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Starting a workout routine is always a challenging thing to do. An endless variety of programs, a disconcerting habit of making lame excuses, and constantly escalating gym membership costs – all that can get in your training way. Still, many enthusiasts are bending over backwards with a glimmer of hope to find an ideal workout plan at a sports facility […]

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He deserves credit for being one of the very few national politicians to focus on this enormous problem. If enacted, his proposal would be a step in the right direction, though it is likely to have only a modest impact.

Democratic Senator and possible 2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker has proposed a bill to curb exclusionary zoning, a practice that massively increases the price of housing in many cities and cuts off millions of people from job opportunities. Booker deserves credit for being one of the very few national politicians to highlight this enormously important issue. If enacted, his proposal would be a step in the right direction, thought it would probably have only a modest effect.

Richard Kahlenberg of the American Prospect summarizes Booker's plan and the problem it is intended to address:

Local ordinances that ban apartment buildings from certain residential areas, or designate a minimum lot size for single family homes, don't explicitly discriminate by race, but they effectively exclude families of modest means from entire neighborhoods—and school districts. These laws promote economic segregation by government fiat. People of color are hit especially hard...

Moreover, exclusionary zoning feeds the affordable housing crisis. Restrictive zoning laws drive up prices by artificially restricting the supply of housing. When developers are limited in the number of new units they can build on a particular parcel of land, the basic laws of supply and demand suggest existing housing will become more expensive.

[On August 1], Booker introduced federal legislation—the Housing, Opportunity, Mobility and Equity (HOME) Act—to address this key piece of the Fair Housing Act's unfinished business. The bill would promote more inclusive zoning policies in order to make housing more affordable and less segregated.

Under Booker's proposal, states, cities and counties receiving funding under the $3.3 billion federal Community Development Block Grant program for public infrastructure and housing would be required to develop strategies to reduce barriers to housing development and increase the supply of housing. Plans could include authorizing more high density and multifamily zoning and relaxing lot size restrictions. The goal is for affordable housing units to comprise not less than 20 percent of new housing stock.

Exclusionary zoning is one of the great underappreciated issues of our time. Economists and housing policy experts across the political spectrum recognize that it prices the poor and lower-middle class out of many areas, thereby cutting them off from valuable job opportunities. It also greatly reduces economic growth, harming even many people who are not directly affected by the exclusions. Increasing mobility by cutting back on zoning is an important common interest of both the minority poor and the white working class, but one that is largely ignored by both major political parties. Broad agreement among policy experts has so far failed to generate much in the way of momentum for reform - in part because most ordinary voters probably don't understand the counterintuitive links between zoning restrictions, job opportunities, and economic growth. Inadequate public understanding of the problem was one of the causes of the recent defeat of California Bill 827, a major effort to liberalize zoning restrictions in the nation's most populous state.

Booker's plan could help alleviate the problem. If the federal government is going to subsidize local development, it should at least deny such subsidies to jurisdictions that are shooting development in the foot through exclusionary zoning. But the effects are likely to be modest because the $3.3 billion in CDBG subsidies is only a tiny fraction of federal grants to state and local governments (estimated to be some $728 billion in fiscal year 2018). Many cities - particularly the big ones whose particularly severe restrictions inflict the most harm - are likely to prefer to do without these funds rather than reforming zoning policies backed by powerful interest groups.

Still, Booker's HOME Act would likely lead to beneficial policy changes in at least some areas, and his advocacy could help attract much-needed attention to this problem. At the very least, Booker's recognition of the importance of reducing obstacles to building new housing is far preferable to the housing proposal advanced by one of his likely 2020 rivals: Sen. Kamala Harris' badly flawed plan to reduce housing costs by providing federal subsidies for renters, an idea that will inflict costs on taxpayers without actually doing anything to alleviate housing shortages.

