Fasten your seat belt or don't, hop on anyway for 46 tweets ☺️
It's 16th of December, 2020. India is standing at the back of an ODI series loss and a momentum shifting win in the t20i series. It's time for the marquee Border Gavaskar trophy. The pink ball test, the boxing day, new year's test and the Gabba Challenge. Are we up for it?

Fasten your seat belt or don't, hop on anyway for 46 tweets ☺️
Jadeja is injured so Ashwin becomes an easy answer for the tough question of the lone spinner. There are other tough questions as to who should be the 2nd opener, Gill who had good practice game or Shaw who scored a 50 in the last test he played? Pant or Saha?
Virat has one the toss and decided to bat. He has never lost a test match after winning the toss
Aus comes out to bat and the openers are giving a nervous start to their team until Bumrah gets both of them.
Shaw goes cheaply again, Bumrah comes as a night watchman.
The captain stands at one side of the crease in shock while Cummins and Hazelwood are now showing who is the boss.
The team is at 36-9 and what makes it worst is that Shami gets a fracture
One bad session turns the match towards the Aussies. I wonder how India would look at this, as a horrific loss or as a match where we dominated multiple sessions?
India are now without their best batsman that too after a batting collapse but Rahane decides to strengthen the bowling instead and goes in with 5 bowlers including Jadeja. He is clearly not deviating from the template that bowlers win you the matches
Gill gets a chance to debut after warming the benches for 2 years and Rishabh Pant makes a comeback in the place of Saha.
India starts the second innings attack only to lose Umesh to injury. Siraj stands up as a champion and we get them for 200.
Looks who is back, it's Rohit! He gets back into the team as the vice captain. Harsh on Pujara to be removed as the VC and for Mayank to be dropped but then this is what the management thinks is the best for the balance with Rohit being experienced player.
Senior player Rohit gets a good 50 in this innings but gets out on boundry and thus India's chance to win gets lowered. Pujara has started playing a blockathon.
He goes on showing his grit and determination to everyone while holding an end tight.
Finally India reach Gabba. One thing easy for Rahane is to select the team. It is like saying "all of you, in the team", because of 3 injuries we got in Vihari, Ashwin & Bumrah. Mayank comes in a new role in middle order and Kuldeep gets his match, or does he?
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#swfc are finally back in league action tonight 8pm GMT away to Coventry #pusb
A relegation six pointer to kick off our second half of the season with 7 points separating us in 23rd and them in 16th.
A look of our numbers and theirs below and what they can tell us.
[thread]
I looked at the survival prognosis for teams in our position yesterday (https://t.co/rmVT8b5sFl).
Thankfully a prognosis is not a prediction, but it does bear out just how important tonight's game is.
Can we quantify match importance then?
Well, @FiveThirtyEight have given it a right good go and how they've done it is explained here: https://t.co/ObjB079Fjw
Their match importance rating ranges from 0 to 100 for a team.
In a game with a high match importance vs. a team with low match importance, a team's likelihood of winning increases: All else being equal, if match importance is 100 for the home team and 0 for the away team, the home team's odds of winning drop from Evens (50%) to 8/11 (58%).
If we look at the combined match importance ratings for both teams, tonight's game ranks 14th of the 317 matches with match importance ratings. Pretty important then!
Of our matches only the win against Bournemouth had a higher combined match importance than tonight's match:
A relegation six pointer to kick off our second half of the season with 7 points separating us in 23rd and them in 16th.
A look of our numbers and theirs below and what they can tell us.
[thread]
I looked at the survival prognosis for teams in our position yesterday (https://t.co/rmVT8b5sFl).
Thankfully a prognosis is not a prediction, but it does bear out just how important tonight's game is.
#swfc Derby's latest win over QPR leaves Wednesday six points adrift of 21st and safety with two matches in hand.
— Peter A. L\xf8hmann (@ploehmann) January 27, 2021
How have teams in those circumstances done in the previous 22 seasons?
[thread] pic.twitter.com/LxENys45wC
Can we quantify match importance then?
Well, @FiveThirtyEight have given it a right good go and how they've done it is explained here: https://t.co/ObjB079Fjw
Their match importance rating ranges from 0 to 100 for a team.
In a game with a high match importance vs. a team with low match importance, a team's likelihood of winning increases: All else being equal, if match importance is 100 for the home team and 0 for the away team, the home team's odds of winning drop from Evens (50%) to 8/11 (58%).
If we look at the combined match importance ratings for both teams, tonight's game ranks 14th of the 317 matches with match importance ratings. Pretty important then!
Of our matches only the win against Bournemouth had a higher combined match importance than tonight's match:

