FiveThirtyEight.com has a totally sports geeky article demonstrating how amazing Lionel Messi really is. Among the many charts:
Author: fish1964
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Every Sperm is Sacred
Something about today reminded me of this Monty Python classic:
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Writing’s on the Wall
More from OK Go. This one is an optical illusion fan’s dream:
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The Gunfighter
Language clearly NSFW but also hilarious. Worth watching full screen.
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How was your bike ride?
A nice post from Seth Godin:
The answer has evolved over the last century…
It was great, I pushed myself and feel fabulous.
It was okay, I came in fourth place in the race, but those other guys beat me again.
I did fine. My speed was 15.6 miles per hour, not my best average.
Well, the computer says it was a personal best, and my heartrate approached max on the third hill.
The app says that I did that route the 159th best of everyone who has ever done it. A bust…
More information doesn’t always make us happier…
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Sportsmanship
One thing about the US/Germany match that was very cool was the sportsmanship. At one point Dempsey (broken nose) is headed towards goal trying to get a pass but the German defender knocks it away. No foul, but Dempsey clearly takes a shot to the nose which has to hurt a ton. He goes down.
So the Germans kick the ball out of bounds. This stops time so the US can check on Dempsey. When play resumes and the US gets a throw-in, we throw it back to Germany.
I’ve certainly seen that before in soccer, but every time it impresses me. One team realizes the other team has a hurt player and kicks it out of bounds. The other team then gives the ball back.
Basic fairness displayed at the highest level of sports. Go figure.
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World Cup Fun
Well, it wasn’t the result we wanted, but it was at least the result we needed. I watched US/Germany under the arch of the Manhattan Bridge in DUMBO.
I knew it would be crowded. CitiBikeNYC even tweeted that this was the place to watch:
https://twitter.com/CitibikeNYC/status/482151381911236608
My office is right there (50 yards behind the vantage point of the pictures below), so I was watching to see when it would start filling up. I grabbed a spot at a picnic table around 10:30. Dumbo has free WiFi, so I sat and worked while the place filled up.
About an hour before the match started, there’s still some room.
We had people from multiple TV stations doing interviews (apologies for the lack of focus on the TV babe):
First half. A tense crowd:
As the match finished. Not a win, but a happy crowd:
I had to stand on my picnic bench for 90 minutes to see, but I’ve never watched a match in that kind of environment. USA chants, random songs being sung, a few German fans being tolerated.
Just a cool day. Go USA!
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Anonymizing Data is Really Hard
On Taxis and Rainbows, a fascinating piece about how a huge anonymized data set of NYC taxi data was released and how clever folks can reconstruct the data:
A cryptographically secure hashing function, like MD5 is a one-way function: it always turns the same input to the same output, but given the output, it’s pretty hard to figure out what the input was as long as you don’t know anything about what the input might look like. This is mostly what you’d like out of an anonymization function. The problem, however, is that in this case we know a lot about what the inputs look like.
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 