Some on the right might object to the HOME Act on federalism grounds. Why should the federal government have the power to use grant conditions to incentivize changes in local housing policy? I am no fan of most federal grants to state and local governments, and have long advocated tighter enforcement of constitutional restrictions on them. But if CDBG and similar grant programs are going to continue (and it is unlikely they will be abolished in the near future), it makes sense to use them to curb local policies that harm large numbers of people and undermine the purposes of the grant programs themselves. Moreover, in my view, many severe zoning restrictions are themselves violations of constitutional property rights, because they are uncompensated takings that violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. To the extent this is true, Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment gives Congress the authority to curb them. The power to enact "appropriate" legislation to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, also includes authority to enforce the Fifth Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights, which the Fourteenth Amendment "incorporated" against state and local governments.

Finally, decentralization of power to states and localities works best when people have the ability to "vote with their feet" against harmful policies and in favor of good ones. Decentralization without mobility often causes more harm than good. Exclusionary zoning is a particularly pernicious example of that problem. It simultaneously imposes burdens on owners of an immobile asset (property in land) that cannot use exit rights to escape them, and severely restricts foot voting by people who are priced out of the regional housing market as a result. There is good reason to use federal power to protect property rights in land from local exploitation, and also to protect mobility against locally-imposed restrictions. To the extent that loosening zoning restrictions enables property owners to exercise greater control over the use of their own land, it actually facilitates a greater degree of decentralization than the status quo. Letting owners make their own decisions is a more decentralized approach to land use than concentrating that power in the hands of state and local governments.

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The air between these blueberries would matter a lot. rawpixel.com/CC BY 2.0

Anders Sandberg, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, describes himself as an “academic jack-of-all-trades,” and on arXiv.org, a gathering place for pre-prints of academic papers, his contributions include work on risk estimates, supersized machines, neck tie-knots, the Fermi paradox, and the energy required to run a brain as compared to the energy required to run artificial intelligence.

His latest work is a disturbing thought experiment that ensures that anyone who reads it will never look at a blueberry pie the same way again.

Sandberg is a user of Physics Stack Exchange, where anyone can ask a physics-related question and hope for an answer. One user, Billy-bodega, asked the following:

Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen from the perspective of a person on the surface?

And Sandberg, eschewing the usual can’t-be-bothered attitude of Physics Stack Exchange towards such whimsical questions, decided to give the question serious consideration. “The end result,” he writes, “is a world that has a steam atmosphere covering an ocean of jam on top of warm blueberry granita.”

Imagine if this were your whole world, but hotter. Lori L. Stalteri/CC BY 2.0

Sandberg grew up in Sweden, where smaller, thin-skinned blueberries grow wild, and he has “very fond memories of exploring the forest and gorging myself as a kid.” But he loved the blueberry question not because of his childhood affinity, but because it immediately got him thinking about sphere packing (a deep issue in physics and math), elasticity, and complex substances. (A planet of blueberries is a more interesting problem than a planet of gold.)

“I like crazy-sounding questions that make me think in the next moment, ‘Hey! I could actually calculate this!’” he says. “Many good physics questions involve taking something everyday and pushing it to the extreme—what if the speed of light was really slow, or we tried to build the maximally tall tower?”

This process of imagining blueberry earth begins with fat, thick-skinned highbush blueberries (the kind you find in grocery stores, not in the blueberry barrens of Maine). Given the estimated density of blueberries, the mass of an Earth made of berries would be a fraction of its current mass, with weaker gravity. Blueberries, Sandberg points out, are not particularly strong, able to resist the weight of a sugar cube but not a milk carton. Within a few yards of the surface of whole blueberries, the force of gravity would pulp the blueberries into mash, releasing the air that had separated each berry from its neighbors and shrinking the planet to a smaller radius. If no other forces were involved, the blueberry planet would collapse under its own weight in an estimated 42 minutes.

But there are other factors at play. The air released by the pulping of berries would create a thick, dense atmosphere, which Sandberg compares to Titan’s. Little light would filter through to the surface, so the dramatic events that followed would happen in almost total darkness.

