Which NBA players take the most shots with their foot on the three point line? If you want the answer to that question, check out the post I wrote on the ZenGM blog.
Why there and not here? I figure, when the hordes of highly interested basketball fans find this spectacular blog post, I'd rather BBGM gets some shine than dumbmatter.com.
Wikipedia defines the Dunning-Kruger effect as:
a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is
Look it up on Google Images and you'll find various summary images, like these:
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As you may have noticed, relationships often have age gaps. This is fine, but it does imply that the younger partner is likely to outlive the older partner. Further compounding this problem is that the older partner usually is the man, and men tend to die younger than women to begin with.
So here is a calculator to show the probability distribution of the number of years between the deaths of two partners, based on age and gender. Of course there are many other factors at play besides those two, but this should give you a rough estimate.
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I made another mini project for no apparent reason. You can load one or many CSV files into a SQL database within your web browser (client side) and run SQL queries on them. In most situations it's not that useful (most databases already support importing CSVs without too much trouble), but it might save somebody some time in a pinch. And it's cool that things like this are even possible, purely client side.
Code is on GitHub.
Since this is my blog, it makes sense to talk about the greatest technical accomplishment of my life.
...except I already wrote a long blog post about it. Just not here, over on the ZenGM blog.
TLDR: I got an order of magnitude performance improvement out of a mature piece of software, with no negative tradeoffs from an end user perspective.
Over at Basketball GM, when I upgraded Prebid.js from 0.34 to 1.x, most of the bid adapters could just be easily copied over. Index Exchange was the one exception. For a while it wasn't availble at all on 1.x, but that changed with version 1.10.0, released a few weeks ago. However it requires some changes to your configuration to upgrade from 0.34 to 1.10+, and I found the documentation to be a bit lacking, so I wrote a blog post!
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As you may know, I wrote this cool basketball video game and work as a data scientist. A couple years ago, back in the Hinkie era when the Sixers were a forward-thinking organization, someone in the Sixers front office noticed those two things about me and asked me to apply for a job. It was a somewhat long and unclear process. They didn't seem to know what they were hiring for or what their criteria were (or maybe they did and I was just a bad fit). Regardless, eventually I didn't get the job, but as part of the application I did a mini analysis project, and 2 years out, I figure I might as well share that.
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...except possibly to the extent of making fun of me for being a hypocrite. Beyond that, I will spare you the typical post about all the amazing reasons I switched to a static site generator. Check out the code if you're actually interested.
God damn, I've been neglecting this blog. It's sad really, because I do have a lot to say. I guess I've just been talking to myself instead of blogging lately, which maybe says something about my mental stability, but whatever. I'm blogging now, and I'm going to blog the fuck out of this blog.
It's 2016. My job is pretty cool in some ways, but in some other ways it bothers me a great deal. It's probably not in my best interest to go into that in great detail here (as if anyone is reading this, right?) so I will leave the rest unsaid, and just get to the broader point. I am someone who cares a great deal about science, engineering, creating cool things, doing things the right way, etc. And when I say "cares a great deal" I mean probably more than I can adequately articulate with my pedestrian writing skills. It's almost like a spiritual thing. So for someone like me, what do you do when your day job is preventing you from attaining your desired level of spiritual satisfaction?
Side projects!
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