As of two days ago, Harvey had dumped around 9 trillion gallons of water.  By yesterday, that number was up to 19 trillion gallons.  And the number is expected to get as high as 25 trillion gallons.   25 Trillion!  That’s 25,000,000,000,000.  Gallons of water.  Here is what 1 gallon of water looks like. Now take a…

Last week I wrote part 1 of “No, no, no, no, no.  Chiropractors are still quacks”.  In that article, I wrote about a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) entitled “Association of Spinal Manipulative Therapy With Clinical Benefit and Harm for Acute Low Back Pain: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis” by Paige et. al.”…

So I was in Whole Foods the other day and they often have vendors in there giving out free samples of their products.  Everyone loves a free snack.  But this time I came across Chiro One, a chiropractic group in the Chicago area.  They were excited to talk to me until I started talking to…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: Here’s a look at the NHL’s final regular standings in the Eastern Conference from 2016-17. As a reminder, eight teams in each conference make the playoffs Tiebreakers and divisional qualification rules not withstanding, both the Islanders and Lightning finished a point out of the playoffs. That’s a difference between what would likely be at…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: In a recent paper, Gregory Matthews, Ben Baumer, and I looked at the role of randomness in professional sports outcomes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we identified that NHL and MLB games tend to be closest to a coin flip, with the worst teams capable of beating the best. Meanwhile, there are larger gaps in talent between franchises in…

Originally posted on xkcd: Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. —Herman Melville, Billy Budd Orange, red? I don’t…

I originally made this plot for the 2012 Stat Geek Idol contest run by Team Rankings, and they are still cool.  The original article describing them can be found here. Below I’ve updated the plots for games through March 19th.  (For games that haven’t been played yet this year, I’ve assumed the higher seed wins…

In 2010 CBS signed a deal with the NCAA for the rights to broadcast the NCAA tournament for 14 seasons from 2011-2024.  According to the NCAA, the deal is worth 10.8 BILLION dollars. Let’s do some fun quick math, shall we: There are 347 NCAA division 1 NCAA basketball teams and they each offer 13…

After 48 games we are in 97th place in this year’s March Machine Learning Madness.  I’m going to guess that we finish in 45th.   Cheers.