Blueberry earth might be like this watery exoplanet. Why not? Lucianomendez/CC BY-SA 4.0

The air released from the pulp would burst to the surface “as bubbles and jets, producing spectacular geysers (especially since the gravity is low),” Sandberg writes. At the same time, the compaction of the earth would release enormous amounts of energy, heating blueberry earth into “a roaring ocean of boiling jam, with the geysers of released air and steam likely ejecting at least a few berries into orbit.”

Deep under this ocean of jam, though, the pressure would change the dynamics. Even if it’s hot, the conditions would compress the jam into ice, most likely “some kind of composite pulp ice.” Meanwhile, the Moon would have long since fled the scene. In the end, Sandberg finds, the Earth will be akin to one of the oceanic exoplanets discovered elsewhere in the universe—a place where no human would want to live (but could perhaps be a resource for future space mining companies in search of ready-made jam products).

This process isn’t entirely unique to blueberries. It would play out in similar fashion for other fruit. “I have been asked about bananas,” he says—there’s a question about how potassium-40 decay would contribute to geothermal heating over time—“and watermelons, but nearly all behave the same way.”

There are still open questions to answer about blueberry earth. How would the chemistry of blueberry pulp play into these dynamics? Long-term, the planet could dry out, so what would that mean for the oceans? How bad are hurricanes on the planet?

Sandberg says he would visit the jammy planet he imagined—“With protective gear. And probably a supply of ice cream.” Which brings us to another question raised on Physics Stack Exchange, one that caught his eye: What material is best suited for eating ice cream from, without the ice cream melting too fast on the edges? (Would diamond bowls be good for delicious ice cream?) He was also intrigued by a question about how Venus flytraps count and another about how diffraction patterns would change if atoms were triangular instead of spherical. And of course there’s always the classic: What if the Moon were actually made of cheese?

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I’m generally a pretty laid-back guy but, like anyone, I do have pet peeves. Because I write about money, I have lots of trivial personal-finance pet peeves. (It’s “saving rate“, not “savings rate”. Dave Ramsey did not invent the debt snowball, and his version is but one kind of debt snowball. It’s not the only debt snowball. See? I told you these pet peeves were trivial!)

It’s silly that I’m bugged by this stuff, but I am. I’m sure you have pet peeves too, especially when it comes to your work.

One of my top pet peeves in the world of personal finance is when people who should know better conflate income and wealth. A high income can lead to great wealth — although it doesn’t always — but they’re not the same thing.

I see this error frequently — even in high-profile articles at major media outlets.

This morning, for example, I read an article at Vox about income inequality in Europe and the United States. The piece opens like this:

Income inequality is a growing problem in the United States. The richest Americans have reaped a disproportional amount of economic growth while worker wages have failed to keep pace.

The author elaborates: “From 1980 to 2016, the poorest half of the US population has seen its share of income steadily decline, and the top 1 percent have grabbed more.”

What bugs me here are the logical leaps from “low income” to “poor” and from “high income” to “rich”. But I can’t blame the author of this article; the source material makes the same mistake.

The Difference Between Income and Wealth

Now, I’m not here to explore income equality — that’s a subject for another day — but I want to talk about the difference between income and wealth…and why they’re not the same thing.

First, let’s define our terms.

• Income is earning money. Yes, it’s the primary piece of wealth creation, but income itself is not wealth.
• Wealth is having money. If you have a lot of money, you are rich. If you don’t have much money, you’re poor.

Income and wealth are related, but it’s a complicated relationship.

In 2016, the Don’t Quit Your Day Job blog took data from the Federal Reserve’s 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances to examine this very subject. They created this chart to graph the data:

The conclusion at DQYDJ? “Yes, people with higher incomes do tend to have higher net worths.” However, “the connection is a lot looser than it may appear before looking into the statistics”.

