Category Archives: Mathematics

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Unprecedented Non-Warming

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A new global temperature index:

What we see is that the halt in warming is without precedent in the recent warming period. As such, something *is* amiss with predictions of not only continued, but *accelerated* warming. The something that is amiss appears to be that:

  1. Sensitivity has been very significantly over estimated and
  2. Natural climate variability, whatever the cause, has been under estimated.

The former undermines the claim of drastic future warming, the latter undermines the claim that recent warming was uniquely attributable to anthropogenic forcing.

Let’s be absolutely clear: that represents a complete vindication of the skeptical position and a refutation of the alarmed position.

Anyone who disagrees is obviously a denier.

Mathematics, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Football Intelligence

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This is one of the reasons that I like football:

More than any other position, playing quarterback requires mastering a farrago of detail, and then sifting through it while staring at eleven large people eager to break your face. The best N.F.L. quarterbacks, like Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Peyton Manning, have reputations as keen, obsessive students of opposing defenses, whose schemes they decode in real time. And yet, what does it say that the great model of lethally consistent play, Peyton, scored a twenty-eight on the Wonderlic while his more erratic brother, Eli, scored a thirty-nine?

One theory some in the N.F.L. hold is that the highest-scoring quarterbacks are too rigidly scholarly, prisoners of research who don’t handle in-game adjustments well, while those whose scores are very low simply can’t handle a high volume of preparation.

Oliver Luck was twice an Academic All-American quarterback at West Virginia University, spent five years in the N.F.L., went on to law school, and is now the athletic director at his alma mater. His son, Andrew, (Stanford Class of 2012, architectural design; Wonderlic, thirty-seven) is the Indianapolis Colts’ excellent second-year quarterback. “Football intelligence to me is situational awareness,” Oliver Luck told me. “The variables in football are so many. Every play is a decision and you do it at full speed. Life involves more thought.” (If there is a dark undercurrent to a discussion of bright football players, it has to do with life after the scrum and the long-term effects that hits to the head can have on the brain.)

That said, Oliver Luck thinks that there have been certain moments post-football when his aptitude for the game has been helpful to him. “I remember distinctly sitting for the Texas bar exam after I finished law school,” he recalled. “There were maybe five hundred people in there. People were sighing and groaning. A guy one table away from me suddenly lost it. I wanted to tell him, ‘Suck it up! You can do it!’ The way I would in the huddle. I was focussed. I knew how to work through that test.”

But the other positions require intelligence as well. It’s not just a brute-force game, despite the heavy contact. It’s much more cerebral than continuous-motion sports (like hockey, basketball, soccer), which I hate. As Camille Paglia has noted, it’s more like battle planning and warfare, and it’s quintessentially American.