Russell Davies

Silly machines

This blog post is funny, a masterful use of YouTube and a potentially valuable reframing of big data and dataviz as 'silly machines'.

"I’M SORRY, you can sit there and look and play with all your silly machines AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE…"

This wasn’t just a rallying cry for all Proper Football Men, as Sky’s stranglehold on vacuous football discourse began to take hold, but a prophetic one. For 1996’s “silly machines”, read today’s football analytics boom, Owen Coyle’s dismissal of tactics writer “Zonal Whoever” in 2011, Tim Sherwood’s belief that “players only call themselves No. 10s because they can’t score goals” and Sean Dyche’s ongoing war against the fraudulent European managers who simply make their players “run harder” and that’s it.

Back to 1996, though, and this was a football world struggling to come to terms with the prospect of a man in a TV studio rewinding all the errors and playing them back in slow motion until everyone had been taught a thorough retrospective lesson.

Old Fitzrovians

I'm going to try and get a Walking Football club going at the 5-a-side pitch near Warren Street. Here's a page where you can express your interest, if you have any.

 

Ring binder bling

I think perhaps I have to accept that I will never have files as beautiful as those of Jean Mohr

(From)

Weapons of Math Destruction

You should read Weapons of Math Destruction, you're probably planning to, I am. It might be queued up on your kindle or bedside table. You might be getting it for Christmas. But maybe you won't get round to it. That's possible. We're all busy. So, just in case, listen to this. It's fascinating stuff.

Cathy O'Neill talks about Weapons of Math Destruction.

Who Will Command The Robot Armies?

Maciej's latest talk is full of genius:

"Amazon hires such workers through a subsidiary called Integrity. If you know anything about American business culture, you’ll know that a company called “Integrity” can only be pure evil."

Kim at Interesting

Kim at Interesting. Beautiful, sad and pointful. (A perfectly cromulent word)

Rest and motion

Further to things not changing:

"the amount of time people have spent in motion has remained constant since 1950"

from Hypermobility. via

History will repeat itself

What is the book but technology?

"Being opposed to technology is profoundly at odds with the book business because what is the book but technology, technology that has been smoothed and sanded by repeated contact with human society into the most comfortable technology we have, as taken for granted as our clothes, product of the looms. … We cannot know how much magnificent culture went unpublished by the white men in tweed jackets who ran publishing for the past century but just because they did publish some great books doesn’t mean they didn’t ignore a great many more."

Something seemed to cough Michal's RSS into life and this popped into my reader. It's wonderful. It's a little ways down his page, the original source seems to have gone.

 

Do simple better

Some bits from a splendid article about the Chicago Cubs.

“All combined knowledge of baseball probably represents three per cent of the game—ninety-seven per cent is unknown,” Epstein told me this spring. “So we’re constantly asking each other questions, testing hypotheses, challenging other people’s opinions—asking if there’s a better way to do things, a better way to capture data, gather data, work with data, testing out old scouting axioms to see if they can be proven by the numbers or disproven by the numbers.”

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“I asked two quantitative people, working separately, to study the entire league and to figure out if there was a statistical way to characterize the success of other ball clubs,”

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“Everybody wants to win, but, if all you think about is winning and losing, you get tight,” he told me. “But process is fearless. Just focus on what you have to do. Play the game properly, and the rest will take care of itself.” To underscore that point with his players, Maddon, in spring training, handed out T-shirts bearing such aphorisms as “Do Simple Better” and “Try Not to Suck.”