Daily Archives: January 10, 2011

The Non-Rivalry Rivalry

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In light of a surprisingly good weekend of wild-card playoff football (Three games competitive until the end, and the fourth didn’t get out of hand until the second half), we have Brady, Manning and the rivalry. (It means a little less right now, with the Colts being bounced by the Jets, but whaddaya gonna do?)

In comparison to other sports and other rivalries, this one isn’t. Quarterbacks aren’t in direct competition with each other, and they don’t act like rivals. One minor objection I have to the analysis is that they don’t emphasize the importance of the other players on the team. While passing yards and TDs reflect talent of the quarterback, your winning percentage also has a lot to do with how good your defense is. But that’s peripheral to the point of the story.

Context Matters

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In physics, units matter (just ask the Mars Climate Crasher Orbiter). They put a context on the number. That isn’t always enough, because you don’t know if the number is big or small unless you compare it to a familiar quantity, which is why it’s a good exercise to be Putting a number in its context

[I]s the failure rate exceptional? A figure means nothing if it has no context: 600 pregnancies sounds like a big number, but there is no way to know what it means unless we know how many women had Implanon, and for how long.

By Gum it's Glass!

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The hover tag on the recent xkcd cartoon Misconceptions mentions the common glass mistake, that it is a slow moving fluid (also seen: supercooled fluid). I remarked to a colleague that part of the foundation for that was not understanding that there is a glass transition, while the more common observation is a first-order phase transition from liquid to solid. He mentioned a good example of a glass transition:

Take a cold piece of chewing gum. Break it in half. That’s a material in the glassy state.

Put the gum in your mouth and wait a short time. Then bite. Elastic and rubbery, but still a solid. Somewhere in that temperature span is the glass transition,