Uncertainty sayings

Below is a personal quotation collection consisting of quotations and verbatim exchanges, famous only among our friends, that were pithy or otherwise memorable enough to be written down in the hope of not forgetting them. Some seem to be deep truths, some delusions, some outright lies. Although the intention is generally to follow Stan Mack’s “guarantee: all dialogue reported verbatim”, this compendium uses light editing for clarity. A more standard compendium of truly famous quotations about uncertainty can be found here. Both of these pages are parts of a series of sites related to uncertainty.

“Surely in your life you have taken an average of numbers before. [...] Do you realize, the first time anyone ever did that to realize maybe there’s some interesting result here was after the invention of algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus. Statistics, [...] it’s just not natural. [...] We don't know how to interpret simple random events because we want to give meaning to them.”

−Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the Joe Rogan Experience #1904, edited by @UniverseLair for a YouTube short “Statistics Isn’t Natural”

(Joe Rogan Experience #1904, originally posted on 27 June 2024) “Statistics Isn’t Natural” posted 2 June 2025

“We don’t have to worry about lizard people. We do have to worry about people who worry about lizard people. They’re not kidding. They’re raising kids and they’re voting.”

−Dan Cummins, “Best of Dan Cummins: Get Outta Here; Devil”

video posted on YouTube 25 May 2025

“Flat earthers, I hope I can always make fun of that. That’s nonsense. So preposterous. To be that anti-science, it’s logic and common sense. It’s crazy that we live in a world now where there are people being convinced by convinced by conspiracy theorists while listening to them on satellite radio that the earth is flat. An almost unfathomable level of irony.”

−Dan Cummins, “Best of Dan Cummins: Get Outta Here; Devil”

video posted on YouTube 25 May 2025

“No one has ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance on their way to the ER while they were having a heart attack. And the price that people are paying not to die is everything. So you have this sector that shouldn’t even be a commercial sector in the first place losing the tiny amount of discipline they once faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification. [...] It’s a mistake to see market discipline, competition, and state discipline, regulation, as separate realms. They are intimately connected because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation. Even if you are the kind of Musk-addled libertarian whose copy of Atlas Shrug no longer opens because the pages are stuck together, who pines for a market in human kidneys and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery if you should so choose, you should still want robust antitrust because otherwise how will the contracts be enforced? The referee has to be more powerful than the players in the game. [.... A] sector with a 100 companies, it’s a rabble. [They’re] at each other’s throats. They can’t agree on anything much less how they’re going to lobby their lawmakers or their enforcers. But a sector of five companies, or four, or three, or two, or one, that’s a cartel. It’s a racket. It’s a conspiracy in waiting.

[...]

“You can just go to a data broker and buy the financial history of pretty much everyone in America, and this is because the US Congress has not passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988 when Ronald Reagan signed the Video Privacy Protection Act which bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you have. The fact that Congress has not addressed a single new technological privacy threat since Die Hard was in its first run in theaters is not a coincidence, and it’s not an oversight. It is expensively purchased in action from a heavily concentrated, wildly profitable privacy invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

[...]

“[C]ompanies are so desperately horny to get you to use apps instead of websites [because] the web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker which is also a privacy blocker. But no one has ever installed an ad blocker for their apps because it's a felony to make and distribute that tool because you have to reverse-engineer the app's DRM to make it. An app is just a website that we have wrapped in the correct DRM to make it a felony to protect your privacy while you use it.”

−Cory Doctorow, on a role at PyCon

22 May 2025

“So social factors are much more important than the mere technical specifications of a technology. Social factors are the difference between a system that warns you if your car is drifting out of the lane and a system that narcs you out to your insurer so they can raise your bill that month by $10 because you drifted out of the lane. I believe that enshittification is not caused by changes to technology but to the policy environment. Changes to the rules of the game undertaken in living memory by named parties who were warned at the time of the likely outcome of their actions, who did it anyway, who are today very rich and respected and face no consequences, no accountability, for their role in ushering in the enshittocene, who venture out into polite society without ever once wondering whether anyone is sizing them up for a pitchfork. In other words, I think we created a primogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society who therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making from our firms and our states leading to a vast enshittening of everything. And while that’s very dismal, there’s some good news hidden in that. Because, if enshittification is not down to a new kind of evil person or the great forces of history bearing down on this moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policy choices. We can make better policy choices. We can emerge from the enshittocene, consign the enshitter to the scrap heap of history, a mere transitional state from the old good internet that we used to have and the new good internet that we could have.”

−Cory Doctorow, in his keynote speech at PyCon, one of the most important lectures that will be delivered this first year after Luigi, on what to do about platform decay, digitalized wage theft, and monopolists who "lacking competitors [...] became too big to fail, they became too big to jail, and that made them too big to care."

22 May 2025

“The Nazis had Riefenstahl, Speer, and von Braun, whose genius we admire with some moral conflict. Where are the geniuses of the modern fascists?”

−an honest question after watching the film Riefenstahl which tells the unpleasant story of the the Nazi-era filmmaker and, later in her life, querulous Karen who could never learn a lesson, but who believes the “German people are predestined [to return to] beauty, morality and virtue”

15 May 2025

“What’s the difference between mass hysteria and a moral panic? Wikipedia [consulted 9 May 2025] defines a moral panic as a “widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community”. Yet, recognising threats from a genuine common enemy or an actual hazard that adversely affects many is not considered mass hysteria or a moral panic. It’s just called risk analysis. Media reporters, pundits, politicians and activists who rouse public concern in such cases are not bad guys but would-be saviours.

“Cohen says a moral panic develops when we “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm” [Cohen, S. 2002. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, Routledge; italics added]. Cohen thinks moral panics are means for social control. What is it with sociologists and their obsession with social control? Foucault argued that sexual conventions and prohibitions are instruments of social control. Some manipulative people are using moral panics to control society? Anyone who’s dealt with the public, or herded cats, knows there are no effective strategies for social control. People are mean or violent or hysterical just because they are mean or violent or hysterical, or maybe because they’re angered or threatened. That's not to say they can't be whipped up into a frenzy. Sure, almost anybody can do that. But control? Ask Robespierre about controlling a mob.”

9 May 2025

Cooperation is perhaps the greatest and most fundamental capacity of humans. Our amazing ability to cooperate and collaborate is what has created our civilization, monumental architecture, cultural arts, broad wealth, and our comfortable lives. This capacity to cooperate is enabled by a complex of adaptations, including tribalism, the knowledge illusion (sensu Sloman and Fernbach), and the peculiarly human form of cooperation that reduces the individual's cost of compelling others to cooperate, by remotely punishing (sensu Bingham and Souza) cheaters who don't cooperate. Without this compulsion, non-cooperating free riders would otherwise win the evolutionary game because they reap the social benefits without any costs to themselves from believing the story or toeing the line to uphold it.

Cooperation, when we can get along, is our superpower, but it has its dark side too.

Moral panics are different from irrational hysterias. But are they?

What happens when delusion festers into hysteria? When tribalism and the knowledge illusion sours in communicated falsehoods? Then those mechanisms

nationalism, and even war is itself an expression of cooperation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_panic_cases

Biological adaptations such as language, religiosity, and story telling in general, but also cheater detection and the knowledge illusion are enhancements that can make cooperation more efficient, but these are adjunct to the peculiarly human solution of remote threat that allows cooperation to be adaptive, even though mutualisms are usually evolutionarily unstable.

caused by a moral

sociologists insist that moral panic and mass hysterias are different,

People in a moral panic are concerned about outcomes that arise specifically from the moral failings within some specific group of individuals and, although the concern may be exaggerated, it may not be irrational.

but I think they may have more features in common than not.

whipped up to a dangerous frenzy

press (except katherine graham)

Cohen blames the press for the moral panic re. mods and rockers

spanish-american war

amy semple macpherson

leave brittany alone

the Red Scare

“When our founders created this country, they took around look around human nature and said, if we’re going to build a democracy out of these people, we have to work hard on moral formation. ‘Moral formation’ is a pompous [phrase] but my favorite definition comes from The Gospel [According to] Ted Lasso, and he says his job as coach of this football team he was coaching is to make these fellows better versions of themselves on and off the field. Schools, unions, civic organizations, they used to think that moral formation was part of their job. It was to reform the character of their kids. There was a school called the Stow School, and the headmaster said ‘Our job is to turn out students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck.’ They wanted to turn out students who were reliable when the chips were down and sometime after the war the whole ethos changed. [We had had] an understanding of human nature that we’re beautiful creatures but we’re also deeply flawed. We went to a [view] of human nature that we’re beautiful people [and] there’s an angel inside...all you have to do is self-actualize yourself. [But] if you think you’re perfect inside, you don’t need to do moral formation, and so all sorts of institutions got out of the moral formation business and into the self-actualization business [...]. And then gradually the schools became just more careerist. They’re not about moral formation; they’re about getting you into Harvard. They’re about getting you a job. And so [...] that whole side of human nature, the whole side of human activity which to me is the most important side, of how can we become slightly better versions of ourselves, we abandoned it. And we’re left with the consequences. And we’re left, frankly, with a country that can elect Donald Trump because [people] look at him and they don’t see anything wrong. And that’s the consequence. [...]

“In the course of American history, universities have gone through different regimes. The first regime was the piety regime: they were Christian institutions, and they were there to instill Christian virtues. Then, in the 19th century, there was the humanistic ideal which is [that] we’re going to still create moral formation but we’re not going to use the gospels, we’re going to use basically the great conversation, the European writers from Aristotle to Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and all the way. Then, in the middle of the 20th century, the [regime] shifted to the research ideal: we’re a bunch of specialists here to advance knowledge. Then it shifted to the career ideal: our job as universities is to get kids high-paying jobs. And then, because those last two ideals were so morally vacuous, the social justice ideal filled the moral vacuum, and [universities] said our job is to be activists and to help people who've been part of marginalized groups. That of course is a noble activity, but it’s not the right activity for the universities, in part because it turned teaching into a form of indoctrination. It turned students into a form of diplomats from their identity groups. What we’re seeing now is that if you affix your university to a political party and say we’re activists, we’re the activist wing of the Democratic party, well, guess what! The Republicans are going to take it out on you, and that’s what's happening, and I’m hoping the universities will realize their new ideal which is to return to the humanistic ideal which is character formation more than political activism [and] then to return to a civic ideal. Our universities, like a lot of institutions, spend a lot more time helping people prosper in their private lives without thinking carefully [about their] role in our civic life. Why do we have so many universities that are blue bubbles in red neighborhoods or in red states? Because they’re not interacting with the civic life as a whole. They’ve withdrawn to the campus walls, and so, to me, universities are great institutions [...] that are really one of the keys to America's greatness, but they’ve lost their mission, and I’m hoping under challenge from Trump [...] that they’ll rediscover their mission and find out [their] job is really to form people and to create citizens and to be civic institutions that bind society across difference and across class difference and that would be a noble mission and a real recovery for American universities.”

−David Brooks, “What happened to American conservatism”, leaving unanswered the begged question of why Republicans hate social justice so much

1 May 2025

Kara Swisher: “The richest people in the world, as you know, Brian, are the victims. I don’t know if you know that.”

Brian Tyler Cohen: “No, I do.”

tête-à-tête 30 March 2025

“One never knows what to do about unrequited email. I’m re-sending the email below in the hopes that, like everyone I know, you are simply very busy. In case you miss as many emails as I do, I’ll repeat a couple more times, or possibly try to telephone you. Please let me know if I should desist.”

24 March 2025

“The drive to steer clear of plastics has become more and more popular in recent years―and for good reason. Pieces of these plastics, known as microplastics and nanoplastics, have been found in our bodies, like in the plaque in our arteries and in our blood. Research is ongoing, but studies show that microplastics can be linked to cancer and reproductive issues. Now, a study published in Chemosphere, which was led by researchers at Toxic-Free Future and the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment at Vrije Universiteit, gives even more reason to reconsider that plastic container or serving spoon. Researchers tested 203 black plastic items that are available in the U.S., ranging from cooking utensils and food storage to personal care products and toys, for flame retardants. Eighty-five percent of the tested products contained flame retardants. ‘It turns out that a lot of them did have elevated levels of flame retardants, and specifically brominated flame retardants, which are linked to a slew of health concerns,’ said Kizzy Charles-Guzman, the CEO of the Center for Environmental Health. Brominated flame retardants have been linked to cancer, hormone disruption, neurotoxicity, reproductive issues and developmental issues, she added. What’s also worrying is that some of the flame retardants found in these products are banned in the U.S. For instance, sushi trays contained the highest levels of flame retardants, and specifically high amounts of decabromodiphenyl ether, which is a banned chemical.

