“…and Neymar will fall and cry like a baby”, predicts a boy in Belgrade about tomorrow’s match. Even if his 3–0 win for Serbia against Brazil doesn’t materalize, the fall almost certainly will. ⚽️

The next time you crack your backdoor to let your cat outside for its daily adventure, you may want to think again. For a cat, the outdoors is filled with undesirable potential. Like the risks of catching and transmitting diseases, and the uncontrollable drive to hunt and kill wildlife, which has been shown to reduce native animal populations and degrade biodiversity.

So starts a University of Maryland press release about this paper, which analyzes interactions between domestic cats and “eight native mammal species common in urban areas” in Washington D.C.

Now, if you ever stepped foot in D.C. you will notice that the most abundant mammals are neither cats, dogs, nor humans, but rats. But these District mascots do not make an appearance among the species analyzed, which were eastern chipmunk, eastern cottontail, eastern gray squirrel, groundhog, white-footed mouse, raccoon, red fox, and Virginia opossum.

Ah yes, the red fox. So very common in Washington D.C.

Look, I don’t doubt that domestic cats roaming around the suburbs are the scourge of bunny rabbits and chipmunks. But downtown D.C. has a bit of a rat problem and this study could have been a way to learn more about them.

Found on Mastodon via @m_clem@econtwitter.net, a passage from The Enchiridion by Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1758.

What a lovely sentiment to have, and not only with regards to social media.

Niall Ferguson in one of last year’s Conversations with Tyler:

The epistemic problem, as I see it is — Ian Morris wrote this in one of his recent books— which is the scenario? Extinction-level events or the singularity? That seems a tremendously widely divergent set of scenarios to choose from. I sense that — perhaps this is just the historian’s instinct — that each of these scenarios is, in fact, a very low probability indeed, and that we should spend more time thinking about the more likely scenarios that lie between them.

This is bananas thinking! ⊕ Probability space replacing the river in this well-known Talebism. If the probability space is 4 feet deep on average you don’t just wade into it as if every part is just 4 feet. You need to know the variance, and from Ferguson’s own telling it goes from unlimited upside to complete ruin.

Worse yet: Ferguson is confusing improbable with the impossible. ⊕ And also hasn’t heard of ergodicity, again courtesy of Taleb. Given a long enough time span, an extremely low-frequency event is a near-certainty. If you don’t believe me, how about a game of Russian roulette?

Is it because Ferguson is a historian? Everything he encounters professionally would have ex post likelihood of 100% so probability theory may not be his area of strength. Don’t ask a historian for predictions, I guess.

So, for people new to soccer watching the World Cup, just to clarify: that wasn’t an offside, that was highway robbery.

FIFA is second only to the International Olympics Committee in corruption. ⚽️

An homage to M.C. Escher’s Three Worlds, shot at he US National Arboretum, which is another one of the spots in DC you shouldn’t miss.