 The unpredictable game Soccer is the most unpredictable of major sports. Goals are rare — some games have none at all, lots have just one or two — meaning that a single bounce of a ball can determine the entire contest. Compare to tennis, where each match involves hundreds of points. If a player is sufficiently dominant to have a 51% chance of winning each one, they will very likely be the victor. Soccer’s strong random element means that while the winners of soccer leagues are moderately foreseeable — expert predictions correlate somewhat with actual outcomes — for a long time it seemed there was an inherent limit to how predictable individual matches were, writes the epidemiologist Adam Kucharski in Understanding the unseen. That changed somewhat in the 1990s, when two statisticians came up with a simple model based on the number of goals each team conceded and scored on average, and which predicted results well enough to at least be a profitable betting strategy — for a while, until bookmakers caught on. But football remains far less predictable than other sports — especially big international tournaments like the ongoing European Championships in Germany, where the on-paper best teams by no means always win. Just ask fans of Belgium and England. The normal curve It is a simple fact of history that history is speeding up. The “most important graph of all time,” writes the econ writer Maxwell Tabarrok, is that of world GDP over the last 2,000 years: It is, essentially, a flat line for 1,800 years or so, then a massive exponential zoom to vertical. Economic activity increased by more in the average year in the 20th century than in the average century in the first millennium AD. It’s very possible that will continue, and that’s not all good news. “The 20th century brought incredible progress but also terrible risk,” Tabarrok writes in Maximum Progress. “The world wars, the rise of authoritarianism, and of course nuclear weapons. Doubling all of this and compressing [it] into a decade is almost impossible to imagine.” But we already stand “at the tippy top of the hyperbolic growth curve in the fastest changing world ever,” so it’s possible that even the insane rates of change we’re going to see in future will “feel normal the whole time.” En busca del tiempo perdido A particular Basque bistro in Manhattan’s East Village has closed. For most readers, that may mean little: For Bess Stillman and her husband Jake, who used to sit, “foreheads touching, at a high top looking out the window at the people hustling up and down the avenue” during the couple’s time in New York, it is a small heartbreak. They no longer live in the city, and more devastatingly, cancer led to Jake having his tongue removed, which “rendered most restaurants irrelevant” — but still, they meant to go back, and now they never will. There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, Stillman writes in Everything Is An Emergency. It means a longing for a home to which you can never return. Jake’s cancer returned and metastasized: It is terminal. “It’ll be hard returning to New York one day without Jake,” says Stillman, “but harder still if the places that once welcomed us, aren’t there to welcome me back.” She had been “clinging to the idea that I’ll sit at our high-top, taste the croquetas we ate together, and smell the red vermouth we drank together,” evoking memories “during which Jake can briefly return to me again. Proust had his madeleines. I’d have my tapas.” |
