Sod's Law The buttered toast phenomenon is the observation that when you drop a slice of buttered toast, more often than not it will inconveniently...
Stuart Coles
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Hey Jude
Don't make it bad How good is Jude Bellingham? No, really, how good is he? Suppose you'd watched his games for England at Euro 2024 and had...
The Endless Match
Hello Wimbledon and happy birthday to the longest tennis match in history. Played between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, this Wimbledon first round...
Rage Against the Machine
The Post Office Scandal The Post Office scandal has been described as the 'largest miscarriage of justice in British history'. There are many...
Guess Who?
Guess Who? Part 1 A young boy grows up loving his local football club. He goes to as many matches as he can, home and away. In later life he builds...
A Magic Wand
Farewell So, farewell to Daniel Kahneman, who died aged 90 this week. I've mentioned before that in a previous Smartodds offsite, when Matthew...
Expensive tastes
The dinner conundrum You've been invited to dinner and feel like you should take a bottle of wine. Is it ok just to buy a cheap bottle of wine, or...
Fatal Attraction
Talent and Attractiveness Do attractive people tend to be less talented? Look at the following graph which shows the relationship between...
Secret Santa and other festive treats
In the spirit of Christmas, this post contains a statistical puzzle and a link to other puzzles that, while not explicitly statistical themselves,...
Terrible Parents
I'm a terrible parent. My 18 year-old son will almost always beat me at anything: chess, skiing, cards, cycling... pretty much everything. Except...
Who wants to be a Danish millionaire?
The Question In the last post I mentioned a problem that I'd discussed with Anders, who had kindly written to me after following the blog for a...
The Lonely Life of a Statistics Blog Writer
Though it's had a couple of lapses and the format has evolved, 'Smartodds loves Statistics' is 5 years old now. In that time there have been 210...