Oslo or The Whale Whose Tail Looked a Bit Like a Wellington Boot

English translation follows the German text. 

Hallo, 

ich wollte nur Bescheid geben, dass ich jetzt einen neuen Blog auf meiner Website habe, wo es hauptsächlich um mein Buch geht: Oslo or The Whale Whose Tail Looked a Bit Like a Wellington Boot.

Also wenn ihr noch Blogposts von mir lesen möchtet, könnt ihr dort welche finden. Die Themen auf dem Oslo-Blog sind etwas weniger breitgefächert als die hiesigen, aber ich würde behaupten, dass - obwohl etwas Zeit seit den glorreichen Tagen des Massive Blogs vergangen ist, man immer noch etwas von meiner Art zu denken und zu schreiben erkennen kann.

Schau dir gerne den neuen Blog an! 

Hello, 

I just wanted to let you know that I now have a new blog at my website that is largely about my book, Oslo or The Whale Whose Tail Looked a Bit Like a Wellington Boot.

So if you want to read blog things from me, you can find them there. The topics on my Oslo blog are much more narrow, but I would suggest that even though much time has past, you can still recognize something of my way of thinking and writing from the good old days of the Massive Blog.

Do feel free to check it out!

Magic Darts Wagon Wheel

Hello,
The title "magic darts wagon wheel" isn't particularly satsifying. It includes two important words: "magic" and "darts", but referring to something that looks like a dartboard as a wagon wheel is maybe a little odd. Particularly considering the fact that it looks like a dartboard because it's a diagram of a dartboard. Wagon wheel just happens to be a term from sports broadcasting (cricket), which is why it is even being used here as the working title for my latest invention.

If it's displaying properly, here's the magic darts wagon wheel of Germany against India from the 2015 World Cup of Darts.

In case it isn't evident what's happening, I'll explain it in a few simple bullet-points:

• the dartboards start white (actually coloured as normal but 100% transparent;
• the beds that get hit (singles affect both beds irrespective of which is hit) get a little bit less transparent for each dart that hits them;
• there are a few settings which mean that the type of bed being hit (single, double, treble etc.) is considered when determining the impact on opacity of a dart in that bed;
• this is because you are probably hitting far fewer doubles that singles (for example) so if I want them registering on the magic darts wagon wheel, then I need to do that;
• missed doubles (which hit nothing) are registered as black just outside the double;
• I have these parameters easily editable – at the moment you enter the number of legs needed to win in the match and it gives you some suggested parameters - this may yet be fine-tuned based on results of testing;
• the boards update automatically when you enter the beds hit, then I save an image of both boards after each visit to a board;
• these are then strung together in a GIF making the animation of the whole match.

As you may well agree, this is pretty nice. Even a casual observer will see that India hit too many single 20s and too many treble 1s and never really hit any doubles.

There are a few things that I could still improve like:

• tidying up the drawn dartboard. It's a little jaggy in places;
• tidying up the programming for saving the image - it works but there is an approx. 1.5 second delay which could maybe be shortened with neater programming;
• possibly add a scoreboard to the grapic, though as there is currently no entry of "double to win leg", this would require additional data entry (or something else like actually calculating the score based on the beds hit, which possibly wouldn't be impossible, but isn't currently included at all);
• possible alteration to the means of data entry. Currently I have a grid and I add 1 to the appropriate cell but I could set up something where you enter the three beds hit, e.g. T20, T20, 20 and then it sources from there. Not sure if that would actually be easier though. Am considering something with dropdown menus;
• other improvements based on testing and/or user feedback.

Please do comment and/or make suggestions for improvements. And, as with my darts wave, covered in previous posts on this blog, please do credit me if using the magic darts wagon wheel for your own darts matches, Twitter feeds or television broadcasts. Thanks.

Also as a little tip, for the latest news and updates, be sure to follow @herrbench on Twitter (that's me by the way) as that's where I'm often posting stuff like this in more reduced form, but including the nice graphics. And it's very handy to retweet stuff on Twitter so feel free to do that as well.

Darts wave fone-tuning [sic]

Hello,
it may be a little bit early to talk about fine-tuning, or "fribbing", as I believe some people call it. Fribbing is apparently more fine than frobbing, just as twiddling is more fine than twoddling. So I guess you could say I'm not yet fine-tuning, but just fone-tuning.

Ask Steven Pinker for a clearer explanation of that first paragraph if it made no sense.

Anyway, some things I've noticed as a result of having used my darts wave a few times and made a few improvements (see the last few posts of the Massive Blog for more details) are:

• that it remains very good, 
• that it indeed keeps getting better as a result of the improvements
• that it does help to use it a few times to find minor errors in the spreadsheet
• that if you have a momentum score based on the last 15 visits to the board then this can go down when you throw a ton-40 if you threw a ton-80 16 throws ago.