“So, how did these harmful, and often-banned, chemicals make their way into your plastic soup ladle or sushi takeout tray? ‘They could have been made from recycled electronic waste and electrical equipment — so TVs, computers, appliances, things that, by definition, get treated with flame retardants to prevent fire in your home,’ Charles-Guzman explained. And these electronics could have been treated with these flame retardants years before they were banned. For instance, decabromodiphenyl ether was only banned in 2021.

“So, how worried do you need to be? This is clearly not good news, but knowledge is power. Now, you can make informed decisions about the products you keep in your home — and that decision may look different than your neighbor’s. Maybe you can’t afford to replace your cooking utensils right now. Or maybe you’re trying to get pregnant and want them out, stat. The choice is yours, but experts have opinions: ‘The thing to understand about the study is they took these kitchen appliances and everything else and completely dissolved them in all these solvents, and then they ran through a machine, and they were able to figure out how many parts per million or billion were in these kitchen utensils and sushi tray,’ said Jamie Alan, associate professor in the department of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University. There’s no question that these black plastics do contain harmful flame retardants, but Alan noted that when you’re using black plastic kitchen items, you aren’t melting them down and eating them. ‘What we don’t know is how much is released potentially into the food that we’re cooking, and we don’t know if that is released in cooking, how much do we absorb into our bodies, so there’s a significant gap in our understanding,’ said Alan. Charles-Guzman has a differing thought. ‘Flame retardants are terrible for us because they bio-accumulate. That means that even a low level of routine exposure really builds up in your body over time.’ If you do use black plastic cooking utensils while you’re cooking, don’t keep it in contact with the hot item for too long. Instead, use it for a quick stir and get it out of that hot pot.

“What [should be used] instead[?] It’s pretty impossible to rid your home of every single item that’s damaging to your health. If you can’t afford to get rid of your plastic kitchen items right now, that’s OK. It is not a death sentence. But Alan said you should work toward replacing them. ‘If you can gradually replace your spoons or use the black-coated ones less, that’s great,’ said Alan. Charles-Guzman also recommends taking a look at the junk drawer in your mom’s house, or even your own home, to see if you have any non-plastic utensils stored away in there.

“There is one instance when you should throw away those black-coated utensils immediately, and that’s if they melt or become misshapen because of the heat. ‘Certainly, if you melt the spoon, I have done this many times because I’ve forgotten it and left it...throw that away,’ Alan noted. You should also throw away the food, which is not good for consumption either, she said.

“Metal, wood and ceramic are all good options for kitchen utensils, said Charles-Guzman. Alan prefers metal because it’s well-suited for high temperatures and it’s easiest to clean. Wooden utensils can become contaminated with raw meat or bacteria on raw lettuce, she noted, and is harder to sanitize and clean. It’s harder to avoid black takeout containers since you can’t control the restaurant’s choices. If you do order sushi that’s in one of these black trays, Charles-Guzman it’s best to take the sushi out of the container as soon as possible and eat it off of a plate, not out of the container. This new study can sound scary, and is part of mounting evidence against the use of plastics. But there are things you can do to limit your use of black plastics, even if that doesn’t mean getting rid of them right now (although Charles-Guzman does advocate for that).”

−Jillian Wilson, in “There's a scary rumor about black plastic cookware—should you throw yours out?” [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/theres-a-scary-rumor-about-black-plastic-cookware-should-you-throw-yours-out-ano_l_67d35711e4b00eb3dcd1faf8] on Huffington Post, completely ignoring the retraction months earlier in January of the underlying Chemosphere article that precipitated the moral panic against black plastics poisoning the blood of our country

16 March 2025

“How do I balance my workload? Are you kidding? Most days, I am just careening from one crisis to the next.”

15 March 2025

“Well, it’s been widely thought that we have something like a crisis of meaning, especially in the developed world at this point. As we become more secular and diverse, and pluralistic, there’s a sense that culture has atomized. We’re all kinda on our own with our phones and laptops, and our own digital media experiences, which are fragmented in a way that, that no one can really understand. No one knows what everyone else is seeing on some level, certainly when you’re talking about their social media feed, the kind of information that they interact with. Our information landscape has been shattered by our new technology. And we spend so much time thinking about and reacting to the digital lives we and others have created, that there has been this shattering effect of culture. One of the consequences of having our information landscape shattered by social media and related technologies is that it’s become increasingly difficult to not only understand the world and to actually arrive at some kind of fact-based discussion of what’s happening out there, but to converge with other people’s understanding of the world. Everyone has a slightly discordant version of events and conspiracy thinking, and its adjacent forms of misinformation, have become increasingly a problem. I worry at this point that we are quickly rendering ourselves politically ungovernable based on our interaction with this technology. And this is a real problem because I see that the challenge is always how to get strangers to cooperate and solve a wide variety of coordination problems. This is really all that separates us from our primate cousins. It is the basis of civilization. If it’s not all that we care about, it’s the behavior that will allow us to safeguard all that we care about. We have love and rationality really, you know, love and curiosity by which to guide us. And cooperation is the only thing that ensures that that project is open-ended. It’s failures of cooperation, the most extreme variant of which is war, which is the only reason, apart from an asteroid impact, that would bring the career of our species to an end. Even something like an asteroid impact is at this point probably solvable, given enough time, on the basis of human cooperation. We we simply have to decide what our priorities are and converge on a shared set of values and then have a rational conversation about how to achieve those goods. And what makes that hard to do increasingly is a level of political fragmentation and extremism and partisanship born of our engagement with these new technologies, born of the fact that we simply can’t agree about who is lying most of the time. And who is misinformed, who is deranged, who is in possession of only half the story. And it used to be that it was reasonable to hope that if you simply continue the conversation long enough, well disposed, neurologically intact people will converge on the same set of facts. I think our faith in that timeless certainty is fraying, and it’s fraying for good reason. Because we have built a machinery of political fragmentation and disinformation ultimately. We’ve essentially performed a psychological experiment on ourselves in which we enrolled the better part of humanity. Now, literally something like half of humanity. That’s the number of people who are, who are online at this point in the way that we would recognize. This has not been designed to optimize human wellbeing and a convergence on the same set of shared truths. It just hasn’t. It’s been optimized really to aim us all in opposite directions. It’s been optimized to shatter us on the basis of what we find most outraging, most salacious, most literally clickable, and it’s, so we’re all hostage to the business models of just a handful of corporations that haven’t thought this through. And, and even if they had, they’re incentivized to stay on their current path of just fragmenting the human conversation further. Now, there are pockets of culture that resist this. Certainly religious communities tend to resist this more than secular ones. And this is often thought to be a reason why religion is good and worth maintaining. I don’t happen to believe that because I think all of these religions rest on completely unjustifiable and therefore intrinsically divisive ideologies. If what you believe can’t really be proven and you’re gonna believe it despite whatever evidence or arguments show up to contradict it, well then you’re by definition someone who’s not going to converge in your worldview and your set of values with other people. The conversation has stopped. Faith is a conversation stopper in my view. So I think we need reason, we need a truly open-ended conversation with now 8 billion strangers. But we have to recognize the way in which the modern world has made this harder in many ways. I mean, there’s this illusion of connection. You know, Facebook thought it was connecting everyone on earth, but it was also deranging everyone who interacted with it, because social media is a kind of hallucination machine. We find it very difficult to converge on even a fact-based discussion about the most fundamental things about just what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in a given city at this moment. We’re awash in lies and, and misinformation to a degree that was not possible before we got the internet and, in particular, before we got social media.”

−Sam Harris, answering the question “What is causing the polarization we are seeing in our society?” in Breaking the spell of propaganda” [interview], Big Think

7 March 2025

“It’s always the data that’s the problem.”

−Bram Setyadji, postgraduate researcher in the University of Liverpool School of Environmental Sciences

19 February 2025

“Half of the country feels like they’re taking crazy pills. The other half has actually taken them.”

14 February 2025

“And, three, give love away. A message to an old friend, a small gift to your mom, a compliment to a stranger. Because it turns out love doesn’t shrink when you give it. It expands. So, no, you don’t need to feel alone on Valentine’s Day because you’re single. You can feel whole because you stopped waiting for someone to else to make you feel that way.”

−Joey Kidney @joeykidney, offering velvet-voiced advice to the lovelorn and the lonely in “If You’re Single On Valentine’s Day”, noting that love, like information, is one of those strange resources that, when given away, is not diminished but often multiplies

13 February 2025

“Forget vocals, just look how clean and uncluttered these kitchen spaces are.”

−@drraug, commenting on the almost forensic deconstruction in the review video “Is singing dead?” by Wings of Pegasus [Fil Henley] of the faux ‘kitchen acoustics’ jam sessions in YouTube shorts by Anthony Gargiula that might evoke a gasp from Milli Vanilli

12 February 2025

“‘Iceberg dead ahead’ is only one data point.”

−Rory Sutherland, on Nokia’s misjudgment about demand for expensive smartphones (but note the phrase communicated by RMS Titanic lookout Frederick Fleet just before midnight on 14 April 1912 was “Iceberg right ahead!”)

video clip posted 29 January 2025

“We only have to play three rounds of this game to understand entropy completely. [With a marble under one of three cups, shuffles the cups multiple times at high speed.] Now you probably completely lost track of where the marble is. You just went from [a probability distribution with unit mass at one of three locations]—in your head you knew exactly where the marble was—to [a probability distribution with one-third mass at each of the three locations]. That’s what a positive change in entropy looks like. Now in the second round I will go a bit slower. [Places the marble under one cup and slowly shuffles the cups a couple of times.] You probably were able to track the marble. You just went from [a probability distribution with all the mass at one location] to [a probability distribution with all the mass at a different location]. That’s what zero change in entropy looks like. The probability distribution is just as narrow as it was before. Now, in the last round, I will not show you in which cup the marble is, and now [shuffles cups slowly a couple of times], after shuffling, and after not knowing in which cup the marble was to begin with, if you now confidently knew in which cup the marble is, that would be a negative change in entropy [depicted as a distribution with three equal masses changing to a distribution with all mass at a single location], and the point where you broke the Second Law of Thermodynamics. There’s an important nuance here though that has been lingering in my thoughts for a while, and I was only recently able to fully integrate it into my worldview. Entropy is not a property of the fundamental reality, whatever that is. It is instead a measure of our lack of precision to specify reality’s actual state. If I go so fast that you can’t keep track of the marble, in reality nothing changes. The marble is still always just under one cup. It’s just you who lost track of it. The difference is in your head, in your perception of reality. Similarly, if I perceive something as going from a crystalline phase to a liquid phase, microscopically the entropy is not actually changing. Entropy is not a property of this microscopic world. Each atom always has a position and a velocity, just like the marble is always just under one cup. Nothing changes about that. The precision of my description of reality, that is what’s changing. If I describe something as crystalline, that’s a pretty narrow description. It implies very specific distances between the atoms and so on. Only very few of the possible atomic arrangements are in line with that description. Liquid on the other hand essentially translates to ‘now I’ve completely lost track of where the atoms are but they must be in that blob somewhere’. That’s way broader. Entropy measures how broad, how unspecific our descriptions are.”

−Tobias Lemke as MarbleScience, in his YouTube short video “Cracking the Mystery of Entropy with a Game”, perfectly exemplifying the absurdity and self-torture of trying to use a single probability distribution to characterize imprecise knowledge. I assure you, Tobias, that changing from a crystal to a liquid is a physical change in reality, not merely a perception. If state changes of matter were not physically real, steam engines wouldn’t work unless we were paying attention to them. The starting ‘distribution’ in the third round is not three equal masses of one third at each of three locations, but rather three imprecise masses at each location. Each is an interval between zero and one corresponding to your ignorance about whether the marble is there. Same for the ending distribution in the second round. We could call such an interval the ‘dunno’ interval because we don’t know whether it’s a zero or a one. That’s what is needed to represent the ignorance here. The result is called an imprecise probability distribution, which is essentially a set of many possible distributions. If all you’ve got is a probability distribution, then everything looks like a nail, to mix a metaphor. A single probability distribution cannot really characterize ignorance about the marble's location. And entropy is not a full description of uncertainty. Entropy is not a measure of how unspecific our descriptions are, but instead is a characterization of physical reality. It is interpreted as the evenness of the distribution of the actual states of the system’s components over their possible states. Some analysts suggest complementing Shannon entropy with a discrete or continuous version of the Hartley measure of ignorance to create a fuller description that includes both this evenness and our ignorance.