For any given income level, people have a huge range of net worths. If you look at the $100,000 income level in the chart, for instance, folks have net worths ranging from $1000 to $10,000,000. That said, people with higher incomes do tend to have greater wealth.

In a follow-up piece, DQYDJ graphed the correlation of income and wealth by age:

As you can see — and as you might expect — for young adults, income has very little to do with net worth. During prime earning years, however, there’s a strong correlation. Then the correlation drops. Then, once you get past fifty, the correlation isn’t strong at all.

Why is this?

Earning money is only part of the equation. What you do with the money you earn has a profound impact on your wealth.

Filling the Bucket

If you earn a lot but you also spend a lot — especially on things that lose value — then you won’t accumulate wealth. If you make poor investments, you won’t accumulate wealth. If you suffer misfortune, you won’t accumulate wealth.

Your income is like water flowing through a hose. The higher your income, the larger the flow of water. But wealth — net worth — is like a bucket that you’re filling with water. If you have a high-flow hose, but you’re spilling the water on the ground instead of filling the bucket, you’re not going to fill it very quickly. On the other hand, even a trickle of water can fill the bucket if you’re careful and take your time.

In my Real Life, I know families with household incomes approaching $250,000 that have almost zero net worth. They buy (and sometimes wreck) fancy cars, cars that quickly depreciate in value. They take expensive vacations. They eat out for every meal. They spend a ton on entertainment. These folks have high incomes and live a lavish lifestyle but they’re not rich. If they were to lose their jobs, they’d be in trouble.

On the other hand, I’ve met with many Get Rich Slowly readers who have mundane jobs with modest incomes, yet they’ve managed to build small fortunes (especially in relation to their spending). How? By keeping expenses low. They may not make as much, but they have high a saving rate and they know how to invest wisely.

Yesterday at A Wealth of Common Sense, Ben Carlson wrote about the three levels of wealth. He looked at both income and net worth numbers, and at how these relate to economic class. His conclusion?

“The standard of living where you choose to reside can have a huge impact on how far any of these income or wealth numbers can get you. And how much or how little you choose to spend of that income or wealth also plays a role. Lifestyle inflation can be a killer if you’re not careful, no matter how much money you make.”

A high income can fund a lavish lifestyle, but if you spend most (or all) of that income, you’re not building wealth. You’re not rich. The high times probably will not last. (Believing that they will is part of the forever fallacy.)

The post What it means to be rich: The difference between income and wealth appeared first on Get Rich Slowly.

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Six years before Mike Pence worked to put Donald Trump in the White House, became his vice president, and proceeded to lavish praise on his job performance, the Indiana politician gave a formal speech on the presidency. What did Pence think were the qualities a good president should possess, speaking from behind the veil of ignorance, when he did not yet know what sort of man would afford him the best opportunity to radically enhance his own political fortune?

By way of explaining, he told an anecdote about Calvin Coolidge, who lost a 16-year-old son while in the White House and thereafter declared, “When he went, the power and glory of the presidency went with him.” In Pence’s estimation, “There is no finer, more moving, or more profound understanding of the nature of the presidency and the command of humility placed upon it.” Thus, his standard for judging a president:

A sensibility such as this, and not power, is the source of presidential dignity, and must be restored. It depends entirely upon character, self-discipline, and an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic, but life itself. It communicates that the president feels the gravity of his office and is willing to sacrifice himself; that his eye is not upon his own prospects but on the storm of history, through which he must navigate with the specific powers accorded to him and the limitations placed on those powers both by man and by God.

President Trump does not strike anyone as a man who is willing to sacrifice himself; if Americans were ranked by that metric, he might be last. Power, however, seems very much a part of his sensibility.

That he lacks dignity is beyond question.

Love him or hate him, surely most will agree that Trump is the sort of man whose eyes are always and forever on his own prospects more than “the storm of history.” Neither “character” nor “self-discipline” are among his strengths. He is very nearly the opposite of the president who Pence lauded.

