I was looking for a WBB version of BracketMatrix and couldn't find any, so I fired up Codex and made one myself. (It’ll update every few hours until Selection Sunday, but not much will change now.) I'll plan to host it properly next season, but for now it’s here: whitakk.github.io/wbb-bracket-...

the funniest scenario for leaving ichiro off the ballot is just someone from cleveland who’s still mad about the quote and has been waiting for revenge. if that’s the case, respect

Late to this but apparently that "black spatulas will kill you" paper that went viral had a math error overstating the effect by 10x statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/13/h...

The teen pager scare, what Cookie Monster's cookies are really made of, why LEGO advertises pre-made sets now, and more things I learned this year: kaleidoscopemind.substack.com/p/52-things-...

19 of the last 20 men's soccer final four teams have come from Power 6 conferences - what happened in 2024 to get this chaos?

In the 2022-23 Ivy League Xaivian Lee and Danny Wolf (both listed in this week's BR NBA mock draft) averaged 20.7 minutes and 7.4 points *combined*

one of the few decent pieces I’ve seen about emotional labor that’s actually targeted at men (the ones who tend to need it): archive.ph/SbMCo

Rutgers isn’t as good as Seton Hall but this win was more impressive since it didn’t require bananas three-point shooting. Thought Princeton would fall to third in the league without St Rose, but so far they’ve looked just fine. bsky.app/profile/adam...

Something surprising to me (via @maxtmcc on X) is how the big red 2016-24 shift in the northeast isn’t a big cities phenomenon, it’s literally a New York City-specific phenomenon. You don’t see much of a shift in Boston, Philly, or DC:

No surprise but a major bummer. Offense was great in a win at Seton Hall without her, but built on an unsustainable 12-19 3P%, and they’ll face a brutal schedule through the end of this year. bsky.app/profile/jenn...

I wrote about Baseball's Copacabana Shot, the breakout star of the postseason pebblehunting.substack.com/p/baseballs-...

Famous books about world-changing organizations reveal some common patterns of innovation - and Skunk Works shows how those can be broken: kaleidoscopemind.substack.com/p/rules-and-...

Scoring in men's college basketball is the best it's been in 30 years. Why? My theories ($): -Continued erasure of charge calls -Coaches being younger and more analytically-friendly -Crashing the boards is BACK open.substack.com/pub/statsbyw...

this somewhat changed my view of the "true" state of the economy in 2024: jzmazlish.substack.com/p/yes-inflat...

Drop the Monty Hall Problem into any group of people and they’ll collapse into infighting and talking past each other. What makes this particular puzzle so hard to explain? open.substack.com/pub/kaleidos...

How geometry can help you care for babies, the mysterious health benefits of ice cream, and other things I learned last year: kaleidoscopemind.substack.com/p/52-things-...