Weekend Editor
@weekend-editor
Retired physicist, after a career in machine learning & stats mostly for cancer drug discovery. Also @weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz. Now blogging about stats in the news:
As Virgil put it in the Aeneid (Book 6, v 126), any damn fool can climb down into Hell, it's getting back out that's the hard part:
@funranium.bsky.social This may amuse your priestly friends? A bon mot in some apologetics by GK Chesterton alludes both to his Father Brown mysteries and Hollnagel's Safety-I and Safety-II concept: why someone is dead (Safety-I) vs how we can all live (Safety-II).
Linguists & phonologists -- way smarter 'n me in these matters! -- think it approaches an accent nowadays? A readable example, e.g., vowel fronting: J Harrington, et al., "Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter", Jnl Acoust Soc Am, 146 (2019), 3327-3332. doi.org/10.1121/1.51...
You know you've made the big time when Bloom County makes fun of you (a couple years later, I think in August 1985). Not sure why I can't add alt text, so: Cutter John's wheelchair is fitted with helium balloons... because reasons... and he drifts out to sea with Opus the penguin.
Blog post addendum: Wet bulb temps (temp & humidity) in Massachusetts will be extreme this week. Some research shows the lethal wet bulb limit is 87.8F; much of Mass will be above that. Make plans for cool shelter. www.someweekendreading.blog/french-baker...
Some thought on Russian casualty rates in Ukraine over the last several years, and the sudden increase beginning in February 2024. www.someweekendreading.blog/ukraine-1400k/
He's like a hallucinating LLM. Tuberville complained about poetry slams on Navy ships, to which the only fitting reply is via Sappho #65, "To One Who Loved Not Poetry".
ICE is very like the slave-catcher patrols of the 1850s. So perhaps the best analogy is not sardines, but the layout of a slave ship? encyclopediavirginia.org/4303hpr-7e68...
Billionaires conspire to save each other at the expense of everyone else, phrased as a variation of Philippa Foote's trolley problem. I've sadly forgotten the source of the image. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley...
Consider, for comparison, the layout of a slave ship and how the bodies were packed:
New board game observed on Mastodon. I'm not a board game person, by any measure. But this one... is intriguing. mastodon.social/@2dh5/116084...
Your photo is... not so unrealistic? In the 1940s, Boston Mayor Curley wrote to the President of MIT asking for engineers to figure out how to use flamethrowers for snow removal.
But... are those *maudlin* tears? Because then we can be confused in multiple, independent ways!
Gorgeous animal! The feather-fluffing is silly, but dignity overcomes silliness. My favorite owl for today is the Superb Owl in the Chauvet Cave in France, patiently waiting for 32,000 years.
Looks more or less vanilla. Just adding a note about the hospitalization. Then tweaking it a bit, as Wikipediants tend to do.
A similar one was done here in Boston last May. One of my squares is on the result:
I've kept track, w/regression model of Russian casualties vs time. Around 2024-Apr-10, casualty rate increases (see plot). 1.2 mln Russian men of military service age = ~5% of that demographic. Add emigration & COVID-19, and it's ~10% of that group. www.someweekendreading.blog/ukraine-1200k/
The number 1 movie when you were 10 years old will define your 2026. If only it were so.
"... may be used forwrong, but are useless for right" is *exactly* the thought of Martin Luther King on "white moderates" in his Letter from Birmingham Jail:
is this the same Jules Feiffer who illustrated _The Phantom Tollbooth_?
Seen on Mastodon via “Uncle Duke”, submitted without comment, other than to note that *some* talking lamps speak more emphatically than others:
Perhaps you might be looking at the bsky app, instead of the web page interface? In the web page interface as rendered in Firefox, there's no Advanced option under Moderation (below). Maybe they update the web interface more slowly.
Experiment design is the most important step, of course. But many statistics clients of course skip that, and ask you to analyze the wounded result. After that, it's knowing *which* statistic to use, and *why*, and explain what bad things will happen if the client chooses to deviate.
... and the unicyclists dressed as Darth Vader in a kilt, with flamethrower bagpipes. Don't forget those. www.unipiper.com