Recently in Links Category
Sometime very soon my favorite company EVRI is going to help you figure this InterWebs thing out. Scoot on over to the home page and sign up for the beta!
Read the blog for a much better explanation than I can offer of what we've all been secretly brewing.
Read the blog for a much better explanation than I can offer of what we've all been secretly brewing.
Bret Taylor has an interesting post about the fact that even though there is a ton of data on the web, no one really has access to it in a way that lets you manipulate it in a programmatical way. That is, you have all the world's map data at your fingertips -- as long as you don't mind using Google Maps or Virtual Earth or whatever to access it -- you can't just get it all in a database so that you can build your own map database.
I've run into this at work, where I'm doing very top secret things (but we don't really want to keep the data that we process itself secret).
I've also run into this in pursuit of a pet project, a new basketball statistics site (look beyond scoring totals!!!). It's really hard to get a stream of nba statistics on a daily basis. Sure, there are lots of pages with NBA stats, but if you want them, you've got to write a complicated crawler that parses the stats out of the site. You can't just plug into a database and get the raw numbers.
Bret suggests a wikipedia for data sets (not information, DATA). An interesting idea. Check out CKAN, which seems to be taking some baby steps in this direction. I don't like that CKAN refers to itself as a knowledge repository, because knowledge is not data. To illustrate what I mean, think about whether an almanac disseminates knowledge about the weather or data about the weather. If it were the former, reading an almanac might be an important step towards becoming a meteorologist. But it isn't.
I've run into this at work, where I'm doing very top secret things (but we don't really want to keep the data that we process itself secret).
I've also run into this in pursuit of a pet project, a new basketball statistics site (look beyond scoring totals!!!). It's really hard to get a stream of nba statistics on a daily basis. Sure, there are lots of pages with NBA stats, but if you want them, you've got to write a complicated crawler that parses the stats out of the site. You can't just plug into a database and get the raw numbers.
Bret suggests a wikipedia for data sets (not information, DATA). An interesting idea. Check out CKAN, which seems to be taking some baby steps in this direction. I don't like that CKAN refers to itself as a knowledge repository, because knowledge is not data. To illustrate what I mean, think about whether an almanac disseminates knowledge about the weather or data about the weather. If it were the former, reading an almanac might be an important step towards becoming a meteorologist. But it isn't.
This article makes an interesting case: That Jackie Robinson was better at basketball than at baseball. In fact, he may have been the best baller of his time.
I remember in 2000 that ESPN did one of those "the best athletes of the 20th century" lists, and Jackie was number 2. I remember thinking at the time that there must be some political aspects involved in that decision. But this information sort of puts his athleticism in a new light. Four-letter sportsman at UCLA? First pro basketball player to dunk regularly? Set the collegiate broadjump record? I mean, Bo Jackson in his prime had nothing on this guy. Talk about multi-faceted.
Hat tip to Truehoop.
I remember in 2000 that ESPN did one of those "the best athletes of the 20th century" lists, and Jackie was number 2. I remember thinking at the time that there must be some political aspects involved in that decision. But this information sort of puts his athleticism in a new light. Four-letter sportsman at UCLA? First pro basketball player to dunk regularly? Set the collegiate broadjump record? I mean, Bo Jackson in his prime had nothing on this guy. Talk about multi-faceted.
Hat tip to Truehoop.
Man. The sheer act of REMEMBERING to blog every day is hard. I rarely get as far as figuring out if I have anything interesting to say. So I'll do what every self-respecting blogger does and just link to somebody else!
Links of the day:
Links of the day:
NBA.com has some new statistics in their box score. There's +/-, which is cool. And then there is "BA." Bad attitude? Big altitude? Consulting with reigning TrueHoop Stat Geek Smackdown champion Justin Kubatko of Basketball-Reference.com reveals that is stands for "blocks against." I think they should change the name of the category to "facials." That's what that column is all about, right? Humilation! Jarrett Jack, by the way, leads the league with three BA's per game. "I'm not sure why a block is much worse than any other type of miss," Kubatko adds. "What they should really track is assisted field goals, as in: 'Kobe Bryant made twelve field goals, and four were assisted.'" That would be cool.
- More Right Brain/Schmight Brain madness.
- Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution on the Economics of Halloween. Today at MSFT, it's "bring your kids to trick or treat at work day", so there's candy everywhere on chairs outside offices. I saw a dentist running down the aisle screaming "NONONONONO!!!" with his hands over his ears.
- The Halloween theme led the Freakonomics guys to blog about pirates, which led me to one of the cooler Google Earth mashups I've seen.
- I installed Leopard yesterday and got a blue screen of death. My employers must feel just a tiny bit giddy.
