Data analyst and postgrad student. Tweeting mainly about tennis, cricket and nerdy stats stuff. All views my own, or plagiarised from someone smarter than me.
How much did home advantage help Tiafoe against Nadal last night?
ATP data suggests that home advantage increases your odds of winning by 10%, on average.
In the US, this is closer to 30%.
Analysis here: https://t.co/GjIVlt3ZSS
#USOpen2022
Everything we call civilization was invented in the last 500 generations—way too short a time for our bodies and brains to re-optimize. We're a bunch of forest primates in a totally unnatural environment, trying our little best. Someone needs to give our species a hug.
This is a macroscopic view of Normandy's beach sands. About 4% of it, is magnetic shrapnel that has been broken down over the decades into sand-sized chunks, coming from the fierce fighting on D-Day 76 years ago #today https://t.co/IdnfbygOXf
This is badly misjudged. People should maintain social distancing, which is what these people are doing. We need to maintain public support for fundamental behaviour change which requires the authorities to focus on genuinely bad behaviour.
Consider: millions of years ago our antecedents gave a massive sacrifice of their left hemisphere.
We lost a tremendous amount of short term memory and replaced it with Broca’s, Wernicke & the phonological loop.
But why?
So we can—talk.
Thus chimpanzees can do this—we can’t:
Not sure there's anything that brings me more joy in life than making podcasts with these two people. We'd love to keep doing it, and hopefully spreading a bit of that joy. If you'd like to support the endeavour, here's how: https://t.co/mPEAtRMut4
This is a great piece on how much harder test batting has become in the past few years.
Motion that test batting averages be measured in standard deviations from the current combined average for all test players.
In Test cricket, wickets are now falling more frequently this year than anytime since 1911. Last year, averages were lower than anytime since 1957.
A piece on the new age of bowlers in Test cricket and what's going on
https://t.co/trvnoAz4kF
@jburnmurdoch Isn't it? I'm not sold on it as the only explanation - tennis in the 70s was almost a different sport to tennis now, albeit partly because of exactly the tech change in question - but it's a very compelling case
In 1999, when Federer played his first Grand Slam match at the French Open, Norway's Christian Ruud was in the draw with him. Twenty years later, the only Ruud in the draw with him is Christian's son Casper https://t.co/YmOIbN1dAi