This is the first issue of the revived PerThirtySix newsletter. The plan is to send it most Mondays, with a note from each of us about what we've been working on, what we're thinking about, and anything else we've found worth your time. Short enough to read over coffee, long enough to be worth the trip. Thanks for being here.

Shri

Hi everyone!

I'm really excited to bring back the PerThirtySix newsletter. I've worked on a few projects over the last couple of months that have been a ton of fun to build, and I'm excited to share them with you.

The How The Heck? Series

This is a set of interactive explorables designed to pull back the veil on everyday technology. Last year, I released a piece on QR codes, and this past month I've wrapped up deep dives into how GPS and Shazam work. I didn't plan to make this a series originally, but I kept finding myself drawn to the idea. After finishing the third one, it felt like there was enough momentum to finally give it a name.

From How the Heck Does GPS Work — 147 live satellites, drawn to scale.

From How the Heck Does Shazam Work — hashing a song into 100 fingerprint pairs.

It's a bit of a cliché, but I've always loved the Arthur C. Clarke quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” My hope is that getting a peek behind the curtain of the “magic” makes the technology feel equal parts accessible and awe-inspiring. I know I've learned a ton working on these pieces.

I'd love to hear from you: What should the next piece in the series be? If there's a piece of tech you use every day but don't quite “get,” reach out at shri@perthirtysix.com or on Bluesky with your ideas.

Is Music Just Sound?

The other project I finished in March is Is Music Just Sound? This one is a bit more philosophical. I grapple with some light existential dread regarding AI-generated music and the purpose of art.

The interactive quiz that opens the piece — most people can't tell the difference.

It features an interactive “Can you tell AI music from real music?” quiz, along with an economic and cultural analysis of tools like Suno. I'd love to know how you do on the quiz and what parts resonate with you.

Thanks for following along,

— Shri

Rob

I stepped outside last night just before 10pm. The last of the cherry blossoms still hanging on for another day or two before a hurried spring turns into another muggy D.C. summer — which I still love, inexplicably. I was walking to my office to print three NFL draft papers, including The Loser's Curse by Cade Massey and Richard Thaler.

Just as fascinating as the paper itself is the fact that Massey and Thaler, a Nobel laureate in economics and co-author of Nudge, would spend serious time on the NFL draft - a fact I'll use as justification that my own deep dives into the draft on weekend nights is time well spent. The premise of M&T's research was to study if “biases found in judgment and decision-making research remain present in contexts in which experienced participants face strong economic incentives.” That is to say, if the millions of dollars at stake would nudge scouting departments into more rational behavior, or if they would still act with the overconfidence of DraftKings parlay degenerates. They concluded in favor of the latter (in far more measured language, of course).

The paper's findings are still relevant today, but I did find their methodology for player evaluation a bit lacking. They used games started and All Pro selections as their measures of player value, which was reasonable given the data available at the time, but has a real gap in resolution e.g. a backup who starts on an injury riddled (or bad) team accumulates starts without necessarily being a quality stater.

To be clear, no single number can capture an NFL career. It can't account for the coverage scheme that inflated a corner's stats, or the torn ACL that ended a prime two years early, or the offensive line that made a running back look like a star. What it can do, if built carefully, is rank 5,000 players in an order that makes sense more often than it doesn't. The history of sports analytics is a history of choosing what to measure. Baseball chose wins above replacement. Basketball chose Estimated Plus-Minus and DARKO. Football never settled on anything, partly because the sport is harder to decompose into individual contributions, and partly because nobody could agree on what mattered. We took a shot at it.

pVAR (player Value Above Replacement): a single number measuring how valuable a draft pick turned out to be. It combines per-snap grades (how the player actually performed on the field, play by play), career counting stats, and end-of-year awards like All-Pro selections and MVP. It's the backbone of our draft redraft rankings, team report cards, and bests and busts analysis.

I'll let you guess which team graded out as an F over the last 20 years.

Three of the thirty-two. Click any to open the full card.

Full methodology here. Or jump straight into the redraft rankings, team report cards, and bests and busts.

If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, Massey himself is giving a talk this week: Has the Loser's Curse Been Broken?

— Rob

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