Kevin Whitaker

Yale Fails on 4th-Down Risk, and Harvard Pulls Out Win (Published 2009)

amazing but this one is still the greatest in my book (4th and 22 up by three against a much better team!) www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/s...

the funniest scenario for leaving ichiro off the ballot is just someone from cleveland who’s still mad about the quote and has been waiting for revenge. if that’s the case, respect

Late to this but apparently that "black spatulas will kill you" paper that went viral had a math error overstating the effect by 10x statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/13/h...

NJ, pediatrician did it

52 things I learned in 2024 1 | Mice don't particularly like cheese. They're known for eating it because they could easily find it aging uncovered in cellars, but exterminators say their favorite food is actually peanut butter.

The teen pager scare, what Cookie Monster's cookies are really made of, why LEGO advertises pre-made sets now, and more things I learned this year: kaleidoscopemind.substack.com/p/52-things-...

19 of the last 20 men's soccer final four teams have come from Power 6 conferences - what happened in 2024 to get this chaos?

galaxy brain: Gunner Stockton is a true up-3-is-better-than-up-6 believer

"the medium is the melee"?

In the 2022-23 Ivy League Xaivian Lee and Danny Wolf (both listed in this week's BR NBA mock draft) averaged 20.7 minutes and 7.4 points *combined*

one of the few decent pieces I’ve seen about emotional labor that’s actually targeted at men (the ones who tend to need it): archive.ph/SbMCo

Rutgers isn’t as good as Seton Hall but this win was more impressive since it didn’t require bananas three-point shooting. Thought Princeton would fall to third in the league without St Rose, but so far they’ve looked just fine. bsky.app/profile/adam...

Something surprising to me (via @maxtmcc on X) is how the big red 2016-24 shift in the northeast isn’t a big cities phenomenon, it’s literally a New York City-specific phenomenon. You don’t see much of a shift in Boston, Philly, or DC:

No surprise but a major bummer. Offense was great in a win at Seton Hall without her, but built on an unsustainable 12-19 3P%, and they’ll face a brutal schedule through the end of this year. bsky.app/profile/jenn...

Harvard down 50 spots in KenPom for all the Hinton hype (though a decent amount of that is bad shooting luck)

Baseball's Copa Shot The underrated breakout star of the postseason.

I wrote about Baseball's Copacabana Shot, the breakout star of the postseason pebblehunting.substack.com/p/baseballs-...

Rules (and exceptions) of innovation The "Silicon Valley canon" includes lots of stories of small groups that created big things. One of these is not like the others.

Famous books about world-changing organizations reveal some common patterns of innovation - and Skunk Works shows how those can be broken: kaleidoscopemind.substack.com/p/rules-and-...

Scoring is the best it's been in men's college basketball in 30 years. Why? Questions with questionably easy answers

Scoring in men's college basketball is the best it's been in 30 years. Why? My theories ($):

-Continued erasure of charge calls
-Coaches being younger and more analytically-friendly
-Crashing the boards is BACK

open.substack.com/pub/statsbyw...

Yes, inflation made the median voter poorer I began writing this post the morning of Wednesday November 6th 2024 — the morning after the US election, where Donald Trump won a reasonably close yet nonetheless resounding victory over Kamala Harri...

this somewhat changed my view of the "true" state of the economy in 2024: jzmazlish.substack.com/p/yes-inflat...

Why the Monty Hall problem is confounding When I was in eighth grade, I became obsessed with a card game called Killer Bunnies, spending an embarrassing amount of time on a fan forum about its mechanics and strategy.

Drop the Monty Hall Problem into any group of people and they’ll collapse into infighting and talking past each other. What makes this particular puzzle so hard to explain?
open.substack.com/pub/kaleidos...

52 things I learned in 2023 How geometry explains caring for babies, the mysterious health benefits of ice cream, and 50 other things I learned this year.

How geometry can help you care for babies, the mysterious health benefits of ice cream, and other things I learned last year: kaleidoscopemind.substack.com/p/52-things-...