therandomtexan
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Coronavirus vs. Hipster Beards
Will full beards be the next casualty of the coronavirus? Check out the CDC’s guide to respirator-friendly facial hair styles: Tip from Drudge, who wouldn’t know a permalink if it bit him on the butt. Read more
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Like, Ambiguous, Dude
I hadn’t seen this hoary old saw in years not since I was studying AI in grad school. The professors always used the phrase to show how difficult natural language processing could be. Tip from Maggie’s Farm, where there’s always something interesting. Read more
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Make Every Vote Count
Every semester, I begin my introductory biostatistics class with a simple “show of hands” experiment based on the Bouba-Kiki effect. Prior to the experiment I “volunteer” two students at random to count hands, and when hands are raised, each of my volunteers counts silently and independently. Invariably, the counts DO NOT MATCH. We briefly discuss Read more
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I Learn Something New Every Day
How did I get to be so old without learning about this? https://twitter.com/Brink_Thinker/status/1219287571517378560 Thanks to GV at American Digest for putting me hip to Kevin W. and his remarkable Facebook page. Read more
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It Takes More Than a Beard
So it’s not just me who thinks the current craze for men’s beards is just so much bullshit. Writing in the Washington Examiner, Suzanne Venker says “Looking masculine is one thing, being masculine is another”. Will these beards help attract women? Absolutely. But unless men learn to develop and proudly own their masculine core, the Read more
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Tsoo Tsoon to be a Tsunami
Andrew Gillen at the Texas Public Policy Foundation says “Two Tsunamis are About to Hit Higher Education,” when :..the Department of Education released post graduate earnings and debt data broken down by college program — which will have a revolutionary impact on higher education.” A bit of poking around on the web gets you to the Read more
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Fresh-O-Matic!
Just read this delightful article about steamed hoagies, and recalled using a Fresh-O-Matic steamer. Right out of high school, starting in University, I started a weekend gig as a prep guy in a Mom and Pop hamburger stand in Big Bear, California. The owners patiently showed me the ropes, and over two years built me Read more
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“Don’t worry, it’s harmless”
…is what the marijuana crowd has been telling us since I was a toddler in the Eisenhower Administration. Well, if the States are a Laboratory for Democracy, I’d say that the Marijuana Experiment is crashing from the “unexpected” side effects. Peter Hitchens, writing in The Spectator comments Marijuana has been the beneficiary of one of Read more
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Counting is DIFFICULT
Eleven million? or 22 million? A new Yale/MIT study estimates the illegal alien population in the US somewhere in the range of 16.5 to 29.1 million (for us statisticians, that’s 22.8 ± 6.3 million). That’s a margin of error larger than the entire population of Los Angeles (3.99 million). Worse yet, this estimate suggests that Read more
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Pick a Name at Random
Found a cool new tool useful in simulating data sets: the Random Name Generator. What a great way to fake up some data! I’ve been using it in a course that includes survey sampling. Read more
The Random Texan 