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.
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The 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.
Modern data stack in a box, for baseball
I built a modern data stack in a box for fantasy baseball, on the recipe DuckDB sketched in 2022 — and learned what it does and doesn't replace.