Yesterday, in an article about Michigan’s Hillsdale College and the commencement address that Pence delivered there this year, I argued that the Indiana politician acts in ways that suggest the morals and behaviors he claims to value most are not actually what he values most.

Lots of Hillsdale stakeholders emailed with similar concerns. And several pointed me to this speech, delivered at Hillsdale College and published in Imprimus, the digest that the institution sends out to alumni and potential donors, among others. Today, it serves as a striking illustration of a vast chasm: the chasm separating the qualities that good presidents should possess, as Pence once set them forth, from the qualities of the powerful man that Pence now publicly praises as a good president.

The dissonances go beyond that single passage. “The Constitution and the Declaration should be on a president’s mind all the time, as the prism through which the light of all question of governance passes,” Pence said. (Though we have—sometimes gradually, sometimes radically—moved away from this, we can move back to it.” Are the Constitution and Declaration always on Trump’s mind?

They are most certainly not.

In another passage Pence spoke of the bully pulpit and its potential for abuse, especially when the president’s words can reach and influence the young. “Is the president, therefore, expected to turn away from this and other easy advantage?” Pence asks. “Yes,” he avers. “Like Harry Truman, who went to bed before the result on election night, he must know when to withdraw, to hold back, and to forgo attention, publicity, or advantage.”

Among all presidents, who would rank last on that metric?

“We serve neither him nor his vision,” Pence said. “It is not his job or his prerogative to redefine custom, law, and beliefs; to appropriate industries; to seize the country, as it were, by the shoulders or by the throat so as to impose by force of theatrical charisma his justice upon 300 million others.” And yet, here Pence is serving a theatrically charismatic man appropriating the micromanagement of industrial policy—and participating himself in a theatrical walkout at an NFL game in an effort to seize the country by the shoulders and impose a vision of what’s proper.

“You must always be wary,” Pence declared in 2010, “of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness.” Can you think of anyone who does that?

Thank you Adam Levine, The Federalist, in interview on @foxandfriends  “Donald Trump is the greatest President our Country has ever seen.”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2018

Thank you for all of the nice statements on the Press Conference yesterday. Rush Limbaugh said one of greatest ever. Fake media not happy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

"Donald Trump’s birther event is the greatest trick he’s ever pulled"https://t.co/zvVQnxeiQ9

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 17, 2016

"@Dale_Dangler: @realDonaldTrump You will be the greatest president the world has ever seen"  Thanks.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2016

In many ways this is the greatest economy in the HISTORY of America and the best time EVER to look for a job!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2018

And Pence’s foreign-policy advice?

“You do not bow to kings,” he said. “Outside our shores, the president of the United States of America bows to no man.” Does a Saudi prince count?

“When in foreign lands,” Pence said, “you do not criticize your own country. You do not argue the case against the United States, but the case for it.”Here’s Donald Trump the day he met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki:

Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2018

By the standards that Pence set forth before he joined his political fate and his legacy to the president, Trump would appear to be an utter catastrophe.

Said Pence near the end of his speech, “I have never doubted that Providence can appear in history like the sun emerging from behind the clouds, if only as a reward for adherence to first principles.” If only America’s current leaders adhered to first principles enough to warrant rewarding.

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Almost 60 years ago, Eugene Wigner wrote an essay that still shapes how many scientists see mathematics. In ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’, Wigner argued that advances made by mathematicians are motivated by a desire to “demonstrate ingenuity and [a] sense of formal beauty”. Complex numbers arose, not because physicists demanded them to describe waves or quantum physics, but because 16^th century mathematicians were looking for elegant solutions for the roots of polynomials. The applications of complex numbers, and many other parts of mathematics, came well after the theoretical development. And it was this that Wigner found ‘unreasonably effective’ and even mysterious: the rules of physics were already written in mathematics.

