Why Is the World Cup Only Once Every Four Years?

1. The players aren't paid a salary to play for their country.
2. The national teams aren't as cohesive as a professional team that consistently trains together.

That being said, wouldn't it be quite a treat to have events like the World Cup and the Olympics more often than once every four years?

The Key To Landing LeBron: Possibly Worldwide Wes

The Key To Landing LeBron: Possibly Worldwide Wes

Why the TV Show House Bugs Me

The plot of every episode is as follows: someone comes into the hospital with a baffling ailment.  House and his medical team spend the entire episode trying to solve the problem, but don't really get anywhere.  House is condescending and cranky.  At the end of the episode, someone says something random from which House solves the problem.

I suppose there are more shows that follow such a strict formula; however, whenever I watch House anymore in the back of my mind I know that the episode will unfold as I described above; that really takes the fun out of it.  Even on Law and Order you don't know what the ending will be.  Harrumph.

Upside-Down Maps

The other day I was wondering what would a map look like if north was down and south was up? The designation of north as up seems arbitrary. I googled it and apparently other people had thought of that first.

American Sports Leagues Are Socialist

...and ironically European sports leagues are capitalist. The Washington Nationals have the first pick in the Major League Baseball draft for the second year in a row based on their poor performance. It just so happens that in these past two years two of the best prospects in recent memory have been available: Steven Strasburg, the best pitching prospect, and Bryce Harper, the best hitting prospect, who has been described as the Lebron James of baseball.  In a few years they could potentially have the best two players in baseball on their team. (On the other hand, who know what will happen).

Constructed Languages

Esperanto is the most widely-spoken constructed international auxiliary language.  Basically, it is an artificial language designed with the intent that other people from can communicate with each other in this international language.  It is apparently really easy to learn.  Here is a quote from the linked Wikipedia article:

The Institute of Cybernetic Pedagogy at Paderborn (Germany) has compared the length of study time it takes Francophone high school students to obtain comparable 'standard' levels in Esperanto, English, German, and Italian. The results were:

• 2000 hours studying German =
• 1500 hours studying English =
• 1000 hours studying Italian =
• 150 hours studying Esperanto.

It should be noted, however, that these figures can only reflect the respective learning difficulty of these languages for native French speakers. They should be compared to figures from other countries to allow for a more general perspective on the learning difficulty of Esperanto. It should be noted in the chart above, Italian would naturally be easier for French speakers to learn since they are both Romance languages, where German is a Germanic language, for example.

Another intriguing artificial language is Interlingua.  It is designed to be easy like Esperanto, but it is based more on Romance Languages.  Here is a video of someone speaking Interlingua.  If you speak a Romance Language you may be able to understand quite a bit of this.

Besides these, there are several other such constructed languages.

How Much Is Home-Court Advantage Worth in the Playoffs?

In honor of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, which starts Thursday night, here is a post about home court advantage.  The Lakers have home court advantage over the Celtics.

Here is a scholarly article on home advantage.  It its introduction it notes that in the NBA, about 61% of the time the home team wins.  The article does argue that due to the construction of the league schedule this number is inflated because the visiting team typically has had less time between games than the home team.  For sake of argument we will assume home-court advantage is 61%.

Consider a theoretical seven-game series between two evenly-matched teams.  One team has home-court advantage, meaning they will have four out of the possible seven games in their home arena.  We therefore assume that the home team has a 61% chance of winning any given game.  What is the probability of the team with home-court advantage winning?  The probability is about 53.5%.  This implies that home-court advantage increases the probability of winning by about 3.5%.

As noted here and here, the Celtics focused their regular season on preparing for the playoffs and worried less about accumulating wins.  In this case, it appears that the trade-off was worth it as they did make the finals even without home-court advantage for the last two rounds.

In the NHL the home team wins approximately 55% of the time.  In a seven-game series between two evenly-matched teams, the home team will win with a probability of 51.6%.  Home-ice in the NHL is therefore worth about a 1.6% percent increase in winning.

Most-Spoken Languages

Here is a list of the most-spoken languages by number of native speakers (link) (In parentheses are the estimated number of speakers):

1. Mandarin Chinese (1.1 billion)
2. English (330 million)
3. Spanish (300 million)
4. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
5. Arabic (200 million)
6. Bengali (185 million)
7. Portuguese (160 million)
8. Russian (160 million)
9. Japanese (125 million)
10. German (100 million)
11. Punjabi (90 million)
12. Javanese (80 million)
13. French (75 million)

Here are the languages by number of secondary speakers:

1. French (190 million)
2. English (150 million)
3. Russian (125 million)
4. Portuguese (28 million)
5. Arabic (21 million)
6. Spanish (20 million)
7. Chinese (20 million)
8. German (9 million)
9. Japanese (8 million)

Therefore combined we get:

1. Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
2. English (480 million)
3. Spanish (320 million)
4. Russian (285 million)
5. French (265 million)
6. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
7. Arabic (221 million)
8. Portuguese (188 million)
9. Bengali (185 million)
10. Japanese (133 million)
11. German (109 million)

Here is a list based on the number of countries where each language is spoken:

1. English (115)
2. French (35)
3. Arabic (24)
4. Spanish (20)
5. Russian (16)
6. German (9)
7. Mandarin (5)
8. Portuguese (5)
9. Hindi/Urdu (2)
10. Bengali (1)
11. Japanese (1)

Finally, here is a list of "most influential languages":

1. English
2. French
3. Spanish
4. Russian
5. Arabic
6. Chinese
7. German
8. Japanese
9. Portuguese
10. Hindi/Urdu

Chart of Family Relationships

My mom found one of her French cousins on Facebook the other day. She asked me what I would be to him. I looked it up here and found out I would be his first cousin once removed.

Lottery Part 2

And even if you did win the lottery, who's to say that you wouldn't just blow the money within a few years.

The Lottery Is a Tax On People Who Are Bad at Math

This topic recently came up in discussion, so I thought I would comment on it. Here is a longer more mathematical explanation.  This same reasoning applies to casinos and many other forms of gambling.

Let's consider a hypothetical example.  Suppose there is a simple lottery for $20 million.  Any given ticket has a probability of 1 out of 80 million of winning.  Suppose each ticket costs $1.  If 80 million people play this lottery, one would expect on average one person to win the jackpot.  In such an average case the lottery gains $80 million in ticket sales and pays out $20 million to the winner for a net of $60 million.  The average payout for each player is therefore $20 million divided by 80 million people, or $0.25.  This $0.25 is considered the expected payout of this lottery based on the probability.  Therefore each player loses an average of -$0.75.

Here is the Wikipedia page on Powerball.  It calculates that the expected payout per dollar spent is less than a dollar for jackpots less than $322.274.  Therefore, when the jackpot is less than this number, on average one loses money by playing.  When the jackpot rises above $322.274, one could argue that money is made by playing the lottery.  It seems to me, however, that this is not the case.  If multiple people win the jackpot, then the prize is divided among the winners.  In theory such a situation would present a prisoner's dilemma, causing so many tickets to be sold that on average the pot is likely to be split.


In my view, one would be wiser taking the money he or she spends on the lottery and investing it.