Weekly links for May 27

From quora, which planet spends the greatest share of time closest to Earth? (Hint: it’s not Pluto.)

From the math graduate students at Carnegie Mellon, slides for the convergence of a random walk on slides to a presentation and video of the talk based on these slides.

A few talks from the MIT Sloan sports analytics conference:

• Michael Mauboussin on “Why you don’t understand luck”
• Joe Peta, author of Trading Bases, on sports as an alternate asset class”
• Cade Massey on skill and chance in the NFL draft

(Unfortunately these videos were filmed with a single camera on the speaker, and some of them refer to visuals that can’t be seen. They still make sense, though.

Stephanie Coontz on how averages can be misleading – in this case when averaging people’s experiences.

findthebest.com offers unbiased, data-driven comparison of lots of things. (But despite being in Santa Barbara they don’t seem to have enough information to find the best Santa Barbara wine! I suppose I’ll just have to go down there and drink more.)

John Baez on (the number) 42.

The always excellent DataGenetics asks how far can you overhang blocks?

Keith Devlin has some remarks (from his course “Introduction to Mathematical Thinking”) on the brilliance of calculus.