Jordan Ellenberg's Blog, page 3

Constructing lameness hierarchy using crowd-sourced data

I was giving some talks in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, and afterwards I talked to a grad student, Sky Sheng, who it turned out is a UW-Madison grad in dairy science. Now she’s getting her Ph.D. in animal welfare at UBC. She told me about her research, which among other things involves ranking cows in a herd by lameness (which in a dairy science context means disrupted gait due to leg or hoof pain.) They found that you do much better if, instead of asking viewers to rate the lameness of a cow, you show them two cows and ask which one is lamer. Then you combine all those pairwise comparisons into an overall ranking (though of course there’s the problem of how to resolve inconsistencies.) Anyway, this all struck a chord with me, because this idea is that various forms of small-group comparisons beat numerical ratings is one that I learned years ago from Rob Nowak and other people in the optimization grouip here at UW. And Sky’s question to me — how do you choose which comparisons to undertake if you want to most efficiently learn the lameness heirarchy? — is very much the kind of thing that the entire multi-armed bandit literature is about. Math is the gift that keeps on giving — the same problems pop up in different forms again and again. Even with cows.

By the way, I never thought of cows as hierarchical animals, but Sky set me straight on this. They absolutely bully each other and the dominant ones keep the subordinate ones away from the food. They look so nice!

A fang, a feeling, a flair, a match, a thing for you, levitation, my TV and my pills, New York

Are the things that “I’ve got,” according to songs in my iTunes library.

Brewers 5, Orioles 2 / Orioles 8, Brewers 4

I like to record it here when I see a baseball game and write down a few thoughts, but I forgot to do it right after CJ and I went to these games on May 20 and May 21, and so my memories are a little sparse. A few scattered things. This was the fourth time the Orioles have lost 5-2 this year. Tom Scocca and I agree that this is somehow the emblematic score for this team to lose by. To hit well enough to have won, you’d have to score 6 runs, which we’re rarely doing. And to pitch well enough to have won, you’d have to allow only 1 run, which we’re even more rarely doing. It’s a loss that doesn’t look like a blowout yet is somehow insuperable. The all-time record for most 5-2 losses in a season is 9, held by the 2011 Giants. What’s weird is, that team was actually pretty good! But when they lost, they lost 5-2.

Anyway, that was their 8th loss in a row. We saw two young pitchers, Chayce McDermott and Logan Henderson, each make their third major league start. Henderson was a lot better. Like to the point that I felt: we might want to remember that we saw one of this guy’s very first starts in the major league. A lot of very, very ugly swings from Orioles hitters.

The next afternoon was a lot better. First of all, it was Brewers Math Day. I got to meet some kids from New Berlin and their calculus teacher, who I’d had a phone meeting with earlier this season. Fun! Brewers Math Day started as an outreach program by the UW-Milwaukee math department, a great instance of the Wisconsin Idea.

The score doesn’t make it sound that way, but it was a good old-fashioned pitcher’s duel, which the Orioles almost won 3-2. But Felix Bautista, who has been looking shaky, continued to look shaky. He came in for the bottom of the 9th, he walked a couple of guys, he got two outs and got Brewers rookie 3b and 8th place hitter Caleb Durbin into a 2-strike count — the scattered O’s fans stood up to get ready to celebrate — and Durbin singled in the tying run. Orioles and Brewers traded runs in the 10th, and then the Brewers, in the 11th, ran out of guys they wanted to see pitch and sent out Joel Payamps, who they were not excited to see pitch. But Adley Rutschman was excited to see Joel Payamps pitch. And that’s how this game ended with a not very extra-innings pitching duel type score.

That’s when everything went widdershins

AB asked me “what did they call clockwise and counterclockwise before they had clocks?” which is an excellent question I’d never considered. It turns out that clockwise was called “sunwise” in the Northern Hemisphere, and counterclockwise was called “widdershins.” Widdershins! That needs to be brought back. It later acquired a more general meaning of “in a direction opposite to or different from what was expected/desired.”

Get out of my dreams

In honor of Bob Rivers, I’m considering only listening to songs that were on the Billboard Top 100 in April 1988 until the Orioles win a game. “Devil Inside” was really one of the best INXS songs but I feel it’s been largely forgotten. (“Need You Tonight” is the best INXS song, I’m sorry but sometimes the popular choice is the right one.)