27 January 2025

“i cant believe ChatGPT lost its job to AI”

−terminally onλine engineer @tekbog, commenting on the emergence of DeepSeek-R1

27 January 2025

“My black plastic spatula weighed 40g when I bought it 8 years ago. If it was losing 34,700 ng of chemicals daily, [then] now it weighs -61g. Thanks to this paper, I discovered antigravity!”

−nonithehun, commenting on a video by Vox describing the Liu et al. corrigendum about contaminant levels in recycled plastic kitchenware, but committing a gross mathematical error (perhaps for comedic effect) confusing micrograms for nanograms, as 40 grams − 34700 nanograms per day × 8 years × 365.24 days per year is about 39.9 grams, not −61 grams

23 January 2025

“The authors regret that our original manuscript was printed with an error when calculating the BDE-209 reference dose for a 60 kg adult. We compared the estimated daily intake of 34,700 ng/day of BDE-209 from the use of contaminated utensils to the U.S. BDE-209 reference dose of 7000 ng/kg bw/day. However, we miscalculated the reference dose for a 60 kg adult, initially estimating it at 42,000 ng/day instead of the correct value of 420,000 ng/day. As a result, we revised our statement from ‘the calculated daily intake would approach the U.S. BDE-209 reference dose’ to ‘the calculated daily intake remains an order of magnitude lower than the U.S. BDE-209 reference dose.’ We regret this error and have updated it in our manuscript. This calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper. The authors would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

−Megan Liu, Sicco H. Brandsma, and Erika Schreder, in a correction in Chemosphere 370: 143903 published February 2025 [sic] entitled “Corrigendum to ‘From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling’”. The original, erroneous article had appeared the previous year in Chemosphere (365: 143319) and fanned the recent lowkey panic about black plastic kitchen utensils reported by many such as Jessica Roy, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who advised “Yes, throw out your black spatula”. My high-school physics teacher used to give partial credit to answers that were incorrect in the order of magnitude, but only partial credit, and he never said the “error does not affect the overall conclusion”.

January 2025

“Our god teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.”

−Mariann Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, directly addressing the newly inaugurated American president in her sermon at the interfaith National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral. The entire ending message to Mr. Trump was “Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you, and as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families—some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals—they, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love, and walk humbly with each other and our God, for the good of all people—the good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen.” Her sermon was met with outrage by some, such as Republican congressman Mike Collins from Georgia who wrote on social media “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.”

21 January 2025

“Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld had these famous axioms. He had three of them. There was…there are known knowns, things that you know that you know. There are known unknowns, things that you know that you don't know. And then there are unknown unknowns, things that you don’t know that you don't know. And he said that that last group was the most dangerous, but he never completed the quartet of the possible combinations. The final, and in my opinion the most dangerous one, is there are unknown knowns, things that we know but we choose to unknow for some reason. Well, for some reason, and it may be a perfectly understandable reason, the American people have decided to unknow what they definitely knew about Donald Trump. Well, today the great remembering began.”

−Stephen Colbert, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

20 January 2025

Hank Green: “This one is infuriating.”

Daniel Pompa: “If you have a tattoo, or you know somebody that has a tattoo, listen up. This is really important.”

Green: “What a delightfully engagement-bait way of starting a video. ‘If you have a tattoo, or know someone who does’?!”

Pompa: “This study was just out in May, 2024. 21% increase in the risk of lymphoma.”

Green: “Where is this man? Is this his home? So 21% increase in the risk of lymphoma if you have a tattoo. I mean, I can have some immediate context to add. It's very easy to hear ‘21% increase in risk’ and, instead, your brain interprets that as a 21% risk, like a one in five chance. [But in fact y]ou're starting with a very low risk and then that risk is increasing by 21%. If you start with a risk of 1%, then it's going to be 1.2%. 0.1%, then it's going to be a risk of 0.12%. So one thing we want to look at is what the lifetime risk of lymphoma is. So we're going basically from this 0.02 chance of getting lymphoma in your life to a 0.024 chance…which isn't nothing. That's like important society-wide if this is a real effect. That would be epidemiologically important. [...] I just saw a lot of people talking about this study, and it worried me the extent to which it was being discussed, like, it was just going to cause a lot of anxiety unnecessarily.”

−Hank Green, author and science blogger on hankschannel, reacting to a video by Daniel Pompa, a former chiropractor self-describing as “an expert health coach, author, speaker, trainer, and family man”, and founder of the Pompa Program for patients who suffer from “low energy, brain fog, anxiety, depression, sleep problems, weight gain” but for whom medical “tests show nothing wrong”

15 January 2025

“Holiday health tip: avoid hugs from those filthy people who frequent airports, and don’t even talk about a cruise.”

−voice from a sick bed

30 December 2024

“During the 1990s, an argument arose that civilian casualty ratio had dramatically increased. The argument stated that, as of 1900, civilians constituted 10% of all casualties, but by the 1990s, civilians constituted 90% of all casualties. This figure has been widely doubted, and research has found little to no evidence that 90% of casualties are civilians. The 2005 Human Security Report called it a "myth" and instead suggested that 30–60% of fatalities from conflicts in 2002 were civilians. Likewise, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated in 1999, that between 30–65% of conflict casualties were civilians.” [notes omitted]

−Wikipedia as edited by Vice regent, under the header “Myth of the 90% of casualties are civilians” in the article “Civilian Casualty Ratio” which also notes that 88% of the nearly quarter million deaths in the Gulf War were civilians. There were around 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed by Coalition actions and 1,600 Kuwaitis killed or disppeared by Iraq forces, compared to 20,000−50,000 Iraqi combatant fatalities and 292 Coalition combatant fatalities, including 148 American soldiers, a quarter of which were by friendly fire.

Wikipedia article edited on 30 December 2024

“Physics cares about math, but math doesn’t care about physics.”

−Jade Tan-Holmes, in the beautiful Up and Atom video “The dome paradox: a loophole in Newton’s laws” (script by Jade Tan-Holmes and Joshua Daniel) introducing John D. Norton’s surprising but compelling argument that mathematical Newtonian systems are actually subtly nondeterministic, at least in some special cases, sparked by his consideration of John Earman’s 1986 book A Primer on Determinism. Although the discussion can sometimes feel a bit Zeno-paradoxy, Tan-Holmes explains, “This video is about what the mathematical theories we use to understand reality tell us. Now, I know some of you are thinking, ‘What’s the point of that? If this is purely theoretical and doesn’t apply to the real world, who cares?’ [...] Imagine two gigantic numbers. Numbers so big that that many things couldn’t physically fit into our universe. Now imagine that if we found out that our rules of addition didn’t work for them. When we add them together, we get something weird and unexplainable. It wouldn’t physically affect anything in the real world, but it would mean that our theory of addition doesn’t work all the time, and that’s something worth knowing.” [By the way, Jade, we don’t hate determinism. We just don’t want to allow it a stranglehold over our thinking.]

26 December 2024

“Don’t tell anyone this, and they don’t want me to tell you this, but I just found the top-secret formula to regrow your hair and as little as three to six months. It’s Hims prescription hair loss spray. It contains finasteride and minoxidil, two doctor-trusted ingredients that are going to help you keep and regrow your hair. They don’t want you to know this. But thousands of men have seen results. No drip, and no mess. You can style your hair just like you normally do. They don’t want you to know that this will boost your confidence. Getting started is simple. Assessment and consultation are done 100% online. If prescribed, it’s delivered right to your door.”

−advertisement for hair loss medicine, although it is not entirely clear who they are who don’t want us to know this information as the only people or company mentioned is the telehealth company Hims which itself is proffering the hair loss spray, and it seems unlikely they want to keep the secret, considering they produced an advertisement, hired the actor to portray the double agent willing to share the secret of hair regrowth, and paid to place the ad on TikTok and YouTube

advertisement observed 19 December 2024

“In case you didn’t know, in case you somehow have not been on Earth, there was a shooting in New York. Basically, this dude walked up behind, um, CEO of United Healthcare, and he shot him several times, and then he went off. Right? But apparently he had been camped out there waiting, that dude walks past him, he goes pop pop, pa-pop, pop, pop. And then he jumps on, apparently, a Citi Bike—which is not advisable—and then he heads over to Central Park and disappear[s] into the night slash day, ’cause it was day. It was broad daylight too. That’s also what felt so insane about it. It happened during the day. You got to understand, there’s New York day things and New York night things. We usually keep the shootings after dark.”

−Josh Johnson, in his brilliant commentary The Failure, Fear, And Frenzy around Luigi Mangione, slightly altering the timeline as, technically, it wasn’t “broad daylight”. Thompson was shot at 6:44 am on 4 December, but sunrise in New York that day was 7:04. The fact destroys the particular comedic bit, but it does open a whole slew of possible references to the early bird.

17 December 2024

“Vinny Vidi Vigilante”

−Trae Crowder (Liberal Redneck), referring to Luigi Mangione, named the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin, although the spelling might be the more classical ‘Veni...’ as Mangione did notably come to the New York City scene of the crime by bus and bicycle, allegedly. Crowder went on to note “What this dude did, shooting this man, this is considered by everybody to be violence. But, like, the cold calculating corporate decisions driven entirely by profit that lead directly to the deaths of countless innocent people, that’s not considered violence. No, that’s just considered, what? Policy? Good business? [...] Why doesn’t [bureaucratic violence] count as violence?” Crowder made an obvious allusion to the French Revolution by using the word guillotine, which of course recalls Ursula K. Le Guin’s quip that capitalism’s power may seem inescapable, but so did the divine right of kings. Trae stopped short of a German allusion that used the word Schreibtischtäter.

10 December 2024

Galinda [played by Ariana Grande-Butera]: “Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”

−in the song “No One Mourns the Wicked”, music and lyrics by Stephen Lawrence Schwartz, from the musical film Wicked released 22 November 2024, but hitting differently after Brian Thompson’s assassination last week

9 December 2024

“From all the attention focused on the murder this week of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, you’d think the victim was a cop, or maybe even a 20-year-old blond girl.”

−observing that there were 19,796 homicides in the US in 2023, a rate of 5.763 per 100K people, which means there are, on average, about 54 people murdered each and every day. Famous for its gun violence, the United States homicide rate is actually only a little higher than the global average, although it is about 5 times the homicide rate in the UK, which is itself about 5 times that in Japan.

5 December 2024

“My empathy hasn't reached its deductible yet.”

−Mike C, tweeting to the news that the CEO of America’s largest private health insurance company was murdered by an assassin who lay in wait and brazenly shot him on a public sidewalk. Numerous people composed variants of “My thoughts and prayers are out of network”. In response to the chastising post by Julie Nelson “Just a reminder that Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth who was just shot and killed in NY, was a human being with a family. So many of the comments on his murder are despicable”, Taheerah Barney (guillotines n’ roses) wrote “Under his ‘leadership’ as CEO, UnitedHealthcare deployed an AI model with a 90% error rate—which UHC knew about—to deny lifesaving coverage to millions of people—all of whom have families. ¶ He was a serial killer. And he should be remembered as such.”

The most egregiously misbehaving industries usually have something that redeems them. Banking, policing, polluting factories, airlines, prison systems, oil companies, the military, and home insurance companies, they all provide valuable services to society that at least partially offset the manifest evil they create. You can add the media and universities to the list if you believe they’re evil too. But all these industries do something important for us. The healthcare insurance industry, on the other hand, does not seem to provide anything to society as far as I can tell. Like monarchies, they are simply parasitizing societal functions. I’m not really sure why we tolerate the profit motive in the healthcare insurance industry. Are we thinking they are performing the valuable service of rationing our limited healthcare resources? Is it that they are serving the ruling class by restricting access by the underclasses? Asking for a friend.

4 December 2024

“In this talk I want to investigate possible applications of queer feminist views on (philosophy of) logic with respect to contradictory logics and especially bilateral representations of these. Thereby I want to show that, on the one hand, the formal set-up of contradictory logics makes them well-suited from the perspectives of feminist logic and, on the other hand, that queer feminist theories provide a relevant, and so far undeveloped, conceptual motivation for contradictory logics. Thus, applying contradictory logics to reasoning about queer feminist issues may prove fruitful both as a ‘real-life’ motivation for these rather marginalized logical systems and as a formal basis for a philosophical field that is still characterized by a distrust of formalism.”

