Friday 7/3/2009
Le moteur à explosion, via Wikipédia
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It’s been a hotly debated scientific question for decades: was Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak a genuine statistical outlier, or is it an expected statistical aberration, given the long history of major league baseball? I’d optimistically assumed, based on the work of Harvard physicist Ed Purcell (as cited by Stephen Jay Gould) that DiMaggio was the real deal. Here’s Gould:
“Purcell calculated that to make it likely (probability greater than 50 percent) that a run of even fifty games will occur once in the history of baseball up to now (and fifty-six is a lot more than fifty in this kind of league), baseball’s rosters would have to include either four lifetime .400 batters or fifty-two lifetime .350 batters over careers of one thousand games. In actuality, only three men have lifetime batting averages in excess of .350, and no one is anywhere near .400 (Ty Cobb at .367, Rogers Hornsby at .358, and Shoeless Joe Jackson at .356). DiMaggio’s streak is the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American sports.”
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Wednesday 7/1/2009
Tuesday 6/30/2009
Un récit illustré d’une visite au domaine de Thomas Jefferson, sur le site du NY Times.
"The point, it seems, is that there’s novelty in every situation if we look for it, but there’s no harm in making the task easier by remembering to do plenty of new things. “As long as something is novel,” Kashdan says, “we are still in the process of finding and creating meaning.” And “finding and creating meaning” may be as good a definition of fulfilment as I’ve yet encountered."
John McEnroe at the Stella Artois Tennis Championships, Queens Club in 1979. Photograph: Charles Knight/Rex Features
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Tout a débuté vers minuit lorsque deux jeunes femmes âgées de moins de 25 ans ont commencé à se quereller sur la rue Sherbrooke, près du boulevard Pie-IX. Une quarantaine de policiers armés de matraques ont alors encerclé les deux jeunes femmes et les ont clouées au sol, ce qui a suscité l’indignation chez des amis des suspects et chez de simples passants.
Quelques minutes après ces deux premières arrestations, deux autres jeunes femmes âgées de moins de 25 ans ont également commencé à se disputer et à hurler des insultes aux policiers. (…)
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Thursday 6/25/2009
Se demande ce qui se passe avec les jeunes femmes âgées de moins de 25 ans.
