One of the best things ever written about sports, business and fandom was this essay by Bill James in his 1987 Baseball Abstract. I’ve never seen it reprinted online and no doubt this is a fair use violation but I need to quote it in its entirety. If you have never read a Bill James… Continue reading David Stern part 3: basketball as a business
Docker and a regression
Let’s make a docker container out of this thing. The key win from docker is it gives you a headache-free way to “just run” something and not worry about the dependencies and install/uninstall and binary incompatibility and all that great stuff. So in our case it’s a bit of overkill. I’ve taken pains to keep… Continue reading Docker and a regression
2022 forecasting
The 2022 schedule is up in the cfbd API so let’s try a run: $ python3 ./mcc_schedule.py -v USC at Stanford on Sep 09, 2022 Fresno State at USC on Sep 16, 2022 San José State at Fresno State on Oct 14, 2022 San Diego State at Fresno State on Oct 28, 2022 Stanford at… Continue reading 2022 forecasting
David Stern part 2 : NBA popularity
The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 — and so it… Continue reading David Stern part 2 : NBA popularity
Lindy Effect in College Football (part 3)
Links to Part 1 and Part 2. The Lindy Effect says age predicts longevity so let’s try to make a graph that can test that. Plotly makes it pretty easy to scratch the itch and get the graph you think you want. Here’s my attempt at a scatter plot showing relationship of pre-1971 years to… Continue reading Lindy Effect in College Football (part 3)
Lindy Effect in College Football (part 2)
I got the graph I wanted (link to download): How did I get it? As we discussed before, it seems like investing in a separate csv for the dataset rather than baking it directly into code is a nice minimum of effort here. The google sheet is a decent front end data entry tool and… Continue reading Lindy Effect in College Football (part 2)
On the matter of David Stern
David Stern died just over two years ago. If someone wrote the obituary he deserved I did not see it. They have all fallen on a spectrum between “breathless hagiography” and “chin-stroking encomium”. Let us summon the Advocatus Diaboli. Let us dig up the old pope. The truth demands it. Future generations take note. If… Continue reading On the matter of David Stern
Lindy Effect in College Football (part 1)
The mid-century expansion (and subsequent contraction) in Cal State football programs is a fascinating little story I want to dig into more. From the vantage point of 2022 it’s hard to believe that schools like UCSB, Cal State LA, Cal State Hayward and Sonoma State were all playing major college football in the modern era.… Continue reading Lindy Effect in College Football (part 1)
Faking 2022
I am impatient for cfbd to populate the 2022 schedules so I can see how the Monte Carlo stuff performs on “fresh powder.” The good news is with the testing harness we can fake up the announced schedule without too much trouble. This should be it: Doing the teams as unstructured tuples is kind of… Continue reading Faking 2022
some tests are better than none
I was hung up for a while on the idea of unit tests and a proper test harness and how to pickle test sets. Python3 pickle serialization package seems really nice but it occurred to me that the most bang for my buck is some kind of end-to-end test with artificially created schedule data. The… Continue reading some tests are better than none