−Sara Ayhan, the abstract for her talk “Queer feminist logic & contradictory logics: a symbiotic relationship” delivered on the first day of the Bochum Nonclassical Logic Workshop III held at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany

28 November 2024

“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders.”

−Donald J. Trump, United States President-elect, in a post on Truth Social [https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113546215051155542] apparently seeking to drain the humor from the memic line on the sitcom Arrested Development by Lucille Bluth [played by the inimitable Jessica Walter], “It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?”

25 November 2024

Oreo CEO [played by Brennan Lee Mulligan]: “You are losing your mind. We made the perfect cookie, a hundred years ago. And now there’s no work left to do. I’m telling you, we did it. We won, go home, be with your families, raise your children. Stop making new Oreos! […] Do you see that there is nowhere else to go? And Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. We done did the good cookie that everybody like, and now we get to go home! […] You have a poison in your mind, and the fact that you can’t see it makes me so sad.”
Oreo product developer Kyle: “We work really hard.”
Oreo CEO: “Don’t.”
Product developer: “Uh, Cinnabon Oreos. Uh, Cinnamon Latte Oreos.”
Oreo CEO: “You are a babbling fool, and we have built a temple to madness.”

−“Stop Making New Oreos!”, Dropout.tv, extracted from the full seven-minute sketch originally aired 13 April 2021

edited rant reposted 23 November 2024

“The days of America being stupid are over.”

−Eric Trump, son of the U.S. president-elect, in an interview with the right-leaning UK outlet GB News

21 November 2024

“I saw this museum, this museum that covered everything about JFK except for the fact he had an affair with Marilyn Monroe. Let me tell you, if I’m killed, and they make a museum about me, and at some point in my life I slept with Beyoncé, that better be a full fucking floor!”

−Gianmarco Soresi, commenting on selective historiography, augmented by @BreandanAnraoi, “You could dedicate multiple floors to it, but you know that most people would still be thinking ‘Really? Wasn’t he gay?’”

21 November 2024

“Why does Magne’s mom Turid have such a thick Norwegian accent? Is she doing some kind of Norseface stereotype?”

−shower thoughts about Ragnarok and the role as played and dubbed in English by the accomplished actor and comedian Henriette Steenstrup whose accent in real life seems somewhat less pronounced than on the Netflix drama

17 November 2024

“It’s 1 if I choose different branches for the square root, lol (or just one really weird branch). But I guess there is a commonly accepted definition.”

−@avz1865, contradicting Mr H’s assertion that the correct answer to the problem

√-3 × √-5
√15

in his 14 November post “The answer is not 1!” is (B) −1, which might better be characterized as a conventional answer. If we recognize, for instance, the value of √4 to be the set {−2, 2} = ±2, then we should acknowledge ambiguity about the sign in Mr H's problem as well, which makes the correct answer (C) ±1.

17 November 2024

“So let me get this straight. Our options are Idiocracy or Civil War?”

−failing to realize that Children of Men is also a possibility

13 November 2024

Mika Brzezinski: “So, Claire McCaskill, your thoughts this morning?”
Claire McCaskill: “Well, first we have to acknowledge that Donald Trump knows our country better than we do.”

−discussion on the American talk show Morning Joe (S2023 E223)

6 November 2024

“But I still wouldn't accept that I was wrong.”

−Leni Riefenstahl, recounting her theft as a child of a chocolate bar, for which her father beat her severely and locked her in a toilet for twelve hours

recorded in the documentary film Riefenstahl released in Germany 31 October 2024

“As an American, this is what America is like”

−@prof.reuniclus21 among the comments for the video short “What Europeans think America is really like (part 3)”

video posted 30 October 2024

[no words]

−unannotated food-blogging image from our friend Thom travelling in Greece

25 October 2024

“There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty. If there was only certainty, and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and, therefore, no need for faith.”

−Thomas Cardinal Lawrence [played by Ralph Fiennes] in the film Conclave, screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the novel Conclave by Robert Harris

film released 25 October 2024

Enrique: “What’s a good position to be at?”
Conal: “You don’t want to be at the top or the bottom of any scale.”

−discussing the Bristol Stool Scale, which is also available as a design on t-shirts

25 October 2024

“So maybe I should be adding lemonade to my ice tea?”

−heard after Donald Trump’s commentary on Arnold Palmer at a presidential campaign rally in Palmer’s hometown, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, “Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women, but this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough, and I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it. I had to say it.”

19 October 2024

“He has this idea that he knows things he doesn’t know.”

−Bob Woodward in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (S10, E23) about President Trump’s insistence that the COVID pandemic that infected 104 million Americans and killed over 1.1 million would “just go away”

17 October 2024

“Do we all so slowly lose control? / As emotions overflow / Falling into the unknown”

−Victor Lundberg, “Small Fragile Hearts”, Small Fragile Hearts

released 10 October 2024

“Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally.”

−Andrew Harding, in his BBC piece “UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius” discussing one of the sequelae of Brexit in the widening diplomatic isolation of the UK leading to international unanimity on the question of its last colony in Africa. The British Government has announced it will surrender the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius and pay substantial financial support partly as restitution and partly as a lease to continue operations of a military base there. Beautifully nerdy geographers on Reddit note this could mean that the sun will set on the British Empire for the first time in over four centuries on 21 March 2025.

BBC article published 3 October 2024

“So if I push that random button on my calculator, you’ll see I'm getting random numbers, importantly between zero and one, and that’s like randomness classic, reals from zero to one. And once we’ve got one of these random numbers, we can do something with it so, for example, you could take a random number and you could calculate its square root, or you could take two random numbers and calculate which one’s bigger. And it turns out those two operations are mathematically equivalent. It’s true, they’re the same thing. The first time I heard this fact, I was like, no, that’s not true, but it is.”

−Matt Parker in his Stand Up Maths video “The unexpected probability result confusing everyone” although, actually, the distribution of the square root of a random number distributed as U(0,1) is the same as the distribution of the bigger to two random numbers so distributed if those random numbers are also independent, but not generally. If the numbers may not be independent, the only thing you can say about the distribution of the bigger value is that it dominates the distribution U(0,1) and is dominated by the distribution U(0.5,1). These are the best possible bounds on the distribution function of the bigger value [see the graphs below]. We’ve been trying to impress on engineers that not all random variables are independent of one another. Corrosion and humidy are related. Skin surface area and body mass are related. Redundant components are typically not independent if they are collocated, as the backup generators were at the Fukushima nuclear facility. Risk calculations in the past very commonly but erroneously assumed independence, sometimes with disastrously misleading conclusions.
How we get the bounds on the distribution of max(X1, X2)? It is a straightforward generalisation of the solution to a problem originally posed by Kolmogorov himself: what are the bounds on the sum of variables whose marginals are known? In this case, the bounds are also best-possible, because we can find two particular dependence functions that yield the bounding distributions (perfect dependence and opposite dependence).
Matt might argue that using the word ‘random’ already implies independence, and it does in some contexts such as sampling, but it fails to fully convey to viewers the assumption needed in this case. He did not use the word ‘independent’ anywhere, although the Chat GPT solution does mention the independence assumption. In fact, there are (infinitely many) other dependence relations or copulas between X1 and X2 that also make sqrt(X)~max(X1, X2), although it’s not clear how to describe the family of copulas that do.

26 September 2024

“OK, John von Neumann, a machine cannot make a correct non-empty list of things that machines cannot do.”

−Daniel Litt, slamming contemporary AI specialists and responding to John von Neumann’s 1948 argument “You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.” A week earlier Litt had mentioned “a collection of set theorists who are so excited that they cannot contain themselves”.

17 September 2024

“I do not believe [...] that just because things are bad [...] it’s okay to let them get worse.”

−Ruwa Romman, member of the Georgia House of Representatives (D, HD97), in her Tiktok post “I love y’all 🩵 #uspolitics #tacticalvoting #electoralorganizing”, also aired on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (S11, E28)

2 September 2024

“A new Nature Human Behaviour study [...] has revealed that non-cognitive skills, such as motivation and self-regulation, are as important as intelligence in determining academic success.”

−press agents for Queen Mary, University of London, or perhaps the study’s leads Margherita Malanchini and Andrea Allegrini in an article in Medical Xpress that pretends not to hear the collective “duh” uttered by academics around the globe

26 August 2024

Patron: “I usually try to put the bills in the stripper’s sock.”
Stripper: “Oh, so you’re into feet?”
Patron: “What? No, oh my god! No, I was just trying to be respectful.”
Stripper: “Right. You’re into feet.”

22 August 2024

“This problem took the Internet by storm in 2016 and still makes the rounds nearly every year. Problem number 8, reasonableness. Marty ate four sixths of his pizza, and Luis ate five sixths of his pizza. Marty ate more pizza than Luis. How is that possible? The student who answered this question gave the response that Marty’s pizza is bigger than Luis’s pizza. So there should be no controversy, this is definitely a reasonable answer, but the controversy started because the teacher marked this reply as wrong. The teacher even then wrote ‘That is not possible because 5 over 6 is greater than 4 over 6 so Luis ate more.’ [...] The student’s reply was completely correct, and unfortunately the teacher marked it wrong. [...] We have a mathematical question: how much bigger does Marty’s pizza need to be so that four sixths of Marty’s pizza is at least as large as five sixths of Luis’s pizza? So many times pizza sizes are given by the diameter of the pizza, but we need to know the area of the pizza and this formula is in terms of the radius. So let’s let the radius be equal to half the diameter. Let’s do these variables for both of the pizzas, so the larger pizza will have an area of π times R squared. The radius will be equal to half the diameter, and then, when we square the numerator and denominator and multiply by π, this works out to be π D squared divided by four. The same formula will be true for the smaller circle. We just use the corresponding variable for the smaller circle. So we go ahead and apply this formula, and we end up with a very similar formula. So now let’s compare how much Marty ate to how much Luis ate. So Marty ate four sixths of his pizza, and Luis ate five sixths of his pizza. We need Marty to eat at least as much as Luis, so we have a greater than or equal to here. Now let’s simplify this inequality. The π terms will cancel out, because π is baked into both formulas. Argh, ha ha, arrh!”

−Presh Talwalkar’s MindYourDecisions video “Internet is going wild over this problem” which takes seriously what is most likely an internet hoax flagitiously denigrating teachers

21 August 2024

A pedant would note that, at 5:54, RobWords’ graphic misuses the colon. Colons don’t mark every list, just those that follow a complete clause that could stand alone. See Hull’s helpful guidance. Of course, languages change, and using a colon for every list seems to be more and more common.

17 August 2024

“In America, insurance companies make doctors into crooks.”

−Pat Mercardante

24 July 2024

I get that it’s wrong to body shame people, and I more than most know the debilitation of a bad hair day, but I cannot help but think that his odd haircuts betray the twisted thoughts entertained in his head.

23 July 2024

“I don’t know, we got to win the Midwest, and they like casseroles and bigotry. That’s what they like up there. But maybe not the Democrats, so it could work. I think the man’s incredibly talented; I just think that maybe it needs a little more time until then.”

−Trae Crowder [Liberal Redneck], in “So Joe Biden Dropped Out”, on gay former Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg as a possible VP pick for Kamala Harris

22 July 2024

“Yes, [builders in the past] were more advanced in that we have now forgotten how to look after traditional buildings built with more natural or less processed materials. Knowledge was passed on in a much more vocational way than it is now. Modern construction has a more hierarchical system with highly academically trained people at the top who may not be as well connected with the realities of the materials in practice and who specify designs based on guaranteed systems and economic factors. This is mostly fine in modern construction but [the same] expedient solutions used in traditional buildings are often not advantageous. We have also lost the master craftspeople as training has become more mass produced and based less on practical experience.”

−Luke Dickens, explaining why modern repairs to a stone masonry structure built in 1600 have mostly exacerbated and accelerated damage to the structure

22 July 2024

“I think polling’s dependable within the margins of error.”

−Joe Crowley (D, NY), former chair of the US House Democratic Caucus, on Chris Jansing Reports S2024:E289, responding to Chuck Todd’s suggestion that polls aren’t dependable in “volatile moments” such as when a party seems to turn against its own nominee

19 July 2024

“No matter what the average is, I’m slightly above it.”

