Sometimes Harvard Yard literally smells like bullshit. The grass takes a regular beating from the weather and the footsteps of mathematicians eager to find the shortest path to class. So, a few times a year, to spruce it up for the brochures and the visiting parents, the grounds crew gives it a fat coating of organic…

Last weekend, I went to the sixth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Attendance has gone up every year, and it gets harder and harder to get a feel for who actually goes to this thing: Why were they there? Were they still all sabermetrics geeks? High-powered businessmen? To find out, I did some analysis of…

Twitter reports that the Super Bowl generated 24 million tweets last night. Most of them were terrible, so I just looked at the ones that said "fuck."

During halftime of last night's Clippers-Suns game, the Inside the NBA crew had some fun at the expense of Charles Barkley, who mentioned during the second quarter that he gets his eyebrows waxed. The segment began with a mocking Shaquille O'Neal getting the same treatment, and it quickly devolved into transparent…

Hall of fame ballots follow their own own internal logic. For instance, regardless of how they feel about steroids, almost all voters agree with both or neither of the following statements:

I'm about to go vote, and I haven't read up much on the issues. I don't know which candidate loves America more or who has the bigger penis. So I asked the only objective sources I could find: computers. In case you're still on the fence, I've copied their advice below.

In case you haven't been hanging around the benighted corners of the political internet lately, there's an idiotic backlash afoot against Nate Silver, the proprietor of the FiveThirtyEight blog who made his name as one of the sharpest baseball analysts around.

The Giants' World Series title is the latest point of retreat for the desperate sportswriter still looking to slam the use of statistics in baseball. In today's San Francisco Chronicle, Bruce Jenkins insists that this championship team got there through hard work, gristle, faces, eyes, shoulders, knees, toes, etc.:

Alex Rodriguez is both straight and male, but you wouldn't know it from the insults lobbed his way on Twitter over the past few days. Here are a few hundred examples.