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\nData.\u00a0 Big data.\u00a0 People talk about data these days as if they know what they are talking about.\u00a0 They have no idea.\u00a0 What we do know is that the amount of data has grown exponentially with new systems and techniques, resulting in new types of data.\u00a0 I find it fascinating that it is making possible to compare things that you couldn’t before or never thought of comparing.<\/p>\n
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That is why you see a picture of a baseball and telescope.\u00a0 You can capture what is happening in baseball as it moves, but it is more than the speed and distance of the baseball.\u00a0 Baseball and astronomy are defining and capturing new datasets.\u00a0 It’s a lot of data.\u00a0 They know some of the information that they can get from the data.\u00a0 Furthermore, they only have an vague idea of what is possible to do with that information.\u00a0 Usually data is to support findings.\u00a0 With today’s data it is not known what are the questions to ask.\u00a0 That fascinates me.\u00a0 So what about baseball and astronomy?<\/p>\n
Major League Baseball has been measuring the velocity, movement, location and spin rate of every pitch since 2001 Bruce Schoenfeld wrote in Can New Technology Bring Baseball\u2019s Data Revolution to Fielding?<\/a>.\u00a0 By triangulating views from two cameras\u00a0 perpendicular to each other, you can calculate where that ball was at a given moment and where it went.\u00a0 But how to track movements of something that it is not a given size, like people?<\/p>\n In 2015 STATCAST technology started to capture and record the movement of people from cameras placed on the field. The data about the movement of players is now layered with the data from the radar system to see where the ball went.\u00a0 The technologies generate 3D snapshots of every movement on the baseball field.\u00a0 It comes to about 40,000 frames per second converted into digital data. There’s a lot of data.<\/p>\n What can this data possibly show? One example is that it can show how well fielders play their position.\u00a0 No longer it is is just \u201cdid you see that catch?\u201d\u00a0 Now looking at where the ball went and where the fielder started to catch it, a percentage of how often a fielder makes a catch can be calculated.<\/p>\n A statistic that could not be calculated before but clearly has huge significance.<\/p>\n Data here, data there, data everywhere.<\/p>\n On NPR’s Ted Talks<\/a>, Andrew Connolly talked about data and the universe.\u00a0 With 24 data points, the Hubble telescope in 1929 showed universe was expanding. 24 galaxies. Seventy years after Hubble, by looking at 42 data points over 3 years, it showed the universe was not just expanding but accelerating. 42 supernovas exploding stars.\u00a0 Small changes can give rise to new ideas and theories, even with only 42 data points.<\/p>\n Yet there are 10s of 1000s of galaxies with 10 supernovas per second.\u00a0 Galaxies merge and collide, stars born and die.<\/p>\n