A Phase Transitions in the New York Times Front-Page Picture Density?

Visually, it seems like it resembles a phase transition (watch how suddenly the density changes), so I expect that one could see that arise in a simple model.

Every single New York Times front page since 1852. Look at the growth of pictures in news.
(h/t Josh Begley). pic.twitter.com/zLxe01U2QX

— Carl Miller (@carljackmiller) November 3, 2017

(Tip of the cap to Sabine Hossenfelder.)

A New Low for PLOS ONE

Well, this paper in PLOS ONE demonstrates in epic fashion that this journal is a predatory journal.

Quoting the paper's abstract: The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.

This kind of statement should not be allowed in a scientific paper.

(Tip of the cap to Sang Hoon Lee.)

Update: This paper has also been discussed in Easter Eggs in Scientific Papers.

Update (3/05/16): Oh look, PLOS ONE continues to be careful about how they go about doing things.

Update (3/07/16): Here is Aaron Clauset's take on more general situations in publishing, with the recent PLOS ONE debacle as the backdrop for these larger issues. (My view of the journal is considerably less generous than his, perhaps because they have been failing epically with mathematics ever since their inception.)

A Differential Equation in the New York Times

Here is Steve Strogatz's second guest article in Olivia Judson's New York Times blog. He lifted some of his discussion from his textbook, but it just warms my heart to see differential equations discussed in a venue like the New York Times and even more to see one (even a simple one) actually appear there.

My guess is that Strogatz's third guest article will be about synchronization and networks.

(Tip of the hat to Samuel Lee.)

Math and the City

Here is a guest article by Steve Strogatz that appears in the New York Times. Strogatz is guest-blogging for Olivia Judson in the next three weeks. The first article is called "Math in the City" and it discusses Zipf's Law and the work by Geoff West and collaborators. (However, unlike West in his seminar yesterday, Strogatz does not discuss what I have come to call The Power Law OF DOOM.)

(Tip of the hat to Hilary Ockendon.)

Debate over inclusion into baseball writers' association

There's quite a spat going on about the inclusion of internet journalists in the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA).

Before I make comments, here is one article that discusses stuff and names names. Here is an associated blog in which some of the issues are being discussed and the so-called "credentials" of many members of the BBWAA are being tabulated.

Recently, the BBWAA finally decided to allow membership (which eventually results in things like the ability to vote for membership in the Hall of Fame) to internet writers (in addition to newspaper writers). This should have happened years ago, but at least this oversight has finally been corrected --- well, sort of. Two notable nominees (Rob Neyer and Keith Law) of ESPN.com were the only two nominees rejected, despite their enormously high credentials and certain "luminaries" managed to get in without a problem. The "official" reason was that they don't attend enough games, despited the fact that they have written about baseball daily for something like 10 years. A fundamental problem with this so-called "criterion", however, is that most of the people who are actually in the BBWAA are not being held to anything remotely like this standard. The blog to which I linked is dissecting the list of BBWAA members ad nauseum. And guess what? Some of them write about baseball on the order of once a year or less. Basically, Neyer and Law were excluded because they're actually willing to criticize others in print. This whole thing is utter tripe. If you want an official standard, apply the fucking thing to everybody --- not just to exclude the people you don't want!

Ideally, the BBWAA will be faced with the choice of fixing this problem or becoming irrelevant. In any event, the story has really mushroomed over the past several days.

Prank alert: The California Tech visits MIT

Well, this isn't much of an alert because the prank actually occurred on Friday. I'm just getting around to posting this entry now.

For April 1st, The California Tech decided to have a few fake pages in the style of MIT's school newspaper. There were some April Fools articles in the issue, but the plans expanded to writing an entire fake issue of the MIT paper and flying over to Boston to deliver it on their Campus Preview Weekend (what they call prefrosh weekend) in lieu of their regular paper. I approve!

I have only glanced through the actual articles -- one can find copies of the paper all over campus -- and they don't seem particularly funny (although a couple of things are amusing). However, the writing per se is far less important than the prank itself, which is awesome! (Autumn and I are definitely planning to have a story about this prank in Legends IV.)

One thing I don't know is whether our upcoming book helped motivate this prank. (An article about the book is going to be appearing in the next issue of The Tech, so such things had been stirring in the air around The Tech for a while now.) Naturally, one of the big motivations of the book is to encourage pranks, so hopefully that will happen. There have certainly been several encouraging signs over the past couple of years and some amount of money from each copy of our book that's sold will be going towards a prank fund, so there will be some money available for this stuff.