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BREAKING: @CommonsCMS @DamianCollins just released previously sealed #Six4Three @Facebook documents:
Some random interesting tidbits:
1) Zuck approves shutting down platform API access for Twitter's when Vine is released #competition
2) Facebook engineered ways to access user's call history w/o alerting users:
Team considered access to call history considered 'high PR risk' but 'growth team will charge ahead'. @Facebook created upgrade path to access data w/o subjecting users to Android permissions dialogue.
3) The above also confirms @kashhill and other's suspicion that call history was used to improve PYMK (People You May Know) suggestions and newsfeed rankings.
4) Docs also shed more light into @dseetharaman's story on @Facebook monitoring users' @Onavo VPN activity to determine what competitors to mimic or acquire in 2013.
https://t.co/PwiRIL3v9x
Some random interesting tidbits:
1) Zuck approves shutting down platform API access for Twitter's when Vine is released #competition

2) Facebook engineered ways to access user's call history w/o alerting users:
Team considered access to call history considered 'high PR risk' but 'growth team will charge ahead'. @Facebook created upgrade path to access data w/o subjecting users to Android permissions dialogue.

3) The above also confirms @kashhill and other's suspicion that call history was used to improve PYMK (People You May Know) suggestions and newsfeed rankings.
4) Docs also shed more light into @dseetharaman's story on @Facebook monitoring users' @Onavo VPN activity to determine what competitors to mimic or acquire in 2013.
https://t.co/PwiRIL3v9x

The first area to focus on is diversity. This has become a dogma in the tech world, and despite the fact that tech is one of the most meritocratic industries in the world, there are constant efforts to promote diversity at the expense of fairness, merit and competency. Examples:
USC's Interactive Media & Games Division cancels all-star panel that included top-tier game developers who were invited to share their experiences with students. Why? Because there were no women on the
ElectronConf is a conf which chooses presenters based on blind auditions; the identity, gender, and race of the speaker is not known to the selection team. The results of that merit-based approach was an all-male panel. So they cancelled the conference.
Apple's head of diversity (a black woman) got in trouble for promoting a vision of diversity that is at odds with contemporary progressive dogma. (She left the company shortly after this
Also in the name of diversity, there is unabashed discrimination against men (especially white men) in tech, in both hiring policies and in other arenas. One such example is this, a developer workshop that specifically excluded men: https://t.co/N0SkH4hR35
USC's Interactive Media & Games Division cancels all-star panel that included top-tier game developers who were invited to share their experiences with students. Why? Because there were no women on the
ElectronConf is a conf which chooses presenters based on blind auditions; the identity, gender, and race of the speaker is not known to the selection team. The results of that merit-based approach was an all-male panel. So they cancelled the conference.
Apple's head of diversity (a black woman) got in trouble for promoting a vision of diversity that is at odds with contemporary progressive dogma. (She left the company shortly after this
Also in the name of diversity, there is unabashed discrimination against men (especially white men) in tech, in both hiring policies and in other arenas. One such example is this, a developer workshop that specifically excluded men: https://t.co/N0SkH4hR35

I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x
The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x
Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x
The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x
It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
As someone\u2019s who\u2019s read the book, this review strikes me as tremendously unfair. It mostly faults Adler for not writing the book the reviewer wishes he had! https://t.co/pqpt5Ziivj
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) January 12, 2021
The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x
Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x
The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x
It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x