−@ibrahimjaved5574, commenting on “I Explored the World of Penis Size Studies to Debunk the 6 Inch Myth” on the YouTube channel Life Science Stories exploring the dubious metrology of anatomical measurement under self selection or volunteer bias

July 2024

“I want to die while I still know who Maya Angelou is.”

−uttered after a long and perhaps pointless visit with a minimally responsive nursing home resident, remembering Georgia Douglas Johnson's exquisite poem “I Want to Die While You Love Me” as read by Maya Angelou

12 July 2024

“I think sometimes the most powerful words in the English language are ‘I don’t know’. And certainly in recent years, on both sides of the Atlantic, if a few more people had been prepared to say them out loud, we’d probably be in a slightly better place.”

−James O’Brien, on his radio show and podcast “I’d rather vote for rice pudding than Donald Trump”, James O’Brien: The Whole Show, LBC (Global)

11 July 2024

Scott in South Florida: “I was so wrong about spending the summer in South Florida. It is 30-35 °C here every single day, with 85% humidity.”

Sebastian in Liverpool: “We have approx. 35 deg F and 85% of the time rain.”

8 July 2024

“So why do the Brits use the expression ‘first past the post’ when they could simply say ‘got the most votes’? I guess if the Liberals have abandoned their calls for a referendum on rejoining the EU and are going to continue the Tories’ austerity policies in any case, it doesn’t much matter what words you use as the new winners will ensure the British continue hitting themselves in the head with a ball-peen hammer.”

5 July 2024

“[The Magna Carta is] shameful, demeaning, illegal and unjust [...and I declare it...] null and void of all validity for ever”
−Pope Innocent III, in a papal bull annulling the draft Magna Carta
issued 24 August 1215

“L’etat, c’est moi.”
−Louis XIV, King of France and Navarre
allegedly spoken before Parlement de Paris 13 April 1655

“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
−Richard Nixon, speaking after his resignation as President of the United States
broadcast 19 May 1977

“We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity.”

−Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court of the United States, delivering the opinion of the Court in Trump v. United States

decided 1 July 2024

“You cannot have economic mobility without physical mobility.”

−Maryland Governor Wes Moore on PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton S2024, E31, discussing a light-rail system to revive Baltimore’s Red Line

29 June 2024

“Do you realize, last year we lost as many people in the United States to traffic accidents as we did in all the years we fought in Vietnam. [...] Our reactions to statistics are very different depending on what caused it. [...] Any laws that treat it are going to have to fold in people’s emotions. Here’s an example, [...] there’s a certain number of dear deaths and human deaths by cars hitting deer in the roads especially in suburban rural places. Okay? Well, what do you do about this? [...] If you have a hundred deaths a year, we can drop that to maybe thirty deaths a year. How? By introducing the natural cat predator to the deer. So it would be like the puma or bobcat, one of these sort of mid-sized cats that hold the deer as their quarry. [...] They ran some models of how this would go, and you could drop the number of human deaths by a factor of three, okay, because still some deer would wander onto the road. But you’ll lose about ten children a year. They’ll just snatch your kid out of the backyard and eat your child. So, look at these numbers, you killed a hundred people in their cars, or the deer killed 30 people [and] the bobcat kills ten. The point is, you could not bring that suggestion forward, right? Because the government would be introducing an animal that killed your children. But no one's looking at the hundred people. [...] We're not equipped to fold our emotions with the data to arrive at a solution that would save the most lives.”

−Neil deGrasse Tyson, talking on the Joe Rogan Experience #1904

posted on YouTube 27 June 2024

“I don’t know much, but I know this is love”

−ur pretty [Jake Hill], “This Is Love”, Happy Anniversary

album released 25 June 2024

“I would have thought that ‘nothing’ would be the correct answer, both biblically and scientifically.”

−near the bottom of a rabbit hole that started with the innocent query “when did dinosaurs live” to which Google offered the answer

252 to 66 million years ago

Dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic Era (252 to 66 million years ago), often called the “Age of Dinosaurs.” The Mesozoic Era is divided into three time periods, the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.

which it collected from a website of the Utah Geological Survey, but it also suggested a non-personalized People also ask question “What does the Bible say about dinosaurs?” which it answered with

God told Noah, “And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female” (Genesis 6:19). A few small dinosaurs would have been on the ark. The larger species of dinosaurs were probably young and smaller on the ark. [Jul 22, 2018]

which it quoted from the article “Pastor Column: Bible tells truth about dinosaurs” by Anthony Conchel that appeared on 22 July 2018 in the News/Top Stories section of The Morrow County Sentinel (AIM Media) serving Ohio (judging by the area codes mentioned in its advertisements). The article goes on to say “The rest of dinosaurs on Earth were destroyed in the flood. Many of the dinosaur fossils were likely formed during and just after the flood.” Morrow County in turn is apparently outside of time and space however, as evidenced by how Wikipedia shows its location within the U.S. state of Ohio [see below].

rabbit hole dug 23 June 2024

Conal: “You can have lots of uncertainty about the colour you paint the bridge.”

Alex: “Doesn’t this mean that decisional uncertainty should be handled differently?”

Scott: “No, I don’t think it’s about indecision. It means that uncertainty about irrelevant things doesn’t matter.”

Alex: “But if it doesn’t matter, why are you talking about it?”

Scott: “Just to make Conal’s point that not all uncertainty matters, and that some uncertainties can be ignored.”

Alex: “You need sensitivity analysis to tell whether it matters.”

Scott: “Sure, maybe, but you need to be very careful. You don’t want to allow a sensitivity analysis to give you permission to leave out factors that might matter but have only a small impact. You can die a UQ death of a thousand cuts if you do that. Instead, you should condense each of those minor factors to a simple interval that is sure to encompass its uncertainty and then use them in a (relatively) cheap but comprehensive analysis. If they really don’t matter in aggregate, that will be revealed in the analysis. But if their uncertainty can build up to a big consequence, then you need to go back and figure out why.”

21 June 2024

“What happens if you do get the worst case?”

−Brian Cumming of Innovate UK, in response to the assertion by John Derry [no? relation to the John Derry of British aviation] that a Monte Carlo simulation involving 10,000 replications never realized the worst case

13 June 2024

“We are your reliable source for totally engaging and transformative content, never ending, aw-inspiring discovery, and binge-worthy entertainment.”

“Disclaimer: The content presented in our videos is intended solely for entertainment purposes. While we may draw upon facts, rumors, and fiction, viewers should not interpret any part of the content as factual or definitive information. Please enjoy responsibly.”

−YouTube channel The Ultimate Discovery, [at left] from its description page, and [at right] in the description of its video “New Shocking Discovery At Pompeii's Unexplored Regio IX Change Everything”. What is “aw-inspiring”, in the sense of aw, bless your heart, is how unreliable the video’s content turns out to be. The video and still imagery, much of it borrowed from cinematic sources, make the content grossly misleading, as does its repeated use of phrases like “sudden” and “without warning”, and the description of pyroclastic flows as travelling at “over 7 kilometers an hour”. We know the timeline from records by the eyewitness Pliny the Younger through the historian Tacitus. After days of seismic tremors, Vesuvius erupted at about noon on 24 August 79 CE. The ashfall started in Pompeii two hours later, which accumulated about 5 inches per hour. After about 5 hours into the eruption, roofs in Pompeii started to collapse under the weight of the deposited pumice, and grapefruit-sized rocks also started to pelt Pompeii. The pumice and rocks fell all day long and into the night, eventually depositing about 9 feet of material on Pompeii. After midnight, there were several pyroclastic surges, but it wasn’t until about 7 am the next day that one of the surges destroyed Pompeii, about 19 hours after the eruption began. The surge sheared off the tops of buildings not already buried, and deposited another 50 feet or more of volcanic debris, entombing the city for many centuries. The long timeline and the paucity of human remains in the city suggests to historians that most of Pompeii’s residents simply walked out of town. There is evidence that perhaps a couple thousand people died in Pompeii itself, many in the initial building collapses, out of the population of 15 or 20 thousand, though some fleeing residents may have died after they left the city. A more accurate—and perhaps actually more terrifying—depiction of what happened over those two days can be found at Zero One’s animation. Although the recent findings in Regio IX are interesting, the argument for changing the date of the eruption seems hard to believe given the contemporaneous attestation.

The video is apparently part of some topic/content sharing club among YouTubers as content of the same name, usually including the grammatical error, has appeared on several channels, including
The Ultimate Discovery, 500K views over 11 June—3 September
Top Discovery, 200K views over 16 June—3 September
Nature Discoveries, 3K views over 23 June—3 September
Viral Fantasy, 4K views over 21 August—3 September
WS - Discovery, 521 views on 3 September
among others. The videos are similar to one another, but seem to vary rather widely in narration, direction, usage of movie snippets, and the accompanying disclaimers. Some seem much better than the posting from The Ultimate Discovery.

video posted 11 June 2024

“As creator of said game: You should support indies if you can, but culture shouldn’t exist only for those who can afford it. ULTRAKILL wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t had easy access to movies, music and games growing up. If you don’t have money, you can support via word of mouth.”

−Public Hakita Is a Good Idea @HakitaDev, in response to a tweet on 31 May by kali @kaliicappy showing an in-progress download of the game ULTRAKILL with a meme-like banner "i ❤️ pirating indie games”

2 June 2024

“To turn a statement into a question, we flip the subject and the verb. The cat is hungry. Statement. Is the cat hungry? Question. A question to which the answer is always ‘yes’.”

−Rob Watts, as YouTuber RobWords, in “The weirdest things about English”

25 May 2024

“‘Dark energy’ is the name we give to our ignorance of what’s causing the accelerating expansion of the universe.”

−Jason Rhodes of NASA JPL, on “Decoding the Universe: Cosmos”, on Nova S51:E8, ~40:30

aired 22 May 2024

“In the same way that more than 80 percent of people surveyed think they are above-average drivers, and fewer than 1 percent consider themselves ‘worse than average’ (each a mathematical impossibility), I like to think I’m smart.”

−Jeff Haden, contributing editor of the magazine Inc., exhibiting illusory superiority in his wry mention of it in his “expert opinion” “Neuroscience says 6 to 10 minutes a day can make you smarter and more focused, and even increase the size of your brain” [just in case it is not clear that neither of these two is a mathematical impossibility, consider some examples. For the first case, suppose there are 9 individuals whose score is 100, and 2 individuals with a score of 0. The average score of these 11 people is 81.818. Nine are above this average, so the percentage of people who are above average is about 82%, which is just 9/11. For the second case, suppose there are 101 individuals whose scores are all 100, but one poor performer who gets a 99. The average of all 102 people is about 99.990. Because only one is below the average, the percentage is 1 over 102, which is about 0.98%, which means that, in this case, less than 1% are worse than average. Even Garrison Keillor’s famous line about Lake Wobegon is not necessarily impossible. While all the children in Lake Wobegon cannot be above the average of the children in Lake Wobegon, they could very easily be above the state-wide average for Minnesota, especially if Lake Wobegon’s population is small. I don’t know if I want a bigger brain exactly, but Jeff’s probably right that I should exercise.]

16 May 2024

“You should get that looked at.”

−Alex Wimbush, in response to Enrique Moralles-Dolz’s comment “I’m a hypochondriac.”

19 April 2024

“Everyone makes it seem like Gen Z [...] are so different. I don’t think we are. I think every generation of people has always been hopelessly human, and now we just see all of it. That’s what’s so scary now, is that there are great leaders that may not get the chance because we already saw them not be like worthy. You know what I mean? We find out a lot of the stuff we find out about people now that we think are great after they died. And now we see all the stuff, we see all the mistakes happen in real time, and it makes people harder to follow. Do you really think you would have followed MLK if he did the Tide pod challenge? Do you think if a young MLK in high school was like, ‘Oh, all right, uh, this Martin here. Uh, we about to see what it do!’ [makes choking sounds] and then, 5 years later, he’s like ‘March with me. They might beat our ass, but come on!’ Nah, no. ¶ I’m scared that’s what’s happening right now. I think that there’s a brilliant, young, young, but smart, smart for her age, wise old soul. There’s an incredible person out there right now. A young, young Angela Davis right now...twerking. And like, feet on the wall too, like nasty stuff. And then 20 years from now when she’s ready to lead a revolution there are going to be people like, ‘This you? [mimes showing a cell phone screen] This you with the booty?’ [She]’s like, ‘Yeah. it was a different time.’ He like, ‘Nah, I’ve seen it now.’”

