Monthly Archives: August 2010

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 turns out that the science fiction [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I was going through some old papers in my office recently and I came across a paper entitled Scaling of Differentiation in Networks: Nervous Systems, Organisms, Ant Colonies, Ecosystems, Businesses, Universities, Cities, Electronic Circuits, and Legos. Crazy collection of systems aside, let’s focus on the last one. These scientists studied Legos to understand networks! It’s [...]

Well, not really. But Clare Holden, one of the co-authors on a 2003 paper, Spread of cattle led to the loss of matrilineal descent in Africa: a coevolutionary analysis, looks more than a little like Drew Barrymore. The paper itself is also pretty cool.