear. We can literally money our way out of this one, but it's a lot of money? How much, exactly, is the personal price of carbon absolution?

Cheating vs Innovation in Sports

Why do some changes in sports end up being considered cheating, and others innovation? Let's look at some historical examples for patterns.

 

In baseball, "the shift" is a strategy in which defensive players deviate, or ‘shift’ from the default locations for their positions to locations closer to where they expect the ball to land. This practice has had a measurable statistical effect on the game; hits other than home runs have become rarer, and the hits that do happen are more often singles compared to seasons before 2010. The shift is simply data-driven strategy and yet the practice is still controversial.

It seems like such an arbitrary thing to call out as unfair

When to use "the" or "a" in scientific writing

A.K.A. : "The", the definitive definite article article.

"The", while making up about 7% of all written and spoken English words, is the hardest word to get right. The rules surrounding "the" are so difficult to define that comprehensive dictionaries can spend 5 of more pages trying...

R Packette - Fraction Matrix Operations

Open up any linear algebra textbook and have a look at the matrix entries. Are there all integers? Are they all written as decimals? There's probably at least some that are fractions. Matrices in computer programs are almost always in decimal form. The exception is symbolic mathematics programs like Maple and Mathematica. That's because computers store non-whole numbers as floating-point values instead.

Floating-points are fine most of the time, but they're often not exact. What happens if we work the fractions directly?

First impressions of the new XFL

In 2001, the XFL, short for the X Football League* started as a sort of college-level alternate to the NHL, the premier gridiron football league in the United States. Establishing a new team is hard, let alone an entirely new league, and the XFL shut down after only one season and a ton of controversy.

In 2020, somehow, it came back.

Postmortems from 'Game Developer', a book review

"Postmortems from 'Game Developer'", edited by Austin Grossman is a collection of after-the-fact analyses of popular video games that had been recently developed and sold. The analyses are all written by senior members of each game's development team, and usually the game's head creator. "Postmortems" was published in 2003, so the games being analyzed include Diablo 2, Age of Empires, System Shock 2, and Black and White.

I purchased my copy from a thrift store in 2016, which had a suggested Canadian price of $42. This copy had several discount stickers on it, one of which had the book for sale for $0.84, a 98% discount.

Offsetting the carbon emissions of the blog, and then some.

Worrying about climate change is wearing down my sanity, and I'm know I'm not alone. I wanted to find a way let others reduce the amount of CO2 and methane in the air that didn't cost them money. One way is to buy carbon offsets with money from advertisements, like the ones that roughly 10% of you see at the top and side of this blog.

Is that futile?

How much carbon emissions are produced by a visit to a website like this? How does that compare to the cost of offsets? This is going to be a rabbit-hole of citations and unit conversion, so buckle in.

Alternatives to cryptocurrency for seasteads

Frequently, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology (crypto for short) is cited as a necessity for a functioning seastead. In the long term, when or if seasteads are large enough and economically important enough to fight for sovereignty, having your very own currency makes sense.

However, Cryptocurrency works best in places with a robust internet infrastructure to back up digital transactions, and where there is a critical mass of people in an area willing to trade their goods and services for the currency. In the early days of floating hamlets though, better alternatives to crypto exist.

Making Crossword Entries from Jeopardy! Before and After Clues

Before and After clues in Jeopardy! are clues pointing to two answers in which the last part of one answer is also the first part of the second answer. For example, "Supernatural kids' cartoon meets Star Wars prequel" could be a clue to both "Danny Phantom" and "The Phantom Menace", which would be shortened to "Danny Phantom Menace". 

These are a weak spot for me in Jeopardy, so I tried to make some more crosswords using only the 'before and after' clues on from Jeopardy! as found in the J-archive. It worked, sort of.

Seasteading Economic Opportunities Overview

This is an attempt to start a conversation about different means of making a living while seasteading. From chatter online, I've heard many of the same intended sources of income: bitcoin and other crypto mining, playing the stock market, tourism, and freelance software engineering.

These strategies won't work. Not because they are bad ways to make a living, but because the supply will quickly outsize the demand, no matter how good each worker is at programming, or how amazing each oceanic hotel is. Somebody has to grow the food for all these service and knowledge workers.

In short, we need economic diversity.

Below are some seasteading-based economic opportunities, arranged by their distinct advantages.

Reversi in R - Part 2: Graphics and Custom Boards

In this post, I finish the Reversi / Othello game in R by improving the graphics, adding the ability to save and load boards, and fixing bugs. Also, many more boards have been added and tested, including those with unusual shapes, three or more players, and walls that can make the board into unusual shapes or even break it in half.

Reversi in R - Part 1: Bare Bones

In this post, I showcase a bare-bones point-and-click implementation of the classic board Reversi (also called Othello*) in the R programming language. R is typically used for more serious, statistical endeavors, but it works reasonably well for more playful projects. Building a classic game like this is an excellent high-school level introduction to programming, as well as a good basis for building and testing game AI.

I read this: New Rules for Classic Games

New Rules for Classic Games, by R. Wayne Schmittberger, written in 1992, is exactly what it sounds like. "New Rules" contains possible amendments to rules for Risk, Monopoly, Poker, Bridge, Scrabble, Reversi/Othello*, Shogi, Go, and of course Chess.

Annual Report to Stakeholders 2018-19

Every year in grad school I had to write a report on my research and academic progress. I found it a useful exercise so I've continued to do so as a faculty member and post-doc.

Summary: 

Professionally, this year was a struggle just to keep my head above water. I expect next year to be more productive in general, as well as more research oriented.

Lingering questions from the 2018 MLB season

Here's a few more comments and ongoing questions about Major League Baseball that I wanted to post but didn't fit anywhere else. Just a few more weeks until spring training!

Inside: Pitch count superstitions, base coach evaluation, WAR in blowouts, and anecdotes of SafeCo.