my favorite Punk Rock OR posts

Earlier I promised to write about my favorite posts that are not necessarily my most read posts. Here are 11 that I enjoyed writing:

• Betty Crocker 1st edition cookbook (1950): the first edition wasn’t just a collection of recipes, it was a guide  for immigrants for assimilating to American cuisine and eating customs. Not a lot of OR in this one, but I promise you’ll find more OR in the other articles.
• There are biases in predicting temperatures (there is a bias toward accuracy in predicting hotter temperatures than normal) and snowfall (small snowstorms are exaggerated while large snowstorms are not). Biases in forecasting should be taken into account when, say, coming up with models for weather-related decision-making under uncertainty.
• Are squirrels optimizers or satisficers? The squirrels near me are not good at assessing risk or avoiding cars but if they were, we humans may be in trouble 😉
• My post-Super Bowl dissection of why the Patriots’ decision to let the Giants score a touchdown made sense.
• My first silent movie: the best part of this post were the silent movie suggestions for months to come (thank you readers!)
• Running, cheesecake, and OR: names matter
• Is London ready for the Olympics? I wrote this blog after exchanging some emails with WSJ journalist Carl Bialik about queuing at Heathrow. Carl included some of my responses in our conversation on his blog (Link).
• What are the odds of winning the lottery two times? I enjoyed the comments to this post, which taught me that one can indeed make a living by playing the lottery.
• On pirates and operations research. My former undergraduate and podcast partner is now trying to work pirates into his OR dissertation.
• Five articles about women in engineering.
• Benford’s law post: why leading digits of numbers are not (discrete) uniformly distributed. I finally understood Benford’s Law after it was indirectly brought up in class.

Go here to find the top 11 most read Punk Rock OR blog posts.