One Ringy-Dingy, Two Ringy-Dingy

Over at Cosmic Variance, JoAnne tells a story about dialing Pi on the phone:

Several years ago, before pi-day was famous, a student called the phone number associated with the digits in pi that appear after the decimal point, i.e., 1-415-926-5358. Apparently this is rather common now, and in fact, appears to be promoted as a mnemonic for the first 10 decimal places for those folks we need to have those numbers handy at all times. But this story happened in earlier times, back before the Bay Area split into several area codes. And, as the clever reader has already guessed, that student reached the SLAC main gate. How cool to phone pi and reach the main gate of a major national scientific research laboratory!

I remember the Cesium atomic clock frequency as a phone number: 919-263-1770. It should be a number in the Raleigh, NC region, but there is no listing for it. I’ve never actually called it.

No Confidence

Odds Are, it’s Wrong

They seem to be looking specifically at medical (and related) research; I don’t know if there is a greater prevalence of an underlying problem — not publishing null results — in those fields as compared to elsewhere.

Over the years, hundreds of published papers have warned that science’s love affair with statistics has spawned countless illegitimate findings. In fact, if you believe what you read in the scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.

“There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”

Not-So-Sudden Death

NFL to examine 2 possessions in playoffs OT

NFL owners will vote next week whether to allow each team a possession in overtime in the playoffs if the team winning the OT coin toss kicks a field goal on the first series.

This seems a little odd. I wonder if the purpose is to entice teams to go for the TD which would end the game, rather than settle for the field goal. But I looked at my fantasy league statistics from this past year (the NFL site didn’t have league-wide stats) and there were about 800 field goals vs 1200 offensive TDs, so scoring a TD is more likely.