Archive for April, 2025
Going bananas!
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math, pop, Uncategorized on April 24, 2025
Monkeys are a lot of fun except when they get on the loose, as I experienced once while eating at an outdoor restaurant at a Costa Rican resort (as seen pictured). Unfortunately, another tourist started feeding them, despite numerous warnings posted throughout the patio. This last fall 43 monkeys escaped a South Carolina breeding compound—the last 4 of which ran free for two months. Not good.
On a lighter note, consider the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which states that a monkey hitting keys independently and at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. Mathematicians from the University of Technology Sydney did some calculations on this that say no to Shakespeare but provide small consolation by allowing for a 5% chance that a monkey can type “bananas” in its own lifetime. See the stats and math in their December 2024 publication of A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem.
“It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works.”
— Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta
So no monkeying around will be allowed by mathematicians and/or statisticians.
PS: On the topic of bananas, I plan to blow my entire $2 State of Minnesota 2024 property tax refund (just got word on this windfall from my CPA), to purchase this banana-flavored Laffy Taffy. It’s not easy to find something good like this for $2 or less!
Artificial intelligence (AI) enters the “age of inference”
Oxford Languages defines “inference” as “a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning.” Achieving accurate inferences with a minimum amount of work is of utmost importance in my field of design and analysis of experiments for industrial R&D. So, Amin Vahdat, Google’s Vice President and General Manager of ML, Systems, and Cloud AI, got my full attention by promoting their latest developments in AI as the beginning of the “age of inference” in his April 9th blog on Ironwood —their 7th-generation TPU (tensor processing unit). The blog announces that by “combining the best of Google DeepMind and Google Research with Google Cloud” will “further accelerate scientific breakthroughs, with a mission to become the most capable platform for global research and scientific discovery.”
An April 9 report by VentureBeat offers up an impressive array of statistics on Ironwood with much hyberbolic, high-tech jargon such as “when scaled to 9,216 chips per pod, Ironwood delivers 42.5 exaflops of computing power — dwarfing El Capitan‘s 1.7 exaflops, currently the world’s fastest supercomputer.”
I don’t grasp the units of measure, but it sure sounds great! Perhaps AI will fill in for the ongoing cuts in USA’s funding for institutional research and ripple effects on industrial R&D. I hope so!
However, despite the rapid development of AI, it may be a long while before it gets embraced by researchers. For example, Aidan Toner-Rodgers, an MIT economist, published a paper on Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery and Product Innovation last November that reported 82% of R&D scientists (over 1000 surveyed) being dissatisfied with AI due to it decreasing their creativity and skill utilization.
On a positive note, Toner-Rodgers asserts that the output of “top” researchers nearly doubles due to how they “leverage their domain knowledge to prioritize AI suggestions.” That is the best of both worlds—human intelligence (HI) combined with artificial intelligence (AI).
PS: An April Nature News article summarizes results from a survey of 4,000 researchers that addressed broader questions about AI, not the “what’s in it for me” focus of the Toner-Rodgers’ poll. For example, scientists viewed the glass slightly more than half full for AI whereas nearly all the general public feel it creates more risk than benefit. Interesting!
Bulbous bats hit the sweet spot for bashing baseballs
Posted by mark in sports, Uncategorized on April 4, 2025
According to the lore of Major League Baseball (MLB), in 1919 Babe Ruth hit the longest homer run ever recorded—purportedly 575 feet, but probably closer to 540 feet. See the bat he used, which sold in 2003 for over $56 thousand, at this auction site. Notice the clean lines.
In the early days of baseball, batters preferred bats made from hickory and oak due to their durability. But when Babe Ruth played, ash became the preferred choice for its lighter weight, allowing for increased bat speed and power. In 1998, the MLB approved maple, which despite its heaviness and propensity to shatter catastrophically, is now used by nearly all players, in part due to ash becoming very scarce due to invasive insects.*
Now attention to bats has shifted to their shape. The New York Yankees set the baseball world on fire by using “torpedo bats” in game 2 of their 2025 season to hit 9 home runs—a notable exception being Aaron Judge (AJ) who hit 3 of the home runs with a conventional Chandler model AJ99 (aka the “gavel”, ha ha).
Developed by an MIT PhD physicist—Aaron Leanhardt, torpedo bats push their barrel closer to the player’s hands, thus providing a better chance of hitting the ball on the sweet spot. They look like an elongated bowling pin, not elegant like the bats I saw being turned out at the Louisville Slugger factory a few years ago.
So far as I’m concerned the ‘jury remains out’ on torpedo bats, especially given the counteracting results by the Judge (see my pun there?). I will be watching for statistical evidence based on a representative and sufficiently sized sample.
Stay tuned!
PS: By the way, baseball bats, specifically their shapes, cannot be patented because they fall within the rules of the game, making them ineligible for protection. That opens up the market for bat-makers to feed the frenzy for torpedo bats, for example Louisville Slugger’s Pro Prime Pink model TPD1. Wow!