Terence Trent D’Arby! I think he became a mystic and changed his name at some point. But boy do I love the little tin whistle thing in “Wishing Well.”.

But there’s no way around it, if we’re doing April 1988 we are going to have to listen to Billy Ocean, “Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car.” I’m going to be at American Family Field watching the Orioles take on the Brewers tomorrow and Wednesday. Let’s hope they win; I can’t let this song get stuck in my head again.

This and that

The Orioles game tonight was the MLB.tv Free Game of the Day, so I watched it. The Orioles left 15 men on base — including leaving the bases loaded three times — and lost 4-3 to a terrible Nationals team when Felix Bautista forgot there was a runner on second. It was not, in fact, the free game of the day. It came at a great emotional cost.I have been traveling a lot the last few weeks. I was wondering: if sitting in the exit row means you’re asserting your availability to help the crew in case of an emergency, why are they allowed to serve alcohol to exit row passengers?I only just realized that “Going Down to Liverpool” (the Katrina and the Waves song made famous, or at least a little more famous, when the Bangles covered it) is a wholesome response song to the very unwholesome “Hey Joe.” “Hey Joe” is a song about a man killing his wife. “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand? // I’m goin’ down to shoot my old lady.” “Going Down to Liverpool” is a song about a chill guy who’s unemployed. “I said hey, where you goin’ with that UB40 in your hand? // I’m going down to LIverpool to do nothing, all the days of my life.”I actually have lots of interesting math to talk about but somehow have not felt lately — maybe because I’ve been traveling a lot, teetotaling in the exit row — that I had the spare minutes to write a substantial math post. But I will!

A paleontologist, a scientist, a tree, decided, God, Superman, the leveler, the voice of Sarah Strickland’s rage, the walrus

Are the things that “I am,” according to songs in my iTunes library.

St. Olaf, Carleton, UW-Madison, wholesomeness

I was in Northfield, MN last week giving the “Math Across the Cannon” lectures at St. Olaf and Carleton. (It turns out the Cannon is a river; I had imagined the two campuses each having a rusty hilltop artillery piece aimed at the other, the relic of some 19th century intra-Lutheran feud….) They both seem like fun places to go to school. CJ didn’t apply to colleges like this; on grounds of novelty he took a pretty hard line on not applying to colleges that were smaller than his high school, and his high school has 2200 kids, so that did actually rule some places out.

Anyway, visiting a college means a bunch of meetings with undergraduates to talk about their work, their interests, and their plans, and as always I was struck by what a great part of my job this is, to be around young people like this so much the time. Their values are agreeably old-fashioned: they want to work hard, they want to learn about things, they want to get a little better at stuff every year, they want to use the skills they’re building to lead a life they can be proud of. And of course it’s not just small colleges where these values are realized. I taught my FIG again this year: “Writing and Data,” where the freshmen, mostly STEM majors, practice the art of writing non-technical articles about quantitative topics. (Previously covered on the blog.) I wasn’t sure how this would go — but the students have drastically exceeded my expectations. It’s a true joy to spend those hours each week with a group of 18-year-olds who sincerely want to learn a craft, who are generous and conscientious readers and editors of each others’ work, who are not cynical in the slightest, who truly believe that there’s value in learning how to do things well. College is, in a word, wholesome. Not everybody gets to work in such a wholesome environment and I ought to take the time to appreciate it more.

Another thing about the White Lotus

The finale of season 3 having aired, an old post of mine about The White Lotus season 1 is getting a lot of hits. So let me just say that I think the conclusion of season 3 very much backs up my 2021 read of Belinda’s character.

I Just Saw a Face

My sister-in-law was explaining to me a difference between British and US standard English — in Britain, “just” acts as a marker requiring the past perfect, but in America, that’s not the case. So the Beatles sing “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” not “I Just Saw a Face,” while Stevie Wonder sings “I Just Called To Say I Love You,” not “I’ve Just Called To Say I Fancy You.”

Is this a Beatles song you’re aware of? Not one of their biggest hits but wonderful. Paul McCartney was always just kind of finding perfect pop songs like this between his couch cushions. “I’ve just cleaned my couch,” he’d say, and there it was.