The math of Adam Sandler movies

That right there is the math of what I hate about Adam Sandler: the red and green clusters.

The yellow cluster, I'm all good with: Spanglish, Punch Drunk Love, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer. (Admittedly, I haven't seen Funny People or Reign Over Me.)

As the Walt Hickey write on FiveThirtyEight, "Sandler was young and hungry, and his schtick was still relatively fresh — or at least it wasn’t 20 years old. When you watch the films, you can sense it: Sandler is trying. They are not necessarily great films, but they’re solid comedies."

Then came the green and red clusters, about which, "predictable product that will perform consistently and make money for its producer" (the green) and "most Sandler movies are bad...[s]ome have suggested that Sandler movies are going downhill, but his movies were never on a hill to begin with." (the red)

It's not that his bad and financially unsuccessful movies (the red) are particularly worse than the bad and financially successful ones (the green), it's just that some time around 1998, he stopped trying to make his comedies any good.

Punch Drunk Love and Spanglish are easily the finest of his films.

Hickey also did the same sort of analysis of Will Ferrell movies.

And the first shall be last.fm

I've been hanging with Last.fm for about fifteen months now (since January 2014.) I'm not doing it because of the ability to listen to music via last.fm. I'm happy with iTunes and the occasional Spotify playlist. I'm hanging with last because a former student of mine suggested using its Scrobbling feature to track my musical listening habits.

Here's what I've seen after a year and a quarter...

From www.lastchart.com...

From last.fm's playground...

From My Music Habits...

From nicholast.fm, though those are only from 2014...I can't find a way to combine 2014 and 2015 on that service.

Mathmatical oddities...

This one comes to us from Futility Closet...

Discovered by R.V. Heath in 1950:

Think of two positive integers.
Add them to get a third number.
Add the second number and the third number to get a fourth number.
Continue in this way until you have 10 numbers.
The sum of the 10 numbers is 11 times the seventh number.

That didn't make sense to me, so I set up a little spreadsheet to check it, and I included x's and y's to see if it works.

To check it out, click the link above and enter any two integers in the yellow boxes of the top left. The totals show up in the green to the far right.

I'll tell you in advance that it works.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Just because there's a correlation between two data sets doesn't automatically mean there is causation between the two. Take, for example, the various examples of spurious correlations at the blog Spurious Correlations. The site will even generate new correlations at your request.

correlation = -0.933

correlation = 0.992

 correlation = 0.993

These aren't from Spurious Connections, but they're relevant, too.

From Dinosaur Comics

From Glen Gilchrist

PS: In retrospect, maybe the title should be cum hoc ergo propter hoc rather that post hoc ergo propter hoc.

A man after my heart...and my art skills...

I wandered into the Math With Bad Drawings blog via a post at Neatorama pointing out a joking post about math experts splitting a check at a restaurant. The jokes are mostly about stereotypes of how engineers, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and economists use math.

The joke is accompanied by his white board drawings of the various professionals and their thoughts about the check. I appreciate that his drawing skills with the white board markers are about the equivalent of mine.

 

After having read through every one of his posts (he only has about thirty or so, having started in April of this year and not having posted too frequently), I can safely say that I appreciate this Oakland, CA math teacher's blog for a lot of other reasons.

I appreciate it for his analogy of teaching being like throwing fistfuls of sand into the ocean.

I appreciate it for his beautiful explanation (and his wife's and his father's) of why you can't divide by zero.

I appreciate it for his openness in relating a time when he, too, struggled at math - as he knows his students do.

I appreciate his exploration of the failures and successes of teaching - how bad the former feels and how good the latter.

I appreciate his candor and three messages for his students at the end of the year.

 And I appreciate him telling me how to play ultimate tic-tac-toe.

Math Run

A number of students I work with should spend some time working through this game because their math sense for simple math is lacking.

I, on the other hand, think I'm just fine.



(Source)

Numberwang!

8Tracks will return next week, Calen. Don't freak out.

Thanks to SuperPunch for pointing this one out...

As to why this exists, well...um...because...see what they were doing was...if you think about the...because...

Yup...that's right.

What's Your Favourite Number?

Alex Bellos is running a little survey trying to find out the world's favo(u)rite number. Wanna help him out? It'll take you like two minutes to do the survey.

Depressing

Today's xkcd depressed me...

Alt text: The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space -- each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

Alternative assessment

In education we occasionally talk about alternative ways to allow our students to prove that they understand a concept. Sure, there's the ever-familiar test/quiz/lab report method, but there has to be something different for those students who are intelligent but just march to a different drummer. Not everybody likes to explain things while sitting still in a perfectly quiet room.

Some folks like to dance...



I've watched this video and the other three (all after the jump), and I hate to say that I really understand the sorting methods way better for them. I may be lightly mocking here, but I think it's a frickin' genius way to explain the various types of sorting.

Thank you to AlgoRyhtmics...

Why you won't win the lottery

One of my math classes in high school asked us to calculate how much money we would expect to make if we invested $1 a week in the then-new Indiana Lottery as compared to investing $1 a week in a bank account granting compound interest.  I vaguely remember that the Lottery return was something like -63% meaning that for every $1 you put into the lottery, you could expect to get back thirty-seven cents.

That hasn't, however, stopped me from dropping my in few bucks every time the lottery reaches a ridiculous amount and fantasizing about what I might do if I were ever to win.  I know, of course, that the odds are drastically stacked against me ever winning.

Thankfully, this blog post lets you see just how long those odds are as it plays any set of numbers in a Mega Millions simulator.  You can tell the simulator to play your numbers once, twice a week for one year, or twice a week for ten years.  The simulator then tells you how much you would have won for your investment.

From running the simulator four times at 1040 plays each, I've 'won' a total of $358.

I then hit to play a fifth set of 1040 and 'won' $10,061.

And that's why the lotteries work, folks.

PS - The rest of the blog from whence the lottery simulator comes is pretty neat, too.

Halloween: a breakdown

Elegance in presentation

There are few things that delight me more than does the elegant visual presentation of numerical information, so today I present to you the Score Tracker.

I don't know that it'll ever catch on - or whether it should or not - but it's so pretty and well presented.

Check out the other examples over on the Hardball Times page.

Visual Representation of Awesome Things

Sometimes, the coolness of math intersects perfectly with the coolness of baseball.

Today's initial example of this comes from the website Beyond the Box Score and is a little something they're calling DiamondView Composite Player Evaluation.

In this one, each player is graded in four skill sets - on base, power, fielding, and base running. The players are then graphed in each of the four quadrants as to how they compare to the league average and league best. The four points are then connected and shaded to produce awesome results like the Adam Dunn graph to the left in which you can see at a quick glance that he's a horrible fielder (-27% compared to the league) and a poor base runner but has a lot of value tied up in his power and on base skills.

Click on through to check out graphs of Carlos Pena, Albert Pujols, Ben Zobrist, and a few other fun examples. I can't find anywhere that has graphs for all the MLB players, but I'd love to see them. I'm also cool with the fact that some people have continued the discussion on other sites.

Beyond the Box Score also had a recent column about the Wins Above Replacement levels for the various members of the Big Red Machine exploring why it was that they peaked so brilliantly in the early/mid-1970's.

Then there's the United Countries of Baseball which tries to divvy up the US (and Canadia) based on where the allegiances to various MLB teams lies. Head on over and cast your vote.