This last point is quite interesting. Clearly, it doesn't matter how many throws you take into account. If the 180 leaves the relevant data range at the same moment as the 140 enters it, then your momentum will drop. Just as your ranking points will drop in tennis or whatever if you are only runner-up in a tournament which you won the year (or two years) before. This seems largely unavoidable.

However, there is one points-based system which I believe is universally revered and respected, and that is the FIFA world ranking system for international football teams. I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty so I'll stick to the notty-grotty, which includes the fact that if a football match was three-and-a-half years ago, then it contributes less to your ranking than if a match was last Wednesday.

I haven't experimented yet, but this has certainly given me the idea of making the last 5 visits to the board of my wave count more, the 6th to 10th visits count less and the 11th to 15th visits count even less. This could potentially counteract the issue of your ranking dropping when you hit a 140. Probably not in every case, but possibly in many cases.

Worth thinking about anyway. I will probably do a couple of trial runs and post something about them in the near future. In the mean time, why not read my other posts about the FIFA world rankings, like this one here.

PS: Just in case you're interested but not interested enough to have clicked on the link, the current top five world football teams, in order, are: Argentina, Belgium, Columbia, Germany and Chile.

The best thing

Hello,
This is just a short post, making use of Google's Ngram Viewer which we all know and love. In case anyone doesn't know about Ngram, it lets you search for word or phrase usage in books over time and gives you a nice graph. So you can see when certain words or phrases were most popular and things like that.

Anyway, inspired by this phone-in on Alan Partridge's Mid-Morning Matters, where the presenter invites listeners to suggest the "best thing ever" and someone says "sliced bread", I decided to have a do a little bit of research.

According to Wikipedia, sliced bread was first sold in 1928 and yet, according to Ngram, the phrase "best thing since sliced bread" only really started appearing in literature around 1974. However, some slightly less half-hearted research shows that "greatest thing since sliced bread" emerged in 1950 and really gained pace around 1962. If we just use "thing since sliced bread", then the first record is in 1947, three years after the famous pre-sliced bread ban of '43, with a real increase in usage in the 1960s, after which it goes up fairly steadily up to the present day.

It's hard to make cast-iron deductions from this information, but the following are possible:

• early sliced bread, invented in the 20s, wasn't all that great and only really won over American hearts when it improved dramatically in the 1960s
• sliced bread was immediately excellent in 1928 but it takes time (around 30-40 years) for phrases like this to develop and find their way into written literature
• sliced bread was good ever since 1928 but there was something else which was still considered better, the popularity of which declined in the 1960s, opening the way for sliced bread to take its place in the phrase

If we consider that the last of these possibilities is indeed possible, then it might be interesting to know what the idiomatic "best thing" (or "greatest thing" etc.) was before sliced bread. If we run "best thing since" through Ngram, we see it first emerge in 1855, with fairly undular, but not insignificant, activity up to the mid 60s, where a real rise can be observed, similar in trajectory to that of the "thing since sliced bread".

Clearly, all "best thing since" happening before 1928 cannot possibly be referring to sliced bread (unless appearing in some obscure and remarkably prescient sci-fi publications) and, if we believe Ngram, most things before the 1960s and all things before 1947 must have referred to other things too. So what might these have been?

Now the scope of the Massive Blog doesn't allow for a very thorough investigation, but a quick and haphazard click through the links underneath the Ngram give us the following candidates for "best thing" from the period 1800-1914:

• John Bourne, writing in 1878, "I put this heavy mineral oil as the best thing since compound engines."
• William Mumford Baker, writing in 1883, "It 's the best thing since the war broke out."
• The World's Work, in 1903, stating that "As a political novel ... "The Henchman," by Mark Lee Luther, is the best thing since "J. Devlin Boss"".

The other examples of "best thing since" from this period are red herrings, because they include punctuation and use "since" to mean "because". For example, American Poultry Advocate wrote in 1905: "We heard it suggested that it should have a separate building, but this seems to us hardly the best thing, since it would, in a measure, set it off by itself; we would much prefer that this exhibit be a part of the regular poultry exhibit". So these can be discounted.

Also, the second listed example, "best thing since the war broke out" is probably to be treated with caution, as it a) only really works when the war is still going on and b) isn't necessarily putting the outbreak of war as something good to be compared to, but rather suggesting that all has been rotten since this time. Indeed, the third example is also only valid in the context of political novels and so also not really equivalent to the usage of "best thing since sliced bread". So we're left with compound engines as the idiomatic best thing of the 19th Century.

