I’m thinking mostly of ‘setting new records.’ In a normal situation, new records should be set ever less frequently. Let me give a silly mathematical example.

I have access to a very long string of binary digits – zeros and ones. This string is ‘random.’ I keep track of the longest run of adjacent ones as I read my way along this string.

Early on, five ones in a row would be unusual. Then six. If we play this game long enough, maybe a hundred ones in a row would turn up – eventually, if the string is truly random, this is guaranteed to happen.

What I’d like to point out is, the setting of new records (for consecutive ones) becomes rarer and rarer as we keep looking. It is an exponential decline: each new record takes roughly twice as long as the previous one.

Truly random observations, like coin flips, follow this pattern.

(You are, in effect, sampling the space of all possible observations. Outliers should take ever larger samples to be observed.)

When this pattern is not observed, there is cause to wonder why – and perhaps worry.

Sports is an example. For ages the four-minute mile could not be run. Then it could. But that record came down very slowly – until Kenyans (with an altitude-induced oxygen capacity advantage) made a few strides (pun intended.)

A rash of new records at the Olympics could be attributed, at least in part, to doping. Think of Lance Armstrong too.

Global warming is another example. New low and new high temperature records were becoming scarcer and scarcer – until maybe a decade ago. Here in Canada we observed both new highs and new lows in the same week. And not by trivial decimal points.

I’ll mention stock markets briefly. When new highs and new drops start making records too often, that’s an anomaly. It should make you wonder, like running times and daily temperatures, if the old rules are being shifted and no longer apply.

Progress in sports can be due to new competitors, new technology (trick swim suits come to mind) or new rule-breaking. Too much progress is a signal, an anomaly.

Progress in weather change – faster and larger storms – is almost certainly due to global warming. Denial of this is absurd.

Crashes in stock markets could mean that program trading is too much faster than humans can handle.

Now for the dumb question: Why should you care?

• Sports should be fair. Athletes should settle for being athletic.
• Global warming will damage us all.
• The financial markets allow big FIs to take large risks feeling sure we’ll bail them out if the bets lose, and they keep the pot when the bets win.

I don’t much care about the sports part. I am saddened that many sports seem to be cheapened.

I care deeply about global warming.

I have the really bad intuition that global warming is partly happening because companies want to keep making large profits. Profits end up in bonus pools and stock options. The rich get richer. Harper and Trump dump environmental protections.

We all lose. All but the one percent, that is.