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In an interview, Rodney Brooks discusses a fun and very clear example of Moore’s Law in robotics – how fast they  move:

When I first came to the United States, I was sort of a gopher for Hans Moravec, who has been part of the robotics institute here at Carnegie Mellon for many years. Back then he was out at Stanford. In 1979 I remember working late at night with him when no one else was using the mainframe, and his robot would go autonomously through a crowded room. It took the robot six hours to go 20 meters. Ian Horswell, one of my graduate students at MIT, built a robot named Polly in 1992. It would give tours of the lab. It could operate for about six hours and go 2,000 meters. In the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, robots went 200 kilometers in six hours. So over a 26-year span, there were 13 doublings in capability, if you measure it as the distance a robot can go autonomously without human intervention in six hours. We have seen Moore’s law in action.

(via @pomeranian99)

In an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about men who take their video game girlfriends to actual vacation destinations, there is this sentence from someone who plays these games:

“There isn’t a lot of romance in my life and this helps me cope with some of the loneliness,” said Mr. Fukazawa with a chuckle.

Somehow the chuckle makes this sentence even more depressing.

Jamey Pittman has written the Pac-Man Dossier, no doubt the most comprehensive article on the history and mechanics of Pac-Man. It includes such gems as how to trap the ghosts within their little home:

The more astute reader may have already noticed there is subtle flaw in this system resulting in a way to keep Pinky, Inky, and Clyde inside the ghost house for a very long time after eating them. The trick involves having to sacrifice a life in order to reset and enable the global dot counter, and then making sure Clyde exits the house before that counter is equal to 32. This is accomplished by avoiding eating dots and waiting for the timer limit to force Clyde out. Once Clyde is moving for the exit, start eating dots again until at least 32 dots have been consumed since the life was lost. Now head for an energizer and gobble up some ghosts. Blinky will leave the house immediately as usual, but the other three ghosts will remain “stuck” inside as long as Pac-Man continues eating dots with sufficient frequency as not to trigger the control timer.

Confused? Here’s the video:

Speaking of luck, we just released a paper onto SSRN about luck and skill entitled Differentiating Skill and Luck in Financial Markets with Streaks. This paper, which I worked on with Andrew Mauboussin (a brilliant high school student who worked in our lab this summer), examines the relationship between skill and luck using mutual fund performance streaks. This builds on some of my previous work in baseball hitting streaks (a popular article here), using the assumption that streaks are good determinants of skill: when luck meets extraordinary skill, you get very long performance streaks. But when luck meets middling skill, very long streaks are generally absent.

The question we tried to answer in this paper was whether or not the distribution of streaks in the financial world over many decades could be explained by the overall performance of the market plus luck (via a Monte Carlo simulation), or whether these long streaks are longer than simply expected by chance and are indicative of true skill. Spoiler: there is skill involved in mutual fund performance, at least according to our methodology. But you’ll have to read the paper to find out the details.

For further reading, here’s a great discussion of skill and luck by Michael Mauboussin entitled Untangling Skill and Luck (pdf). Here’s one fun part from the article:

There’s a simple and elegant test of whether there is skill in an activity: ask whether you can lose on purpose. If you can’t lose on purpose, or if it’s really hard, luck likely dominates that activity. If it’s easy to lose on purpose, skill is more important.

Andrew Mauboussin, & Samuel Arbesman (2010). Differentiating Skill and Luck in Financial Markets with Streaks SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1664031

At the recent Comic-Con in San Diego, a number of people were asked what they thought the greatest superpower is. Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four (among many others), said it was ‘good luck’, because nothing can go wrong if you have good luck:

http://projects.usatoday.com/news/voices/what-greatest-super-power

It still exists.

The Wall Street Journal, with its ever-entertaining journalistic style, has yielded another gem. In today’s paper, there is an article about how the University of Michigan has announced a smoking ban in its stadium (click through for the fun headline). The article has the following sentence, containing one of the more unexpected parenthetical statements:

Following a $226 million renovation that added new luxury boxes and suites, Michigan Stadium, nicknamed the Big House, now seats 109,901 people, more than at any other U.S. college. (Asked whether the numeric palindrome was deliberate, Mr. Madej said, “Believe it or not, the answer is no.”)

I was going through some of my books recently, and I came across my copy of a first edition The Internet for Dummies, from 1993. Reading this book took me back to the first download my father and I ever made: Plato’s Republic, via a university telnet. We were so excited by it, we jumped up and down. The current edition of this book is the twelfth, and one can assume it has undergone quite a number of changes.

The original edition explains TCP/IP networking, email, FTP, gopher, telnet, and WAIS. And there are sentences like this: “Most UNIX systems also include a different, somewhat incompatible telnet-like program called rlogin.” As a friend noted, what might have been considered a dummy back then is a veritable power user now. There is also a section on the Web, but it is eight pages long, and discusses a text-based browsing program, as the first graphical browser was still a year away.

In today’s Wall Street Journal there is an article about Zoltan Mesko, the new punter for the New England Patriots, entitled Meet the NFL’s Most Interesting Man. And this article delivers on the promise. Whether it was his upbringing and background, a mention of the Buffalo Bills in the article, or even just a commonsense quote from Mesko – “You only have this type of income for so many years. After that, you’ve either got to fall back on your education or live off the interest.” – this is a fun portrait of a very interesting football player.

In today’s Independent there is an article entitled In their element: The science of science about my recent scientometrics article in the Boston Globe as well as the field of scientometrics in general. It has a lot of fun bits, including prominent mention of the father of scientometrics, Derek J. de Solla Price. Everyone should read his book.