Eleven months of warning at a small-town cattle auction
Steer prices at one Alabama sale barn tripled in seven years, and the model dates every break. The interesting one happened eleven months earlier, in a series nobody watches.
// signal log
curiosity,documented
I follow things until I understand them, then write down what I found. Subject matter varies wildly.
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- 6
- Topics
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Writing
all entriesThe xBA blind spot
Expected batting average is decided at the moment of contact, so it never learns where the ball went or how far it carried. T-Mobile Park lives in that gap — and the marine layer everyone blames for it turns out to be a null result.
A dashboard you cannot diff
I tried to put a Bayesian changepoint analysis of Nashville 311 into Metabase. Two panels, a credible interval, and a probability bar chart — it took 659 lines of Python against an HTTP API, and I still could not review it. Lightdash gets this right by making the dashboard a file.
Looking for Germantown in two million service requests
I ran a Bayesian changepoint model over nine years of Nashville 311 data to find the moment my old neighbourhood changed. There was no moment.
Guessing the ring
A childhood game at the Clay County livestock auction — guess the weight, the price per pound, the total the auctioneer calls — and what it looks like when you put math behind the guess.
Lab
all projects- live
This site
Astro on Cloudflare Workers — static pages, on-demand API routes, one deploy.
- live
The xBA blind spot
An instrument for reading what expected batting average cannot see. Pick a contact cell and watch its outcome spread across the field, in any of the thirty ballparks.
- live
Sleeper analytics dashboard
Fantasy football analytics for a Sleeper league — power rankings, all-play records, trade grading, and a scoring system for bad lineup decisions.
- live
Clay County auction analysis
Seven years of USDA sale-barn reports for one Alabama cattle auction — Bayesian market regimes, a time-varying value of gain, and a validation rule that caught a typo in the source data.