It's that time of year, the months approaching Fantasy Baseball time. So I am thinking about projections and predictions:
You would never look at a map and say ‘I’m traveling east on I-40. This map expects me to drive into the Atlantic Ocean.’ The map just informs you that the course you are on will eventually lead to the ocean, and if you decide not to exit, wetness awaits. (Obviously, there’s some hyperbole here, as I realize that the freeway doesn’t end with a pier). The map has no expectation of what will happen. It’s just informing you of the course you are on.
The right question, paired with some simple math and data, can offer revelations about how baseball games have been won or lost for over a century. Courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com, please enjoy evidence that Winning 1-0 is largely a product of luck:
The last team to win 2 straight 1-0 games was the 2006 Red Sox, who did it in games 92 and 93 of the year. The winning pitchers were Lester and Beckett. Prior to that, it was the 2000 Dodgers. Prior to that, it was the 1996 Cardinals. Prior to that, it was the 1991 Angels. All of these cases were against the same opponent. Within the limits of the PI I was unable to find the last time it happened against two different opponents in consecutive games.
This is about the web, but it's relevant to all areas of research. David Weinberger asks what changes when filters increase the size of what’s filtered:
A traditional filter in its strongest sense removes materials: It filters out the penny dreadful novels so that they don’t make it onto the shelves of your local library, or it filters out the crazy letters written in crayon so they don’t make it into your local newspaper. Filtering now does not remove materials. Everything is still a few clicks away. The new filtering reduces the number of clicks for some pages, while leaving everything else the same number of clicks away. Granted, that is an overly-optimistic way of putting it: Being the millionth result listed by a Google search makes it many millions of times harder to find that page than the ones that make it onto Google’s front page. Nevertheless, it’s still much much easier to access that millionth-listed page than it is to access a book that didn’t make it through the publishing system’s editorial filters.
For good measure, a nice review of A Short Tale of Skyscrapers, by The New York Review of Books:
Difficult to access and structurally unsound, the upper reaches of these structures served no real purpose other than ostentation and were wasteful in the extreme (perhaps Father Kircher was right after all about living in a violent state). They embodied the kind of destructive feuding that we see in the Verona of Romeo and Juliet, they cost inordinate amounts of money, and they came tumbling down with disconcerting frequency in a terrain riddled with the craters of ancient volcanoes and crisscrossed by fault lines. Verona’s towers crashed to earth in a medieval earthquake.
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