What We Need is More Stats

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In honor of Dirk: ‘Points Per Miss’ and his spot among the NBA’s all-time greats

As Bill Simmons tweeted: “48 points, 3 missed shots total (FG + FT). We need a stat like ‘points per miss’ to see if that’s a record for a 40+ point game.”
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And as I went to bed last night, Simmons’ tweet had me thinking. Just how useful of a stat would PPM be? So I decided to get up this morning and investigate it a little further.

I like it, because it’s a measure of offensive efficiency. Raw statistics, such as points scored don’t differentiate between good shooting and poor shooting, incorporates points scored or squandered on the free-throw line, and normalizes, to some extent, the increased risk and reward of three-point shots for which shooting percentage fails to account. Efficient shooting leaves more opportunities for teammates, which the author recognizes:

Points per game is an oft-cited stat, but it provides little in the way of efficiency. A player could score 40 points per game and lead the league, but if he just does it because he chucks up half of his team’s shots, his team probably is not very good or balanced on offense. Another player who scores only 25 points per game but who is highly efficient at turning shooting opportunities into points is maximizing his own scoring chances while, theoretically, not wasting his team’s scoring opportunities shooting lower percentage shots (by comparison) than what his teammates could get

Science is Not a Wrestling Match

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Refuting Einstein: a media controversy in Ireland

At first, professional physicists paid very little attention to the story. In the few instances where their opinion was sought, the ‘debate’ was portrayed as one voice against another, not as the overwhelming consensus of 100 years of scientific evidence against one engineer. Most of all, the debate was portrayed as Kelly vs Einstein – I do not recall a single journalist draw attention to the fact that physicists’ belief in relativity stems not from a belief in Einstein, but from the mountain of experimental evidence that supports the theory (a confusion of the context of discovery with the context of justification).

The author makes a lot of good observations about what’s bad in science journalism, most of which I agree with and have pointed out a number of times in the past, such as manufacturing controversy by making it appear that both sides have equal merit. Sacrificing scientific accuracy for the sake of the appearance of neutrality is something that ultimately undermines your credibility. When the average reader gets the message that relativity is a religion, you’re doing it wrong.

A Project not Requiring Japanese Steel

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Kill Math

A project investigating a different way to present math and manipulate mathematical information, leveraging today’s technology.

The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
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We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper. The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface.

The site contains an interesting premise — the problems with math instruction aren’t limited to the methodology (a problem pointed out in any number of Vi Hart videos), but also the material itself:

school math is useless, kills inspiration and curiosity, is mind-numbingly tedious, makes no connections to anything, and is forgotten immediately after the test. It’s all negative.

which is also often true of science instruction.

Make sure not to miss

— The animations in the section “A Possibly Embarrassing Personal Anecdote,” which are pretty neat — as visualization of the integral, but also an intriguing visualization of an equation

— The video Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System, which shows a model of a predator-prey system and the ways one can manipulate the equations to visualize how the variables behave.

Swimming Upstream

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Contaminants Can Flow Up Waterfalls, Say Physicists

They found that the leaves (and also chalk powder) were able to navigate upstream if the waterfall was less than about a centimetre in height. “For distances of the order of 1 cm or less, some of the floating particles eventually start to “climb up the stream”,” they say.

This apparently refers to particulates; solutes could presumably do this via diffusion to some extent without setting up a counterflow.

The Last Waterbender

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Bending Water with Lasers

Previously, researchers thought that only lasers with a power of 10 watts or greater–the kind of lasers used in micro-machining or surgery–had enough oomph to make water budge. But Olivier and Janine Emile of the University of Rennes in France realized that no one had tried a weak laser in the configuration known as total internal reflection, where the force details come out differently.