Sunday, April 21, 2013

Six of the Best 344

"It's like buses: you wait all your life for this kind of coverage for a book you've written and then, suddenly, two of them come along and you can't link to them to spread the word." David Boyle on the joys and frustrations of getting extensive coverage of his new book behind The Times and Sunday Times paywall.

Jonathan Fryer on the decline of the Green Party.

Over the past 11 years, according to Defence for Children International, some 7,500 children have been detained in Israeli prisons and detention facilities. +972 Magazine has interviews with some of them.

On 18 April 1930 the BBC announced that there was no news. The Questing Vole wishes it would do it more often.

Dave Rattigan's Facebook page has some then and now photographs of the Bradford locations used in the film Billy Liar.

"Martin Amis thought chess was an unmasterable game, but the machines are proving him wrong. Cricket, with all of its variations and oddities, its geographical sweep, its luck and its superstitions, its weather and its deadly psychology, actually might be. But some of its deeper mysteries are being revealed, and new kinds of machines are emerging to play it." The Old Batsman writes on the growing role of biomechanics and statistical analysis in cricket.

1 comment:

Tristan said...

As a baseball fan as well as a cricket fan I wondered how well the sabermetrics of baseball could be applied to cricket.

I came to the conclusion that there is more variation in cricket - the wicket being the biggest variation and the ball in test matches.
You could probably quantify types of wicket and get some statistical information about performance though.

I suspect that T20 will be the biggest beneficiary of applying statistics, there's far less variation as time hardly factors in.

That said, even Theo Epstein, credited with being one of the brightest young sabermetrics based baseball minds will tell you that statistics never tell the whole story, scouting and the human factor is just as important.