To finish off, because I don't want the post getting too long and you're free to continue the research yourselves, I'll look at the period before "best thing since sliced bread" caught on. Here is one of the more interesting examples:

• The best thing since ice cream is also the best thing since canned pudding.(Life Magazine, 1971)

This seems to be an advert for Birds Eye's Cool and Creamy Cups, which also contains the slightly nonsensical phrase "you'll think they're the best thing since anything".

It is also slightly odd, because canned pudding is a more recent invention than ice-cream, meaning that the best thing since ice cream would automatically be better than canned pudding, unless you were speaking at a time when canned pudding hadn't yet been invented. Depending on what exactly your feelings are, you should be saying something like: "The best thing since canned pudding would also have been the best thing since ice cream if it had come out before canned pudding had been invented" or "The best thing since ice cream is, just to clarify, also better than canned pudding."

Other examples include "best thing since Voltaire" (1923) and "best thing since we went to the Yalu River in Korea" (1975).

Of all examples, my personal favourite is "the best thing since indoor plumbing", as written in 1988 by Peter S. Wenz. I like this example for two reasons. Firstly, its date, at a time when sliced bread was really taking over, makes us realise just how good indoor plumbing is to be able to compete alongside this great thing. And secondly, it reminds us how lucky we are not to have to go outside and face the elements whenever we want to take advantage of some plumbing: One of life's truly great things.

As briefly mentioned earlier, you're welcome to continue or expand on this research, either by using Ngram or other tools. The Massive Blog always welcomes contributions via the comment function or directly to the author on Twitter @herrbench.


 

Equilibrium in the Champions League

The UEFA Champions League draw took place on Thursday. This wasn't for the knock-out stages, touched on in a previous Massive Blog post, but for the groups.

To create some kind of balance across the 8 groups, UEFA rank all the teams according to their club coefficient system. Much has been written about the system, such as this, with Chris Bevan saying things like “it is likely to preserve the status quo” and it “is stacked in the favour of teams from stronger nations”.

Whatever you think about the system, it rewards teams over a 5 year period for winning and drawing games in Europe and for progressing to later rounds of European competitions. You might think it should weight more recent results more heavily or reward wins against stronger teams more highly, both of which FIFA’s world country ranking does. However, FIFA’s system is often criticised as well, so it would seem that international football governing bodies just can’t win.

Anyway, I’m here to talk about the balance of the groups. At the moment, they rank the 32 teams and then split them into 4 pots: the best 8, 9^th-16^th best, 17^th to 24^th best and the worst 8. Then, to make the groups balanced, each group contains one team from each pot.

Looking for more balance

This only provides a very sketchy level of balance, however, as 8 teams are lumped together in one pot, meaning that Barca, ranked first, are treated just the same as Benfica, ranked eighth, and so on.

If we go into more detail on the ranking, and, instead of just splitting the teams into 4 pots, give each team points according to its ranking, from 1 for Barca down to 32 for Real Sociedad, then we can use these rankings as a basis for finding more balance.

All 32 teams together have (32+1)*16 = 528 points between them. For balance then, each group should have 528/8 = 66 points. And we can still maintain the pots, so that each group also has someone from each of the 4 pots.

To make these groups, the most obvious way would be to put the best teams from pot 1 and 2 with the worst from pot 3 and 4, giving you teams 1,9,24 and 32. You could then work down pots 1 and 2 and up pots 3 and 4, so the next group would have teams 2,10,23,31 and so on. This would give you 8 groups of 66 total points.

However, this very simple method falls at the first hurdle because the first group would be Barca, Atletico Madrid, Leverkusen and Real Sociedad, three of which are Spanish, which isn’t allowed. 

Excel time

I threw a spreadsheet together and did some trial and error and you can get balanced groups which also respect the rule of having maximum one team from each national federation in each group. One way it works is (ranking from 1 to 32 given next to each team):

Group A		Group B
Man U	5	Real	4
Marseilles	13	Schalke	12
Galatasaray	23	Olympiakos	22
Copenhagen	25	Celtic	28
Group C		Group D
Benfica	8	Bayern	2
PSG	15	CSKA	14
Zenit	17	Man City	18
Napoli	26	Sociedad	32
Group E		Group F
Chelsea	3	Arsenal	6
Juventus	16	Atletico	9
Dortmund	20	Basel	21
Anderlecht	27	Plzen	30
Group G		Group H
Porto	7	Barcelona	1
Milan	11	Donetsk	10
Ajax	19	Leverkusen	24
Bucharest	29	Vienna	31

 

In all likelihood, this isn’t the only way the groups could be compiled in a fully balanced way, but it is one way which serves as an example and as proof that it can be done. If you wanted, you could almost certainly let a computer randomly compile balanced groups from all the possible permutations.