−Josh Johnson, in his standup at New York Comedy Club

premiered on YouTube 26 March 2024

“While consecutive instances of the letter zed have inexplicably come to denote the sound of snoring, they also show up with surprising frequency in words that were coined in the United States. Perhaps the most famous is jazz, a world-renowned form of music that emerged out the African-American communities of New Orleans from the late nineteenth century. It is widely believed that the word jazz evolved out of jasm which meant vitality or energy and not what you’re thinking about you little.... [...] The Jazz Age that followed spawned several zed heavy words like snazzy, pizzaz, Twizzlers, and future astronaut Buzz Aldrin. [...] More that twenty years before jazz entered the lexicon, American English also gave us razzle dazzle, razmataz, and almost certainty blizzard. They have ten zeds between them. And in the years since, American English has rolled out buzz cut, ZZ Top, and most recently rizz, a slang form of the word charismatic which today is appropriately popular with Gen Z. [...] That said, there’s at least one for which America can’t take credit, and that word is drizzle which emerged in England many centuries ago and hasn’t stopped emerging since.”

−Laurence Brown, 4 Ways American English is Pretty Weird, Lost in the Pond

8 March 2024

“It won’t be long before an explorer discovers one of the passenger’s mobile phones.”

−@istuart0, commenting on the fictitious video “Old Camera Found In The Deep Ocean Revealed Horrifying Titanic Photos” (uploaded 21 December 2023) by The Ultimate Discovery whose 828K subscribers perhaps believe the ahistorical and fraudulent implication that an old camera found deep in the ocean could reveal photos of RMS Titanic which sunk in 1912

8 March 2024

“Can somebody explain to me in crayon-eating terms why I make over three times the federal minimum wage and I cannot afford to live? And I do not want to hear the ‘pull yourself up from your bootstraps, work 90 hours a week.’ That’s not the goal, guys. That’s not. That should not be our standard. [...] What are we doing? Where has the plot gone?”

−TikToker Nic, whose account is now private after over 7 million views, but his rant has been sampled by many, including Belle

2 March 2024

advertisement posted on LinkedIn February 2024

“Inaction is the worst decision.”

−Diego Melgar, in “What’s the one thing you can do to survive a tsunami? Cascadia subduction zone”, PBS Terra, advocating advance planning for, and immediate reaction to, an earthquake/tsunami [you can start your own planning in the United States with NOAA's Coastal Flood Exposure Mapper below]

30 January 2024

“Any religion that expects you to abandon your children—please question your god.”

−Celia LeBaron, adult child of the murderous radical Morman cult leader Ervil LeBaron, recounting her mother moving away without her in the documentary film Daughters of the Cult, episode 4, “The Hit List”

released on Hulu 4 January 2024

“Shaw once wrote, ‘I should be able to spell t-h-o-u-g-h with two letters, s-h-o-u-l-d with three, and e-n-o-u-g-h with four: nine letters instead of eighteen: a saving of a hundred percent of my time and my typist’s time and the printer’s time to say nothing of the saving in paper and wear and tear of machinery.’ The Shavian alphabet achieves that, and would come as enormous relief to Shaw’s typist, I’m sure.”

−Rob Watts [i.e., ·𐑮𐑪𐑚 𐑢𐑪𐑑𐑕] at RobWords in “There’s a better English alphabet”, describing a phonemic alphabet inspired by the Irish man of letters George Bernard Shaw as better than the Latin alphabet for English, but downplaying its obvious drawbacks:
(1) it would Balkanize spellings across English dialects,
(2) it would worsen the torture of dyslexics, and,
(3) per YouTube commenter eclecticexplorer7828, “It would completely destroy spelling bees”,
and moreover completely missing Shaw’s glaring original mathematical error that halving one’s time does not save 100% of it, but only 50% which appeared in his preface to R.A. Wilson’s The Miraculous Birth of Language (1941)

22 December 2023

I don’t think you should have the slightest qualms about using AI to help with your writing. This use is necessarily interactive, and, when used well, it represents a scholarly and intellectual activity as serious and profound as any today. Even if you got help with some turns of phrase, you are still responsible for the content’s correctness, coherence, and completeness. The assistance AI gives helps you get over writer’s block and suggests better phrasing and more vivid verbs. No one blinks anymore at using calculators for numbers, computers for simulations, spelling and grammar checkers for text, reference managers for citations, or Google for facts. In the not-too-distant past, we judged students on spelling, decimal places, and footnotes. AI empowers students, but it also frees professors to look at the meaning and importance of their students’ submissions. Improving the quality of writing helps both you and your reader—and your reviewers—and it improves science literature immeasurably. In five years this won’t even be an issue. You’ll be penalised for not knowing how to wrangle the AI to get the best out of it.

13 December 2023

“If this manuscript is considered for publication, please do not use me as a reviewer anymore.”

−reviewer for an engineering journal (impact factor 2.6) driving home their negative assessment of the submitted manuscript

12 December 2023

LinkedIn: “🕓 Daniel is waiting for your response. Daniel invited you to connect 1 week ago”
Daniel: “I’m finally giving in to LinkedIn after years of pointless contrarianism. I hope all is well with you.”
Scott: “Um, welcome I guess. But that’s funny, I have been thinking that it’s high time for me to withdraw from the internet which has become more and more a cesspool under the devilment of troll farms, scammers, and the pointlessly evil Musk. A long time ago, Donald Knuth retired from emails by saying 15 years was a long as anyone should have to have email.”

8 December 2023

“I feel that’s fair.”

−Malik Elassal, “Woke flat earthers” Stand Up Comedy, on whether we can still have heroes after seeing their clay feet

posted on YouTube on 15 November 2023

“Although a Jewish facility was not targeted, solely due to ironic misidentification, this is yet another reminder to maintain security protocols, remain vigilant of suspicious activity and to report same promptly to the appropriate authorities.”

−Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council, in response to the news that an Indianapolis woman had admitted to crashing her car “on purpose” into what she thought was an “Israel school” but was actually used by the antisemitic Radical Hebrew Israelites, called a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its antisemitic, anti-white, anti-LGBTQ, xenophobic and misogynistic ideology. The woman exemplifies yet again how resolute and shameless bigotry in Indianapolis is enfeebled and self-defeated by profound stupidity that scatters it into diffuse violence and pain but mutes its injustice; see also Kurt Vonnegut’s line in his 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, “Indianapolis, Indiana, [...] is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian.”

6 November 2023

Sabine Hossenfelder: "I wasn’t offered a job because I’m a woman. I’m not guessing that that’s what happened. I know because they told me. I told him that I was under no obligation to work for him, and didn’t care what the rest of the students were thinking. He got angry. I laughed at him. He started shouting that I was fired and physically shoved me out of his office. This institute wasn’t about knowledge discovery. It was about money making. And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn’t just this particular institute and this particular professor. It was generally the case. This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money. And partly, they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants to get paid themselves. The result is a paper production machine in which students and post docs are burned through to bring in money for the institution. It needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery. And since most grants are three years or five years at most, it also needs to be something that can be wrapped up quickly."

Professor Dave [David James (Dave) Farina]: "So, it’s absolutely fine for Sabine to tell her story, point out sexism she experienced, complain about someone who had authority over her, and even lament the degree to which capitalism influences scientific research. But it is a very exaggerated and one-sided description of academia. Yes, researchers need grant money, but this is acquired by pursuing research that is innovative, probes unanswered questions, and potentially has some kind of industrial application. Good research tends to get funded. The description Sabine offers allows those with anti-science leanings to imagine a soul-crushing factory devoid of imagination that exclusively manufactures technology for resource extraction and military campaigns. It’s just not real. My only personal experience with research is in synthetic organic chemistry, but every single other graduate student I knew was just doing chemistry. Coming up with new reactions, trying to synthesize specific molecules. There was nobody there from the pentagon asking about

Now who is showing he doesn't know what's real?

Have you never seen Real Science? Val Kilmer's greatest work.

All research work today is dual use.

Before the 1980s, the grant process in the United States was really different. Scientists got grants based on their reputation and their productivity.

After about 1980, people who'd been funded their entire careers had their grant applications summarily rejected

Hossenfelder's use of the phrase "generally the case" may be the part that Professor Dave finds problematic. It may be worth noting that it is also ambiguous. The word 'generally' to mathematicians means something is true every time. The common meaning outside of mathematics is closer to usually, or more often than not, or even simply widely [Oxford].

As an older professor who's been successfully research-active on both sides of the Atlantic and held leadership positions in academic institutions, I don't think anything Sabine said is untrue. I have long lamented the intrusion of business thinking into academia. I think this misguided and relentless business-envy will be the heat death of academia. Colleges and universities should not try to be businesses in the usual sense. They are not good at it. And they'll screw up academia, which they are good at.

It's the same with statesmanship. You don't want a business person running the government, someone focused on profit and efficiency. You want a statesman, (cf. stateswoman) who knows about society and compassion and civility.

While we're in the mode of reviewing science communicators, there is perhaps room for some light to be shown on Professor Dave himself. His snarky and openly snide ridicule of lesser minds is, well, problematic. I'd much prefer a patient and helpful tone. Maybe a tone you'd use with your mother in explaining those sometimes subtle parts of a scientific argument. Professor Dave's plainly bullying tone is better be suited for use on your little brother.

I welcome his point of view on the state of academia, and I appreciate his criticism of Hossenfelder and agree it is important to discuss the topic. Professor Dave was careful to explain that Sabine Hossenfelder is, in fact, a good science communicator and one gets the idea that he thinks her videos are as about as good as they can be, although he is not exactly effusive in praise. Likewise, I believe I also offer my critique of him in good faith. I truly am a big fan of Professor Dave. His attention, his seriousness and breadth of knowledge, and his rhetorical force make him a most welcome addition to the debates.

His explication of abiogenesis and the misunderstandings by <<>> is particularly brilliant.

But, as my best friends can be my harshest critics, so too would I suggest some notes for him.

Sloman and Fernbach argue that science education efforts don’t work, and they often backfire because simply telling people a whole bunch of stuff new to them--effectively telling them they’re stupid--isn’t an effective way to teach, but it is a good way to make them mad. Maybe you cannot teach science to adults, but you can piss people off. So what is Professor Dave doing, civilization-building-wise? I'm mean, I totally agree you on the substance, Dave, and I think it's /fun/ and perhaps cathartic to watch your snark and fun in a mean-girls way to participate vicariously in the street fight that is your criticism of the nincompoops you're dealing with. But I worry. Do you think you're convincing any of the people you criticize? Do you think you're winning the hearts and minds of those who might be mistrustful of dogma or suspicious of we're-the-experts presentation styles? Of course it's ridiculously hyperbolic to compare Professor Dave's style to that of Torquemada, but let's just note that it's lacking something in /generosity/. We don't have to make people feel small or feel threatened. Even people who are stupid and potentially dangerous. Maybe we should take special care with those folks. I was taught that questioning authority is good. Maybe I drank the Kool-Aid, but I still think so. I think it helps to celebrate questions, even stupid questions. Perhaps especially stupid questions. Answering them calmly and respectfully could maybe bring someone, well, if not to the table, at least into the tent.

And doubt is itself a critical element of scientific progress. A new theory is accepted generally when it explains better or explains all the stuff the old theory explained plus some new stuff. Generally, not always. Kepler's theory, when first proposed, fit the available observations less well than Ptolemy's which had epicycles that increased its flexibility. Sometimes the new, better theory is clumsier in some respects. Lakatos suggests that it's the trail blazers and iconoclasts who are the paradigm busters in science that unleashes it to progress. I shudder to think what you'd have said about Alfred Wegener, or János Boylai. Even Mendeleev had critics. Einstein's work, famously, was riddled with mistakes, both big and small. Yet it's become clear he was right about so much that we might be forgiven for forgetting he got anything wrong.

Criticism in science, as in all domains of serious discussion, should be harsh. And exactly, and unrelenting.

But it doesn't need to be snide.

Even if you think the purveyors are being disingenuous or that they're hucksters or frauds,

their viewers are likely not.

It just seems to me that a educator hoping to be effective would prefer to take the risk of being considered patronizing over the risk of being considered a jerk.

Professor Dave's video uploaded 20 October 2023

Occasionally someone will cancel an appointment with me. Those suddenly freed up periods have become the only time during a week that I can get anything done. Two different cancellations today, so I am rocking.

