Kurt Johnson

This is unbelievably cool.  This guy has persisted in finding ways to move extremely heavy items using only primitive tools.  He’s approaching the point where given time he can assemble something like  Stonehenge – not only without cranes but nearly unassisted by other people!  Very inspirational.

The original website is here.

This Michael Lewis piece from the NY Times might be the best article I’ve read all week.  Shane Battier plays basketball like a trader at a hedge fund:

Before the game, Battier was given his special package of information. “He’s the only player we give it to,” Morey says. “We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re thinking.” The data essentially broke down the floor into many discrete zones and calculated the odds of Bryant making shots from different places on the court, under different degrees of defensive pressure, in different relationships to other players — how well he scored off screens, off pick-and-rolls, off catch-and-shoots and so on. Battier learns a lot from studying the data on the superstars he is usually assigned to guard. For instance, the numbers show him that Allen Iverson is one of the most efficient scorers in the N.B.A. when he goes to his right; when he goes to his left he kills his team…

Battier says. “My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible.” The court doesn’t have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well…if you knew none of this, you would never guess any of it from watching the game. Bryant was quicker than Battier, so the latter spent much of his time chasing around after him, Keystone Cops-like… [but] when he decides where to be on the court and what angles to take, he is constantly reminding himself of the odds on the stack of papers he read through an hour earlier as his feet soaked in the whirlpool. “The numbers either refute my thinking or support my thinking,” he says, “and when there’s any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.” Even when the numbers agree with his intuitions, they have an effect. “It’s a subtle difference,” Morey says, “but it has big implications. If you have an intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there’s still some uncertainty if it’s right or wrong.”

Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy with total certainty. He can devote himself to a process and disregard the outcome of any given encounter.

[emphasis mine]

Perhaps not surprisingly, the VP of Basketball Operations for the Rockets is a former management consultant  (and coincidentally a classmate from OU).

Full article

Some fun maps are here: they distort the size of each country based on relative population, tourism, immigration, emigration, etc. One cool thing to add would be an animation feature to cycle through population over time (or other variables with longitudinal data) as it’s kind of clunky to click from map to map.

I’ve mentioned this to a couple of people in conversation but never had a link handy until now.

Check out the articles here and here (quoted below).

The ancient game of Buzkashi [aka Bozkashi] has been played in northern Afghanistan since the days of Ghengis Khan, the Mongol warrior whose army swept across Asia in the 13th century. It is a fierce game of competition played on the steppes of Asia by expert horsemen. The Mongols lived and died in the saddle. Today, it is played in the Afghan provinces of Maimana, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Kataghan. As a rule, women are not allowed to watch.

The carcass of an animal is used. Goats are preferred, but small calves will do if goats are in short supply. A carcass is soaked in cold water for 24 hours before the game. This is done so the carcass will remain intact and not be torn to pieces as hundreds of chopendoz horsemen independently compete to grab and carry the carcass to the winning circle. Usually, a the carcass is beheaded, its four legs are cut off from the knee, and its insides emptied before soaking. Sand is sometimes packed inside for extra bulk….

Some outstanding photos are here and here. I learned about it first from P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious travelogue All the Trouble in the World. He characterized Bozkashi as a game where one team of horsemen compete against another team in a kind of capture-the-flag with a calf carcass. However prize money went to the winning individual, not the winning team; teamwork was undermined by individual gamesmanship for the cash prize – all in all a pretty neat sports metaphor for central asian politics.