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?

Statistics, Gambling, and Games of Chance

This is a proposal for a survey course on statistics that uses gambling extensively in examples. The target audience is senior undergraduates with a non-statistical background, but quantitative students will also find enough novelty to be interested. The goal of the course is not to encourage gambling, but to use it as a vehicle for a broad range of otherwise difficult statistical topics.

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.