26 October 2023

Shortly after dark, as we were walking down the hill to get a cocktail, we passed large but tightly packed group of young people on the other side of Rodney Street, looking like they had been suddenly assembled by a fire alarm evacuating a building or a recently departed bus. In the dim light of the street, they all wore dark clothes and seemed dressed for an early winter, with big coats and some in scarves and hoods and those balaclava things.

As I walked past, my jaunty thought was what a boring flash mob. Amused with myself, I tried to tell my little joke to a fellow standing on my side of the street looking at the crowd, but he didn't hear me. I thought I might take a photograph of the crowd and post it on this site with my little joke, like I had with the sea gulls during lockdown. Yes, it was also a vanishingly small joke, but sometimes such things help one remember one's life in little, light moments.

I fumbled for my phone to take the picture, but as I struggled to set the zoom and get the focus, the crowd started to quickly disperse. I was only able to take the two shots [below] before someone in the crowd fired a bottle rocket in my direction. By then, the clump of people had spread out and the joke wouldn't even work anymore, so I gave up and started to continue my trip to get that cocktail. But then someone fired another bottle rocket, or tossed firecracker, seeming at me. And then they fired a much bigger Roman candle that made serious and scary boom overhead, and then some more bottle rockets whizzing by my head or hitting me in the back. I'm not sure what they were; I don't speak firework. They're illegal in New York.

But I do know when I'm being assaulted. So I turned around and began to cross the street to tell whoever was firing at me to cut it out. It was hard to cross the street however. There were some cars, and also this kid or kids were firing rockets at my face. I guess it's hard to aim these things. One went to my left, another over my head to my right, and one hit me in the hip. I was using a windbreaker I'd been carrying to shield my eyes from rockets, and I didn't really see who I was approaching. I am not a brave person; I am really a coward. I'm not a foolhardy person either. Usually I'm very calculating and reserved about risks. I went across the street to get this kid to stop shooting at me. Maybe you'll think I made the wrong calculation, and maybe that Roman candle with the really big boom was adrenalizing, but it seemed to me that I had to talk to them because just walking away was clearly not working.

Well, it turned out that talking to them was not a response that they wanted either. Before I even reached the curb, three or four youths set on me, punching and kicking and somehow bouncing off me (which I think they were doing to knock me down). One kid made one of those flying kicks like you see in the movies where he jumped in the air and kicked me with both feet. He must have practiced that move. I used to be a gymnast, but I've never been able to do that. One of the kicks broke a pen in my pocket.

Now my memory from my youth about punching and kicking is that they hurt, but in this instance the assaults didn't hurt me. I conclude from this that perpetrators must have just been merely kids, with insufficient mass to generate kinetic energy to do much real damage, although I feel quite sure the heads inside the balaclavas were going for that effect. The assault dissipated only when a young woman, tall, blond and wearing all white, seemingly straight out of central casting, bravely came and stood near me. Her advice, “Get in your car and go,” was excellent, but I was on foot.

My immediate emotion was mostly embarrassment. It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would object to my taking a photograph of a crowd. I mean, I know that the Amish don’t like you to take their picture, and of course I never would, even though I don’t subscribe to the notion that graven images are something to worry about. I am also aware that police often hate it when you record them. Apologist rationalizing aside, I think all honest people know why they hate it. I can only presume that my balaclava-clad friends didn’t want to be photographed for the same reason cops don’t want to be photographed: they’re up to no good.

In Britain, police are mostly ineffective in reining in this “anti-social behaviour”. In New York, the word “wilding” was used to describe the activities of such misbehaving youths, at least until the moral panic over it led to the injustice on the Exonerated Five who served many years in prison after coerced confessions led to their being wrongly convicted of rape of a jogger in Central Park (and to whom Donald Trump refused to apologize, even after their exoneration, for taking out a full-page advertisements in four New York City newspapers calling for the death penalty for killers in the wake the crime).

I would hardly be the first to notice the parallels with humans in the observations of aberrant behavior by orphaned male elephants in South Africa who killed (and sometimes attempted to mount) dozens of rhinoceroses. The bad behavior resulting from testosterone poisoning of youth was corrected in the case of the South African elephants by the introduction of a handful of adult males into the herd. Apparently, the social impacts of fatherlessness can be cured if there are some good guys around. I guess the message today is try to be a good guy.

24 October 2023

“As probability theory proved to be too limited, two alternative models were introduced in the late 1970’s:
Dempster-Shapfer (DS) theory = belief functions + Dempster's rule (based on random sets, generalizes Bayesian probability theory)
Possibility theory = possibility measures + triangular norms (based on fuzzy sets)”

−Thierry Denoeux, in his talk [in French] “Random fuzzy sets and belief functions: applications to machine learning”

11 October 2023

“Whenever humans are talking, there’s evil afoot. Of course they fear humans. Only the profoundly stupid aren’t afraid of humans. The videos would be funny if they weren’t so incriminating. Like a flinch reaction in children when their father reaches for the potatoes betrays the kind of man he really is to everyone at the dinner table.”

−discussing the videos captured at Greater Kruger National Park (South Africa) showing animals reacting to sound recordings, of either (L) lions snarling and growling, or (H) human men and women speaking calmly, in which almost all species were much more scared by human talking than by lion sounds, documented in “Fear of the human ‘super predator’ pervades the South African savanna” by Liana Y. Zanette, Nikita R. Frizzelle, Michael Clinchy, Michael J.S. Peel, Carson B. Keller, Sarah E. Huebner, Craig Packer, which appeared in Current Biology

online 5 October 2023

“The professor said ‘To do well in this class you have to attend all the lectures, do the homework, and do what I say’. I almost laughed.”

−University of Liverpool student in the first week of the semester

29 September 2023

“[The Northumberland National Park Authority] can confirm that sadly, the famous tree at Sycamore Gap has come down overnight. We have reason to believe it has been deliberately felled.”

−spokesperson for the Authority, not rushing to any conclusions, as reported in The Guardian, which also reproduced four images of the scene, posted on X [Twitter] by Twice Brewed Brew Co., documenting the environmental and historical vandalism of the iconic tree popular in photography and films and once named English “tree of the year” that grew at Hadrian's Wall in the north of England

28 September 2023

It’s a blog for business types, filled with single-sentence paragraphs and misspellings. It also approvingly quotes Elon Musk, so it is clearly the work of an idiot.

17 September 2023

When I pushed my Weetabix under the milk and bubbles came up I realised that the only difference between Weetabix and reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete is the steel bars.

8 September 2023

“I’ve known many people whose entire personal ethos consists of screaming the phrase ‘You’re Not the Boss of Me!!’ over and over. These people believe that everyone is trying to control their lives, and are unwilling to defer or sacrifice the tiniest smidge of instant gratification. MOST of these people reached their 5th or 6th birthday and grew out of this phase! But many others, as I write this, are living their lives around the principle that ‘I will not comply.’ I hate these people.”

−Adam M. Finkel, discussing N95 masks and their properties, and the professional discourse about them among some especially contrarian and argumentative voices, on the Mailing List for Risk Professionals <riskanal@lyris.pnnl.gov>

8 September 2023

The bookseller thriftbooks.com reports that the book Good Vibrations: The Vibrator Owner’s Manual of Relaxation, Therapy, and Sensual Pleasure by George Mazzei is temporarily unavailable but thinks you might also enjoy Elie Wiesel’s Night. I agree that sometimes frustration after dark can become really depressing, but my only real question at this point is whether Good Vibrations will become available again soon.

observed 28 August 2023

Contrast the technological progress in transportation with that in communication. In my youth, we were promised universal video calling, and, remarkably, this is one of the only generational promises our civilization has kept. Well, that and a black man in the White House. They haven’t yet given us our flying cars or jetpacks, or cures for cancer or the common cold, or world peace, but we got the video calls. In fact, the revolution transpired over the course of just a few decades, at the beginning of which we all lived with monopolistically expensive, interrupt-only telephone service essentially unchanged in character or quality for nearly a century, fettered with miserably metered long-distance calling and literally tethered by a physical cord connecting the caller to a fixed point in the office or kitchen. Our bright present of communications witnesses cheap, often unmetered world-wide service that is optionally asynchronous, with live or recorded voice, text, image, and video transmissions, operated by many competitive and technologically innovative carriers (which, by the way, wasn't the result of deregulation, but of classical anti-trust regulation via the break up of the Bell System). We have live streaming, automatic health status relays, emergency service location detection, and a host of significant and trivial features and functions that enrich communications. In broadcasting, flat screens with incredibly high definition display on-demand films and shows, both brand new and archived classics. The internet itself is that two-way television that George Orwell foretold. The next big technological innovation is perhaps holograms or maybe smell-o-vision which, to be honest, I am not looking forward to.

20 August 2023

There’s an old cartoon about the Republican Party’s fabled (but presumably fictional) speech simplification machine that takes a reasoned but perhaps rambling speech and reduces it by simplifying the grammar and vocabulary to high-school-level English, removing nuance and unnecessary detail, and shortening it for consumption by mass audiences. The cartoon depicts the politician inspecting the machine’s output that reads “Commies and queers bad!”. The grimacing politician snarls, “Still too long. Put it through again.” Likewise, your edits to the conclusion section have definitely reduced its indicative nature and improved its informativeness, but I think the text could be put through the process again. What take-home messages should the readers have?

7 August 2023

Jack Smith has announced that Donald Trump will be tried as an adult. [This joke makes light of the unjust punitive practice of trial of juveniles as adults widely and capriciously used in the United States since the Reagan era.]

7 August 2023

The way to tell them apart is that Jordan Peterson tilts his head. Jack Smith rotates but does not tilt his head.

7 August 2023

Alex: “Inferring the value of a model parameter or the output of a stochastic system is a common aspect of many scientific endeavours. In a frequentist view, this can be accomplished through the use of intervals which have a particular property, they are guaranteed to bound the true value with a given probability.” [source]

Peter: “The part that says a confidence interval is guaranteed to bound the true value with a given probability is clearly wrong, isn’t it?”

Scott: “The word ‘they’ makes it correct. We’re not talking about one parameter, but the ensemble of parameters, which do fall in their respective confidence intervals with a specified confidence. Confidence is a probability; it’s just a probability from a different space.”

Alex: “I guess maybe I’m thinking about confidence intervals in a different way to Peter. I imagine C(alpha;k, n)=[invbeta((1-alpha)/2;k, n-k+1), invbeta((1-(1-alpha)/2;k+1, n-k)] as a confidence interval, not [0.3, 0.4]. This can clearly bound the true parameter with a minimum probability because it is conditional on unobserved random data. The resulting interval might be [0.3, 0.4], but it should be obvious that this cannot bound the true parameter [in any particular case] with some probability since it is deterministic, the data had to have been observed in order to produce the interval, so it is no longer random.”

Scott: “You made me laugh when you said ‘it should be obvious’.”

(discussing a paper published online 10 March 2022) 7 August 2023

“Zoom, one of the main enablers and beneficiaries of remote work, just asked its employees to head back to the office. The company announced that employees living within 50 miles of a Zoom office must work there at least two days a week.”

−Ashley Stewart, "The remote-work revolution is officially dead: Zoom just told employees to return to the office", Business Insider

4 August 2023

Scott: “Do you remember the scene in Pitch Perfect where Fat Amy finishes the audition and says to herself ‘Crushed it’?”
Enrique: “What? Do you mean the film Pitch Black with Vin Diesel?”

4 August 2023

“Thank you for your email; I am sure its contents are edifying and instructive in equal measure.
“Now here’s the thing. I’m not here. Well, not really. Sort of here, but not. Here-ish, if you like.
“As you read this, I am supposedly on leave, much to my family’s delight.
“I am actually sitting in front of my laptop, desperately trying to carve out an inspirational research grant application, much to my family’s despair and disdain. Even the dogs have stopped talking to me. The words and phrases ‘transformative’, ‘high risk’, ‘pioneering’ and ‘adventurous’ are forever being typed and deleted on my tired keyboard.
“But let’s be honest, you’re not interested in my forlorn attempts to craft a call to arms for innovative postgraduate research from my limited vocabulary; you’re interested in your email and when I’m going to answer it, aren’t you?
“Well, to distract myself from the torture of editing 12,000 words into 12 pages, I will occasionally read my emails between now and the 7th August. My response to your email will fall into one of three categories: (a) immediate reply, (b) file and reply later, or (c) delete.
“How will you know into which pile your email will fall? Well, have you written with good news? If so, you definitely sit in (a). If your email involves some drab form of administration that I don’t want to do but know I have to do at some point, then your email is a (b). And if your email is giving me a hard time, well, I’ll let you work that one out for yourself.
“Seriously though (now there’s a first), I am on leave but looking at emails occasionally. Please do expect a response, just not immediately, and maybe not before 7th August.”