Now, given balanced groups, the average strength of your opponents (as defined by the ranking points) is always (66 – n)/3, where n is your ranking. For example, Chelsea’s opponents have an average strength (66-3)/3 = 21, whereas Arsenal’s have an average (66-6)/3 = 20.

This is slightly obvious, but it serves to demonstrate that Arsenal would, if all were balanced, have slightly higher-ranked opponents than Chelsea. And they shouldn’t complain about it because it’s their fault for being worse-ranked than Chelsea.

A look at the actual groups

Now that we’ve established that balanced groups are possible and what they could (in one example) look like, let’s take a look at the actual groups:

Group A		Group B
Man U	5	Real	4
Donetsk	10	Juventus	16
Leverkusen	24	Galatasaray	23
Sociedad	32	Copenhagen	25
Total	71	Total	68
Group C		Group D
Benfica	8	Bayern	2
PSG	15	CSKA	14
Olympiakos	22	Man City	18
Anderlecht	27	Plzen	30
Total	72	Total	64
Group E		Group F
Chelsea	3	Arsenal	6
Schalke	12	Marseilles	13
Basel	21	Dortmund	20
Bucharest	29	Napoli	26
Total	65	Total	65
Group G		Group H
Porto	7	Barcelona	1
Atletico	9	Milan	11
Zenit	17	Ajax	19
Vienna	31	Celtic	28
Total	64	Total	59

 

As better-ranked teams have a lower number ranking, the lower the total, the stronger the group. Going by this, the strongest group turns out as Group H, with a total of 59, and the weakest as Group C, with a total of 72. 

Interestingly, in spite of articles like this one, saying things like “Arsenal have a tricky start” or Phil McNulty saying things like “Arsenal were given the toughest test” and “Jose Mourinho may have silently celebrated how the overblown ceremony treated Chelsea”, the table shows that both groups are equally strong.

This means that Arsenal’s opponents (total ranking 59) are slightly stronger than Chelsea’s (62), but this serves to maintain the balance, as Arsenal are worse ranked. Man City’s opponents are obviously significantly stronger (44), as Man City themselves are only in the 3^rd pot.

Getting lucky

Clearly, if all groups were balanced then no team would be luckier than any other team. To measure the luck of a team, I therefore propose comparing the strength of their group opponents with the strength of their opponents in a balanced group. 

We already have the formula for a team’s opponents’ average strength in a balanced group: (66 – n)/3

For the average strength of a team’s opponents in an actual group, we just replace the 66 with g, the group total: (g-n)/3.

The difference between these two totals then gives us the luck (l) of the team.

l = ((g-n)/3) – ((66-n)/3)

This can be simplified a bit down to:

3l = g-n – (66-n)

3l = g – n – 66 + n

3l = g – 66

l = (g-66)/3

Doing it this way round also means that a team playing lower-ranked opponents will have positive luck, which is nice and intuitive.

Interestingly, perhaps, this shows us that a team’s own rank (n) has no impact on its luck, as there is no (n) in the formula. This means that all teams in any group are all as lucky as each other, which is nice.

Luck of the English

So how does it look for the English teams?

Chelsea and Arsenal both have:

(65-66)/3 = -1/3 = -0.33

Man Utd have:

(71-66)/3 = 5/3 = +1.67

and Man City have:

(64-66)/3 = -2/3 = -0.67

This suggests that Man Utd are the only English side which have really been lucky, Man City have had the worst luck and Chelsea and Arsenal have both been equally (and only slightly) unlucky. 

This would appear to contradict McNulty’s suggestions that “United and Moyes have not been handed an easy group” and that Arsenal have gotten "on the wrong end of the Champions League draw”.

Luck of the Scottish

If we look at Celtic, they have a luck score of:

(59-66)/3 = -7/3 or -2.33

Add that to the fact that they’re the worst team in their group, and you can’t really argue with their manager Neil Lennon’s statement that: “in terms of football it doesn't come any harder”. The worst luck theoretically possible for Celtic would be -3.33 but -2.33 is certainly the unluckiest of all groups in the actual draw.

Given what I said earlier about all group members having the same luck, Celtic’s opponents in Group H, Barca, Milan and Ajax, have also had just as rotten luck as the Scottish champions. This may be of some consolation to them.

To sum up, whether or not you like the way the clubs are seeded, whether or not you agree with the system of club coefficient calculation and whether or not you’d like to see more balance in the draw, I think we can say with some certainty that Lennon probably pays more attention than McNulty to maths.

Coming soon: Tune in to the next blog post for a look at the balance of the groups using the club coefficient points as a basis, not just a simple 1 to 32 ranking.