good stuff
-
The Chickens (and Pigs, and Steers, and Lambs) Come Home to Roost
Could eating too much margarine be bad for your critical faculties? The “experts” who so confidently advised us to replace saturated fats, such as butter, with polyunsaturated spreads, people who presumably practise what they preach, have suddenly come over all uncertain and seem to be struggling through a mental fog to reformulate their script. Joanna… Read more
-
How many significant figures should I use?
That question gets asked dozens of times every semester in my statistics classes; it’s pretty clear that most of my students have no sense of scale or proportion about numbers. But now I have Dr Rhett Alain’s short answer in his Dot Physics Measurement and Uncertainty Smackdown, wherein he refers to the (extremely) long answer… Read more
-
The Folly of Scientism
What he said. Read the whole thing, I especially enjoyed the discussion of evolutionary biology. Personally, I think the field is pure bunk. My favorite question for eBiologists is “What were the evolutionary pressures that modified dogs so that they all enjoy riding in cars with their heads out the window? Does it go back… Read more
-
The mark of truth
“It is a mark of truth that the same truth can be approached by many roads.” —Gene Wolfe I ran across this early this morning, and followed the link to Wolfe’s 2001 essay, “The Best Introduction to the Mountains.” Wolfe describes his discovery of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and what he learned from it. … Read more
-
Pathological Altruism
Add the term to your vocabulary. From James Taranto’s ever-amusing Best of the Web Today, read about the work of Barbara Oakley, an associate professor in engineering…defines pathological altruism as “altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm.” A crucial qualification is that while the altruistic actor fails… Read more
-
How to become a stats-savvy boss…
…in one easy lesson. Go read Alan Downey’s slide presentation “How to be a good consumer of statistical analysis.” Then get yourself some data and start working on those CDF plots. Read more
-
STEM Shuck and Jive
It’s an article of faith in my profession that America has a chronic shortage of scientific and engineering professionals, so there’s a constant imperative to recruit more students into the STEM disciplines. Turns out this is a wee bit exaggerated: The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United… Read more
-
Think Twice about Grad School
The ‘market” for professors is pretty skimpy today’s academic job market is a “market” in the sense that one stall selling fiddlehead ferns in the middle of a strip mall is a “farmer’s market.” In the place of actual jobs are adjunct positions: benefit-free, office-free academic servitude in which you will earn $18,000 a year… Read more
-
Free Downloads of Everything for Everyone!
What the word needs now is DIGITAL SOCIALISM. Pablum to the People! Tip from the Instapundit, who want’s to give Obamaism to Hollywood good and hard. Read more
The Random Texan 