And once again I'm skipping-for-a-fun-reason, because, according to the Buffista Calendar, today is Tom Scola's bithday.

Happy birthday, Tom! With lots of wishes for a great day and a wonderful year!

Happy Birthday, Tom!

Happy birthday Tom!

Is it Scola Day again ALREADY!?!?!?

How time does fly!

Happy birthday, Tom!

Happy Birthday, Tom!

Hippo Birdies, Tom!

My Mom will be turning 86 in June, so I'm all too conscious of the possibility of her passing, but she ended up going into a wonderful independent living community which has all the support services she could ever need. I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am for her decision which takes off quite a bit of worry for me.

Watching a bit on statistics, and they're talking about experimental probability. I know I'm just drowning myself in a sea of statistics, but if Scottie Pippen is shooting 83% at the free throw line for the season, but 75% for the game, does it really mean he's even likely to make a free throw next time he gets sent to the line? (By even more I'm assuming them mean >83%)

Semantically I guess the experimental probability he'll make it is higher than 83%, whereas as a pessimistic fan I figure he's having an off night and is going to pull his numbers down.

Heh. (I say 'Heh' because I was just thinking about your first question the other day.)

Somewhere I read something by a statistician that the whole notion of 'winning streaks', etc. in sports is an illusion - nothing but random variences in some probability-dependent outcome. (i.e. along the lines of the idea that if you flip a coin enough times, you'll occasionally end up with stuff like ten heads in a row). But I dunno - the thing we call a 'streak' occurs so much in sports - you hear stuff about athletes being "in the zone" in some psychological sense than can give them a streak off success, etc. But then I wonder how, mathematically, you could prove that there' more involved in just random chance when, say, a basketball team has a 'run' of, say, 15 unanswered points in a game.

if Scottie Pippen is shooting 83% at the free throw line for the season, but 75% for the game, does it really mean he's even likely to make a free throw next time he gets sent to the line? (By even more I'm assuming them mean >83%)

Nuh-uh.

OK, let's say Scottie's free throw % is exactly 83% at the beginning of the game in question. Now lets say in the game he makes 9 out of 12, giving him a 75% for the night. In a strictly probabilistic sense, you would not expect him to do better than 83% "make up" for the lower than 83% run he just had. (Are you familiar with the "random walk" idea in probability?)

OK, let's say that when we now look at Scottie's free throw %, taking into account the current game, it would now be, say, 82.998%. We would now expect (in a probabilistic sense) that he would continue to shoot at 82.998% overall, as this is now his shooting %, (taking into account all the available data). Of course, even in a purely probabilistic sense, there'd still be random variations, so we'd expect that new % to fluctuate up and down as well. But assuming no change in Scottie, his shooting % would tend to converge around his actual probability of getting a free throw, even if that probability is unknown (i.e. his shooting % based on his actual playing would converge around his (unknown) probability of getting a free throw, due to the sample size getting larger and larger).

Of course, all this is based on a theoretical idea of his making and missing shots being a purely random phenomena, ignoring the actual complexity of the real world (he might be in a bad mood on the night when he makes 75%, etc).

Birthday Happies for Tom!!

Happy Birthday Tom!