There’s nothing like a 7-hour travel day to catch up on reading. I managed to crack open and finish Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Levitt is a lauded young economist from the University of Chicago who likes to use his statistical superpowers to answer interesting questions. Dubner is a New York Times journalist [...]
Stats Hacks #4
Playing a little catch-up here … Hack #4 is: Reject the Null.
Scientific method is all about taking guesses and then finding ways to prove them in the real world, through experimentation. Sometimes, though, it is just as effective to prove that a guess is wrong as it is to prove that it is right. [...]
Stats Hacks #3
Wow. Didn’t take long to get off the daily schedule. Credit a truncated work week and a weekend trip north for a funeral for that (but for God’s sake, don’t blame me). My new goal is to be through with the 75 hacks in O’Reilly’s Statistics Hacks by the time Archie turns 3 in mid-October.
The [...]
Wal-Mart has eaten my hometown
This weekend I planes-trains-and-automobiled it from Bloomington to Woodstock, my hometown. The occasion is sad — the death of my friend\’s father — but I also looked forward to reconnecting with my oldest friends and my former community. It turns out, not much of the former actually exists.
Woodstock was home to Orson Welles at one [...]
AcademiaSchmacademia
Three hours of sleep and an early morning train ride is a great recipe for catching up on reading assignments. Despite a very conflicted biological reaction to the trip — I desperately wanted and needed sleep, but I can’t sleep on a train for fear all of my stuff will get off the train before [...]
Literally. . . everyone makes mistakes, even God.
On the way home from the grocery today
Carter: I wish I were related to Abraham Lincoln. (pause) Wait! I am!
Me: What?
Carter: Because of the flood, we’re all related.
Me: What?
Carter: We’re all related to Noah. Because of the flood.
Me: You know, Carter, not everyone believes that.
Carter: I do.
Me: It’s called a literalist interpretation of the Bible. [...]
Denmark
Still waiting for the passport and have to pay the bill for the symposium/hotel somehow, but in addition to the travel arrangements (”Flight 68, departing for the rest of the world”) I now have a scheduled time for my 25-minute talk on PoliticWiki et al. It’s a nice spot for me, since I don’t have [...]