Wigner’s amazement at the effectiveness of mathematics was not new. It dates back to Plato’s shadows in a cave. Nor is it the final word on the subject. Max Tegmark’s book ‘Our Mathematical Universe’ gives a wonderful personal account of how his own adventures on the border between physics and maths have persuaded him there must be a small set of equations that govern the entire Universe. Popular science expositions of mathematics often focus on the symmetries paralleled by Nature and the remarkable fact that a single equation can explain so many different phenomena. These accounts place great importance on the beauty of mathematics. Maths simplifies, maths clarifies and maths captures complexity.

Even before I started writing a book about maths and football, I knew that the effectiveness of and beautiful simplicity of mathematics would come in very handy. After all, football is the beautiful game, making it the natural partner for the science of beauty.

And as I progressed in writing, what later became Soccermatics, there was ample evidence of effectiveness. Goals are Poisson distributed, Voronoi diagrams can be used to show how players create and narrow down space, shots are described by Newton’s equations, vector fields can display player’s passing patterns, tactics are captured by game theory, co-operation involves a team becoming more than the sum of their parts and the centrality of passing networks determine a team’s success. I ‘discovered’ all of this mathematics in football, and even used statistics to make a few quid through gambling.

But my success in modelling football made me think more critically about why maths is effective. Maths works, but is it unreasonably effective like Wigner claims?

To answer this question its important to think about how we applied mathematicians’ work and the times that maths doesn’t work out. During the writing of the book I had lots of ideas about how maths could be used in football.  Not all of these were good ideas. For example, I wrote a long section about how the strategy would change as the number of points awarded for a win in league football went to infinity. I calculated minimum spanning trees on formations, which gave nice pictures but didn’t relate to the style of play of the teams. These ideas and many more had to be abandoned because, while they were fun mathematically, they didn’t make footballing sense.

The requirement for realism became even more important when I started discussing my ideas with analysts at with the analysts at football clubs. Premier League teams are interested in using data and models in their match analysis and many of them employ their own mathematicians. But talking to them, I soon found out that the conditions for what made a good model were very strict.

“Managers and coaches are inquisitive people”, one Premier League analyst told me. “If you put something in front of them, be it a passing network or a Voronoi diagram, they nearly always take an interest. But they are also short on time, so the next thing they ask is ‘so what?’”

The ‘so what’ question is partly about the managers need to win matches, but it is also about the insistence that models make footballing sense. I recently had a discussion with Toronto FC analyst Devin Pleuler about whether node centrality or eigenvector centrality were the best way to assess if a team is overly dependent on one particular player.  This is the type of technical question—where mathematical properties and footballing properties are so intertwined that there is no way of separating them—which defies the view of mathematics as elegant. It is all about getting in to the dirty details, instead of admiring beauty.

We can’t say, as Wigner did about physics, that the rules of football are written in mathematics. The rules of winning the game are a mixture of logic and hard earned experience.

When I think more widely about the research I did previous to Soccermatics, applying maths to model social behaviour of animals and humans, I have always been challenged by my collaborators by the ‘so what’ question. I learnt about the topology of a torus by discussing blind angles in fish with collective behaviour specialist Iain Couzin. I better understood bifurcations in differential equations by working with Oxford biologist Dora Biro on pigeon navigation. And I understood the limitations of agent-based models working on ant migrations together with Stephen Pratt. In each project, I understood how to model a system by working closely together with these collaborators, rather than applying my own abstract mathematical idea to their problem. This is very different from the cold, abstract view taken by Wigner or Tegmark.

The fact that non-mathematicians can produce sharp and correct criticism of an applied mathematician’s work shows us that the success of mathematics does not rest on its abstract beauty. The ability of researchers not versed in the subtleties of mathematics to help develop models contradicts Wigner’s ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ argument. It tells us that people not trained in mathematics are also able to give deep insights to the subject. Mathematics is not there to be discovered, it is part of the patterns of reasoning in all of our brains.

The more I collaborate and work together with other scientists (and football analysts) the more I realise that maths is, in fact, reasonably effective. It gives us a slight edge in our thinking that allows us to better understand biology and maybe to win a few more football matches.

