Live Blogging: 20/20 Australia v. South Africa Match 2

Well that was just as enjoyable as the first game and it was nice to have Brendon along for a small part of it. Perhaps a bit less statistics than I’d intended, and certainly less on bowling after I concluded that bowling average is pretty good just the way it is. I’m convinced, though, by [...]

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Live blogging: Advance notice

Well, judging by the blog stats last night’s 20/20 live blogging was well-received, even if no-one wanted to leave a comment; I certainly had fun, so I’ll be repeating the exercise. Will try to get a bit more commentary in, as well as focussing inevitably on the conjugate problem of an accurate 20/20 bowling statistic.
Stumps [...]

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Live blogging: 20/20 Australia v. South Africa

Here’s a reverse chronological transcript of my live-blogging the 20/20 match. Actually there’s not much match commentary, because there are people on the television for that, but rather some ruminations on how the statistic(s) used for quantifying batting performance in this form should be modified.
22:34 Well, this is heading for an early finish, so I [...]

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Thinking about cricket ratings

For some reason, the ICC Test ‘Championship’ (read ‘Perpetual League Table’) is occupying my thoughts today. Having now disregarded a malicious desire to construct a (non-trivial) ranking system that maintains Australian superiority indefinitely, I instead offer the following cluster of thoughts:

Can it really be that the ICC points system fails to incorporate runs scored or [...]

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Where do I stand on maximum entropy?

My title is taken from a similarly titled article by the physicist Ed Jaynes, whose work influenced me greatly. It refers to a controversial idea of epistemological probability theory: the method of maximum entropy, that was popularised and (arguably) invented by Jaynes. This principle states that, when choosing probabilities on a discrete hypothesis space, subject [...]

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Galaxy surveys in a periodic geometry

Have just had a nice week working at Mount Stromlo Observatory and am looking forward to the coming week in Melbourne (generally) and Swinburne (particularly). Yesterday and the day before I was working on a small problem that grew out of a larger project (which I’m sure I’ll return to at a later date, just [...]

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Statistics of triangulated point distributions

So this morning was unusual not in my having an interesting idea, but in pursuing it. This idea, not likely to be wholly or even partly original—I don’t want to search through journal articles only to disappoint myself just yet, & wouldn’t know where to look anyway—is about the clustering of points.

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The Cost of Motorcycling

When I decided to get my motorbike licence a few years ago, one of the reasons for doing so was the cost. Bikes (new or used) are cheaper than cars and use less petrol. Being on an APA at the time, price was a compelling issue. Other advantages include sexiness, fun, less environmental impact (relative [...]

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Tetris Archaeology

Recently, I was watching my cousin Ben play Tetris on his home computer. Being related to the Brewers, Ben has a somewhat obsessive personality, and playing Tetris had become a habit, something to do when there’s nothing else to do. One day, while discussing Tetris, Ben mentioned that all of the high scores on their computer (shared between Ben and his brother Andrew) were between 18,000 and 21,000. “Wow”, I said, “you guys must play tetris a lot”.

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Quantifying loss in cricket II: New measures

A few days ago I penned a wee diatribe on the use of net run rate (NRR) as a tiebreaker in cricket. Today I will outline a few alternatives and their justification. The punchline is the revised group score tables for the 2007 World Cup at the end of the post and the formulae used [...]

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