After years of hype and not-quite-living-up-to-his-potential, it seems that things are finally clicking for Joel Embiid. Anthony Davis, LeBron, and the Lakers figured out just how difficult the big man can be to stop this past Wednesday night as they lost their first road game since last season - a performance that also opened my eyes to exactly how well Embiid has been playing.

Coming off that performance, I thought it might be fun to do a mini-dive into some different offense metrics, and see if, in Joel’s case, the numbers back up the eye-test - and what other players have also popped to open the 2021 season!

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From 1999 to 2014, the Bowl Championship Series (better now as the BCS) administered a series of season-ending bowl games in an effort to determine the National Champion of Division I College Football. Rankings for these games, which would ultimately determine who would participate in the National Championship game, was done by fusing results of the AP Rankings, Coaches Poll rankings, and six different computer ranking systems.

This system, while well-intentioned, was ultimately doomed to a lifetime of controversy. Fusing the results of the different ranking systems created perpetual debate around the subjectivity of the results, and hosting just a single National Championship game made it difficult to compare a number of highly qualified teams against each other.

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Building maps that are rich in data and also easy to interpret is an incredibly hard task. The map-maker must keep in mind the needs of their audience and cater the projection, coloration, shading, labeling, and more so that the map can be grasped intuitively.

If you’re anything like me, you probably got a full year’s dosage of maps thrown up on big touchscreens at the start of this month as part of the 2020 Presidential Election. Unfortunately for us all, the most common map we were all looking at is objectively, with all due respect, a pretty bad map. You know, this guy?

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Earlier this summer, before the kickoff of the Major League Baseball season, I wrote an article which sought to predict the odds that any hitters might end the shortened 2020 season with a 0.400 batting average. Through a series of Monte Carlo simulations, I found that over an 81 game half-season, the odds that any one batter might hit 0.400 was about 6% - a possibility I found very exciting!

Now, with the season well underway and nearing its ‘midpoint’ (thanks to a 60, rather than 81, game regular season), I thought it would be fun to re-investigate these chances, focusing on one particular man with the best chance of doing the dang thing: Charlie Blackmon.

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What is it about human nature which always pulls us towards what we can’t have? While I’ve been marooned at home due to Coronavirus, my travel wanderlust has been running rampant. I don’t know if it’s the work-from-home in particular, or if taking international travel off the table makes it that much more alluring, but the bottom line is that I can’t shake a desire to just go somewhere.

One of the ways this wanderlust has manifested itself has been me spending a lot of time reading about the airline industry, which is going through some pretty significant changes right now. I won’t necessarily get into all the details, but it’s fair to say that airlines will need to work through a lot of thorny structural problems over the next few months and years. Rapid adoption of videoconferencing as a legitimate alternative to business travel and decreased desire for high-density tourist activities like Disneyland present huge problems on the demand side, and on the supply-side, airlines will need to figure out what to do with a surplus supply of expensive planes and the thousands of pilots, flight attendants, and other employees which kept those planes running.

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In 1997, the National Defense Authorization Act legalized the transfer of military hardware from the Department of Defense (DoD) to all law enforcement agencies for “bona fide law enforcement purposes” as part of the 1033 Program, operated through the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO). For years, the Program transferred small amounts of material, consisting of both assorted benign tools and weapons, to local law enforcement agencies. Things began to change in 2010, however, when the value of equipment transferred began to skyrocket towards a 2014 peak of $391 Million of material transferred from the DoD to local law enforcement agencies. Since 2014, transfers to local law enforcement have continued to sit in the realm of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

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Over Memorial Day weekend, I read a great article by The Athletic musing upon what might happen if Major League baseball decides to play a half season of 82 games. One section in particular caught my eye - “What if somebody hits .400?” The author does a great job of delving into what that might mean for baseball, and whether or not it might be feasible. The article also links to an amazing writeup from STATS, which gets even deeper into the numbers of it all, with lots of historical streaks to compare to.

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Two days ago, I published a new blog post where I broke down mobility data that Apple had generously made public to aid cities, researchers, and the public at large. One of the things I noted in my post was that while the granularity of Apple’s data trailed what Google had previously shared, Apple made their data easily accessible via CSV download, while Google’s data (though seemingly great) was locked up in PDF files.

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Earlier this week, Apple released a trove of mobility data, published to help cities and the public understand the real-world impacts of the COVID-19 disease on human movement across the world. This data comes a bit after Google’s publishing of Community Mobility Reports, which also seek to provide insight into behavior.

While Google’s data, due to their widespread tracking of Android device locations, is able drill into detailed points of interest such as grocery stores, transit stations, and workplaces, Apple’s data, which is based upon Apple Maps direction requests, shows a more narrow slice of user behavior. However, given the tremendous install base of iPhones globally, it’s definitely a great signal into what folks are up to, and better yet, it is accessible as a CSV, while Google’s data is locked up inside PDFs.

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As the COVID-19 coronavirus sweeps across the globe, it presents a public health crisis that is daunting to even the best-prepared communities. While most Western nations have resisted the strict quarantine regime that China first implemented in Wuhan, local and national governments are grappling with the best way to contain the spread of the virus, and will need to make critical decisions in the coming days and weeks.

For those who have not seen it, the Washington Post put together an excellent model on how infection spreads and the potential benefit of alternative approaches to quarantines, such as moderate and extensive “social distancing”. Social distancing, which is a nebulous term but tends to imply a self-driven withdrawal from public to avoid contact and transmission of the virus, may end up being the best option for many communities in the United States while the Trump administration struggles to put together a coherent response plan to the virus.

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