(Note: I apologize for breaking Explananda with this post last night — I let my enthusiasm override my remembering-how-to-post.)

I suppose it’s fitting since my last post was right before the 2004 election, but I never thought my return would be about politics. Well, kind of.

For various reasons, including the interesting Obama/Clinton delegate math, I’ve been following this year’s election in greater detail than any in the past. Which, unfortunately, means I’ve been reading a lot of political articles. In the course of my travails I came across a particularly egregious example of the mis-use of statistics that got me worked up enough that I had to write about it somewhere. So here you go.

I found this in a post yesterday by Peggy Noonan at WSJ.com:

I’m bumping into a lot of critics who do not buy the legitimacy of small town mayorship (Palin had two terms in Wasilla, Alaska, population 9,000 or so) and executive as opposed to legislative experience. But executives, even of small towns, run something. There are 262 cities in this country with a population of 100,000 or more. But there are close to a hundred thousand small towns with ten thousand people or less. “You do the math,” the conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway told me. “We are a nation of Wasillas, not Chicagos.”

The worst thing is that this even passes the sniff test; 262 times 100,000 is way, way less than 100,000 times 10,000, so it does seem like there are more people living in small cities than big cities.

Except: the first alarm should go off when you look at the numbers for small cities. 100,000 times 10,000 is 1 billion, and the population of the US is just over 0.3 billion. And of course, when you actually get to the facts, you find that over 58% of the US lives in cities with over 200,000 people.

The trick is using a floor for the number you want to minimize, and a ceiling for the number you want to maximize. The counting in the quote above counts New York City as a city of 100,000, and counts Eastport, Maine (my ancestral home, population 1640) and many other towns with population under 1000 as cities of 10,000.

Another example of this fun statistical manipulation: only 1% of the US population has a household income of over $400,000, but over 50% of the population has a household income of under $50,000. Clearly, the evidence show that most of the wealth in the US lies in the hands of working families.

Howls of outrage (5)

Neat write-up on the graph theory of the US and Canada at Isabel’s math blog, asking questions like: how many way can you split up the 6 New England states? Of possible interest to those trying to split up the US into red and blue.

My parents live in Maine, so I’m well aware that you have to pass through New Hampshire to get there. #%@*&! tolls and highway liquor stores.

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A neat rundown of songs chosen by (and for) baseball players for their introduction at Page 3. Few shocks, except for that a few actually choose “She Bangs.” Apparently most players are either heavy metal or rap fans. It did please me to see “Misty Mountain Hop” a couple of times.

At an Elmira Pioneers game several years ago, the catcher, named Bingo Owens I think, who was about 10 years older than everyone else on the team, had “Ring of Fire” played every time he came up to bat. Best choice ever.

A single voice crying in the wilderness (1)

A very nice story at Batgirl about last night’s Twins-White Sox game in which Corey Koskie (who is Canadian) got hit by pitches 3 times. Worth looking at even if you aren’t a baseball fan.

It helps to know that Spiderman is the nickname of the Twins’ centerfielder, Torii Hunter.

A single voice crying in the wilderness (1)

MathWorld is reporting that a computer participating in GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime search, claims to have found the 41st Mersenne prime this morning.

This would be the largest known prime number, with roughly 7 million digits. There’s a $100,000 prize for the discovery of the first prime with 10 million digits, which GIMPS is likely to claim within a couple years.

The discovery of the 41st Mersenne prime would also mean the discovery of the 41st perfect number.

Update: After finding the message boards where the discovery is being discussed, it looks quite possible that there has been a new Mersenne prime found, but that it might be smaller that a previously known Mersenne prime.

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A sad day for Damon’s Disciples; Johnny Damon has announced he’s shaving his beard (but not his head) for charity.

Plus, it’s always fun to read quotes from Damon:

Damon talked about his unusual after-dark training regime: racing cars on the Orlando street where he lives, which has a 25 mph speed limit.

“Once a car starts coming, I’ll just race it to my house,” he said. “I scare the cars to speed up a little more, seeing a caveman-looking guy with long hair running at 10 or 11 at night.”

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Historian John Thorn found a Pittsfield, Mass. bylaw from 1796 barring baseball within 80 feet of a new meeting house. Neat stuff, plus an appearance by Jim Bouton.

Pinning down the origin of baseball at this point is nigh unto impossible, but it does seem that a similar game was played in Massachusetts in the 18th century:

“It’s clear that not only was baseball played here in 1791, but it was rampant,” Thorn said. “It was rampant enough to have an ordinance against it.”

For reference, the official version of the origin of baseball is that Abner Doubleday invented the game in 1839 in Cooperstown, NY.

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Soon, the federal government will have a monopoly of professional athlete’s urine.

Doug Pappas has already expressed pretty much all I could say on the matter.

The New York Times reports that the Players’ Union has filed a motion to keep federal prosecutors from testing the samples for THG. Again, *why* is the government involved in any of this?

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Baseball Primer is still down, and I want to talk about this, so:

The Colorado Rockies announced today that they will be going with a four man rotation until the end of the season.

Over the last couple years several teams, most notably the Blue Jays and the Reds, have considered it, but if the Rockies follow through, it would be the first time since 1995 that any team has only used four starters for any significant length of time.

Rany Jazayerli of Baseball Prospectus wrote an excellent series of articles on why teams – if they do it right – might gain quite an advantage by going to a four man rotation, and it looks like the Rockies know what they’re doing.

On the other hand, the four pitchers the Rockies will be using aren’t that great (though their 5th starters had an ERA of 17.47 in 3 starts). And the Rockies aren’t exactly known for following through on ideas. But I hope it works, if only to reward them for being willing to try something new.

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For those of you who want to truly share your feelings with the rest of the interweb, I offer Internet-Diary.com.

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A bunch of people at tonight’s Red Sox-Blue Jays game showed up with fake wigs and beards, with a sign proclaiming themselves “Damon’s Disciples.” One, that’s just awesome. Two, thanks to Baseball Musings for possibly inspiring the idea. And three, hats off to one of the goofier guys in baseball.

Ooh! More on Damon’s new look, from someone with even more impressive facial hair.

A single voice crying in the wilderness (1)

I just don’t understand what’s going on with baseball, steroids, and the government. Now the IRS has seized samples and test results from baseball’s most recent steroid tests. If I were the player’s union, I’d be mighty annoyed that tests that were supposed to be anonymous now look like they’ll be made public.

Why is the government involved in all this? The only guess I have – and it’s probably wrong – is that some of the owners are using connections to get around some of the drug provisions made by the player’s union.

For a reasonable player’s viewpoint on this, check out the Cleveland Indians’ Jody Gerut’s weblog.

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Nearly every mathematician I know uses computers in their work in one form or another – at the very least they’re an easy way to do calculation that would otherwise take up too much time and energy. But an article like this seems to miss the point entirely.

There are two issues here: the first is that using a computer to check cases or run lengthy computations doesn’t affect the worthiness of the math; you’re not going to get shunted off to a computational journal for that. The second is that a proof that is actually found by a computer is not that interesting from a math standpoint. It’s nice to know a theorem is true, but mathematicians have been proving theorems based on unknown facts for thousands of years.

Stephen Goldman, possibly the best baseball writer of the last 25 years not from Kansas, wrote about similar issues in the baseball community. Computers in math, and the new (mainly statistical) methodologies used in baseball are just tools, and correspondingly can be used for good or evil. But dismissing them out of hand is foolish.

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