For me, mathematics does not contain a “supreme beauty, cold and austere” as a young(ish) Bertrand Russell put it, in a quote used at the start of Wigner’s article. Instead, I think of a mathematics that when held warm and near to its applications can help generate new ways of thinking.

The philosopher A.J. Ayer had a term for statements like Russell’s and Wigner’s. He called them nonsense.  This may sound derogatory, but Ayer was careful to define what he meant by nonsense. Nonsense statements are not based on information that we have direct access to via our senses: they come from non-sense data. Wigner freely admits that his idea about maths comes from a feeling that can’t be verified by known scientific methods. This is non-sense and there is no way of verifying it. Later in his life Russell, whose own philosophical position was close to Ayers, would probably have been happy to admit that the “cold and austere” statement was nonsense.

When I wrote about football and maths, I included a lot of nonsense. Nonsense is important to us all. Tens of thousands of fans crowding in to a ground to cheer on their team or sing abuse at the opposition is nonsense. The things we say when we see an amazing goal on TV or when our team reaches the World Cup final are usually nonsense. The feeling a pure mathematician gets when she puts together the pieces of a mathematical puzzle is nonsense. And all of the articles that are written and read about the beauty of mathematics are largely made up of nonsense.

Indeed, the whole of the last paragraph is nonsense. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth writing. And although Wigner is wrong, I know exactly what he means.

………………..

David Sumpter: Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game

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Mathematics, Science

About David Sumpter

David Sumpter is professor of applied mathematics at Uppsala University. His most recent book Soccermatics, takes a new look at the world's most popular game. He shows how probability, geometry, statistics, game theory and dynamical systems all give new insight in to how football is played. David's books draw both from his own scientific research, which explains how animal and human groups work together, and from a desire to understand and communicate about how maths can be used in different contexts. In the academia, David is author of the book ‘Collective Animal Behaviour’ and a leading researcher in the field of modelling group behaviour. He has published around 100 articles in leading scientific journals, including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society journals. He has co-authored work with scientists from every continent of the world, apart from Antarctica. David speaks regularly at book and science festivals, has given Google and TEDx talks. He has written for the Economist, FourFourTwo magazine, The Daily Telegraph, The Big Issue and many other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @Soccermatics. He lives in Sweden with his wife and two children. In his spare time, he trains his son's football team Upsala IF 2005.

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Watch enough MLB games, especially if you have a favorite team, and you're going to learn to hate a few of the umpires. Names like Joe West and Angel Hernandez instantly come to mind. And how could we forget Jim Joyce, who literally stole a perfect game from Armando Galarraga in 2010 (I hate the incessant replays in today's MLB, but this call made a VERY strong case for it). In reality, these guys do an unbelievable job, and many of them are legends that don't get the respect they deserve. Same could be said for the other sports, and you can look no further than that awful few games of replacement refs in the NFL back in 2012.

RELATED: There's now scientific proof that MLB umpires just want to get the hell out of there quickly

The video you're about to see further proves the point that each of the four major sports league's referees are the absolute best of the best in their profession. Even if you feel you're team or favorite player has been wronged in some way at some point, it could be way, WAY worse. Like, these two umpires making this call in a Mexican Baseball League game type of worse. Check it out:

https://twitter.com/BasebaIlKing/status/1020052958304583680

Wait, what? The guy literally took a full swing. If we're being nice, we can understand the ump behind the plate missing it. Maybe he had something in his eye, maybe his view was blocked ... MAYBE. But then he checks with the first base ump who agrees it was no swing! What are these two smoking? Whatever it is we'd like some of... actually, never mind. This is not only the worst call in baseball history, but maybe sports history. It's so bad that Don Denkinger is laughing at it:

VIDEO

I'm sure the pay isn't great in the Mexican League, but guys, we've got to do better.

RELATED: John Lackey flips out on umpire, gets tossed along with catcher Wilson Contreras