−John Bridgeman, in an almost perfect manifestation of displacement behaviour...almost only because it was an automated reply that did not necessarily interrupt the grant writing upon receipt of each email

autogenerated 1 August 2023

“It’s cheating. It’s not doing what you want; it’s doing what you need.”

July 2023

Gourmet: “They say monkfish is the poor man’s lobster.”
Gourmand: “I say lobster is the stupid man’s monkfish.”

28 July 2023

“There’s always unknown unknowns in this business. We know it. In the end, technically, it’ll all fall on my shoulders. You just make the best decisions you can with the data that you have available, but you recognize that there’s always a little bit of risk to some of these decisions.”

−Mike Menzel, mission systems engineer for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, on the Netflix film Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine

film released 24 July 2023

“A function of a prediction interval and a confidence interval would return some franken-interval that is guaranteed to bound the stochastic function of an unknown parameter conditional on the next deviate…maybe. I should probably check that.”

−Alexander Wimbush

21 July 2023

“You all thought that I’d lost the ability to understand what I’d started. [...] Now it’s your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement. And, one day, when they’ve punished you enough, they'll serve you salmon and potato salad, make speeches, give you a medal, pat you on the back, tell you all is forgiven. Just remember, it won’t be for you. It will be for them.”

−fictionalized Albert Einstein [played by Tom Conti] in the film Oppenheimer, screenplay by Christopher Nolan

film released in the US and UK 21 July 2023

“I don’t think that the people who harassed me won. I’m just reinventing myself in my career.”

−Chris Gloninger, after explicit death threats and a year of obsessive emails for his on-air coverage of the climate crisis in his weather forecasts, or what his critic called pushing a “liberal conspiracy theory on the weather”, precipitated [no pun] his move from chief meteorologist at a television station in Iowa to chief scientist at Woods Hole Group, a consulting firm satellite of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, quoted by Oliver Milman in “‘Your heart races a bit’: US weather man threatened with death for mentioning climate crisis”

article published in The Guardian 16 July 2023

“There are different ways of not knowing, and it makes a difference which way you don’t know. We often have some precise data, though usually not much, but we also have imprecise data...whether it’s imprecise because of simple measurement error or censoring or the value’s missing or been lost. Then there is a huge, bottomless ocean of things we could have measured but never tried to.”
−Nick Gray, channeling his inner Donald Rumsfeld

11 July 2023

Laurie: “[In the plot of log catch per unit effort against year, y]ou should omit the outliers. You have so many data, you have a lot of outliers even though as a proportion they are few. You should get rid of them because they draw the eye away from the main trend of the data.”
Matt: “But, for most years, almost all of the data are zeros. The points you see are by-catch.”
Scott: “So the outliers are the data?”

30 June 2023

“Seeing some of this stuff can be discouraging. I just want to make note of the fact that these people are vastly outnumbered, by a factor of two to one, at least. MAGA only makes up 20 to 30 percent of the country.”

−Owen Morgan, perhaps forgetting his high-school history that only about a third of colonial Americans supported the Revolutionary War, with a third indifferent, and the other third composed of Tories supporting the King, in his Telltale Fireside Chat video “Right Wing Tiktokker Rants On The Toilet (LOL)” about the military-language tweet by member of Congress Clay Higgins [Republican, Louisiana’s 3rd district] reading “President Trump said he has ‘been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3PM.’ This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.” in which “rPOTUS” is a reference to Trump, and “1/50K know your bridges” is purported to refer to readiness for a county-level insurrection [more recent historical research argues the proportions were 40–45% Patriots and only 15–20% Loyalists, which might be more comforting to Owen and his viewers, but the outnumbering should in no case be described as ‘vast’ or considered insurmountable]

28 June 2023

“Do you have a citation for this? I can’t find the source at https://academic.oup.com/biomet/pages/General_Instructions or https://static.primary.prod.gcms.the-infra.com/static/site/biomet/document/Biometrika2021.zip?node=4e303f8c060f6b243841&version=481808:a25c95305d3356cf3e54.”

−quotation collection webmaster worried that the attribution of “The overuse of mathematical notation forces the reader to spend time parsing them rather than focusing on the underlying ideas” to the style guide for the journal Biometrika sounds too convenient to be true

23 June 2023

“Have things gotten substantially worse, or is this just another perception thing? When I was a kid, I don’t remember knowing that Supreme Court justices had to be openly corrupt, bald-faced liars and unrepentant sexual predators. Members of Congress, sure, but not Supreme Court justices.”

23 June 2023

“According to APA style:
• Don’t use et al. unless there are more than two authors.
• For references with three to five authors, list all the authors in the first citation of the work, but abbreviate using the name of the first author and et al. for any additional citations of the same work.
• For references with more than six authors, cite using the first author’s name plus et al. for all of the in-text citations.”

−Shundalyn Allen, in her Grammarly blog post “What does ‘et al.’ mean?” which has left me in a small crisis about handling a reference with exactly six authors

20 June 2023

“In the absence of university-wide guidance on how to handle cases involving the use of artificial intelligence in composing submissions we chose to treat them as Category C [which demands a grade of zero for the submission].”

−Volfango Bertola, academic integrity committee chair, who surely did not use spelling or grammar checking tools to compose his report

15 June 2023

“The scandalously poor performance of students on their final exams is not at all surprising. But the cluelessness of the module review board process is really surprising, and deeply disappointing. A bit of amusement thrown into the mix is that the bimodal distributions of student [grades] are variously described by participants as ‘binomial’ and also as ‘bipolar’.”

15 June 2023

“Digital twin is a big buzzword in engineering. Digital twins are supposed to solve the trust problem with complex models of engineered systems, which is the main roadblock in the way toward their universal adoption. However, in the absence of extensive testing results and empirical evidence that we can never collect about these systems, the only thing that explains or even addresses how much we should trust the outputs from these models is a careful uncertainty analysis. In the absence of a clear definition of a digital twin one possibility can be that a digital twin is just a comprehensive uncertainty assessment of a model of an engineered system.”

−Peter Hristov

15 June 2023

“Artificial intelligence is a pretty broad term that can refer to a really wide category of technological developments, from self-driving cars stealing our data, to the Amazon Alexa, stealing our data, all the way to the simple search engine algorithms stealing our data.”

−Ella Yurman, in “What are the real dangers of A.I.?” episode of Some More News

14 June 2023

Aditya: “The Muppet Movie was chosen as a control because it is a film where no character can be argued as suffering from depression.”
Niamh: “Fozzie Bear is depressive.”

5 June 2023

“Algebra, in using letters to represent unknown numbers in formulas and equations, is itself essentially a kind of uncertainty analysis.”

4 June 2023

“Depends on how you say it.”

[filled] “doubt-ridden” 52K “ridden with doubt” 11K
[torn] “doubt-riven” 0.5K “riven with doubt” 5K
[punctured] “doubt-riddled” 5K “riddled with doubt” 64K

−Google, searching twenty or so billion pages of the indexable web for matches

19 May 2023

“So is it ‘ridden with doubt’ or ‘riven with doubt’? Or should it be ‘riddled with doubt’? Asking for a friend.”

18 May 2023

“I think I did do a voiceover for ‘The next station is...sorry, Liverpool.’”

−Eurovision host, Graham Norton, beloved by Sousers, on taking over announcements on Merseyrail trains during Eurovision week, as reported in the local newspaper Liverpool Echo and on ITV’s programme This Morning

12 May 2023

“A lot of people seem to have deep and inexplicably virulent anger about ‘wokeness’. Do they not get that wokeness is this generation’s way of distancing themselves from their parents? Every generation, maybe every person, finds some way to distinguish him- or herself—or themselves—from the mire of what came before. It’s usually something good or something they can be proud of, but which their elders find troublesome and terrifying. What the older generation today calls wokeness, the young understand simply as empathy and acknowledgement of the feelings of others, especially those who had been abused or disenfranchised or forgotten. But perhaps the secret ingredient that really clinches a trend’s value in the minds of the young is when the oldsters revile the movement, predict it will somehow destroy our world, and act a little crazy about it.

“In the fifties and sixties, it was rock and roll music that incensed and terrified parents and authorities. In the sixties and seventies it was Boomers arguing with their parents that maybe not killing Vietnamese villagers would be a good idea. Indulgence and ambition of the eighties and the nineties was something of an antidote to the stagflation and settling [accepting one’s lot] of the old. Of course, there is never a shortage of outrage and amorphous fear among old folks from any generation, on any number of topics. And there are lots of these ‘radical’ movements by the young and moral panics they induce among the old. Sometimes several are happening at once, overlapping and recurring.

“Wokeness is today’s rock and roll. Happily, rock and roll is here to stay, and I hope that empathy and awareness of others’ feelings will never die. Like every generational trend, there will be excesses, but these are only blips in a largely self-correcting process that old people can relax about and leave to the young to figure out.

“In this case, the generational contrast works so well because wokeness is a call to charitableness, which looks pretty good against the stark selfishness of the older generation who had always fancied themselves as the generous ones. It’s a beautiful plot twist that a call to empathy and awareness, charity and inclusion, can be used as a stick to berate, shame and other their own parents.”

10 May 2023

“As a Swedish person I have to say, thank you for pointing out Sweden’s bullshitery.”

−@aerlandsson2792, commenting on “The [Queer] Politics of Eurovision” by Ada Černoša and Verity Ritchie

5 May 2023

Jake Tapper: “It’s good to see you. Is it okay if I call you ‘Dwayne’? I’m told that you prefer ‘Dwayne’ or ‘DJ’.”
Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson: “Whatever comes out. I told your producers ‘Daddy’ works too.”
Jake Tapper: “That would be very, very weird. That would be very strange.”

before 29 April 2023

“But I do not think that online echo chambers of conspiracy theorists are this inevitable symptom of life online. The internet is about 30 years old, and things are changing quickly, and I think it’ll be very important that we develop new solutions for these new problems, on a fundamental level. What if by addressing belief before belonging, we’re starting the conversation at the wrong place? Instead of sitting in collective bewilderment and frustration about how these people could believe these things, these crazies, what if we first looked under the hood and thought about what made them vulnerable to this information in the first place? What might they be getting out of this that they’re not getting in their everyday lives? How much does it have to do with a different truth, and how much does it have to do with the community that that truth brings? We need to think about people’s circumstances and reference points, to see them as fellow human beings who want to believe in something and want to belong, just like all of us do in this room.”

−Peter McIndoe, in his TED talk Birds Aren't Real? How a Conspiracy Takes Flight about his social experiment/hoax

April 2023

“Teaching [undergraduates] is soul crushing.”

−John Bridgeman

28 April 2023

“Grade inflation is terrible, but it seems inescapable. Like the poor, bad students and professorial cowardice will always be with us. What may be worse are the self-imposed guidelines, misunderstood as rules by perniciously officious staff. Under the school’s policies limiting how many students may fail and do well in a course, two years ago we passed 10 people who had objectively failed and, last year, we arbitrarily lowered the grades of some students when too many of them did well. Both cohorts had taken almost exactly the same test, which had been used for almost a decade without any such ‘scaling’.”

24 April 2023

“All the null hypothesis talk boils down to how we deal with ambiguous conjunctions [i.e., satellite collisions]. I recommend maneuvering to keep conjunctions unambiguously safe, with some small allowable error rate. Hejduk recommends treating ambiguous conjunctions as though they were already safe. Most of his paper is spent rationalizing that recommendation, using what I think are pretty tortured analogies.

“Bottom line: tracking uncertainties being what they are, pretty much all impending collisions will show up as ambiguous conjunctions. Consequently, if you want to intervene meaningfully to limit the rate of debris growth, you have to maneuver to keep the plausibility of collision low. There is no analogy or combination of words that can change this basic fact.

“It is possible that our tracking resources are so poor that limiting the plausibility of collision requires more maneuvers than we can sustain. That doesn't change anything about our analysis. That just means our tracking resources are inadequate. Uncertainty quantification isn’t magic; if your data are garbage, it limits your ability to manage risk.

“Now, in theory, if we had an aleatory prior for conjunction analysis, we could get a calibrated posterior probability of collision, and that would allow us to control collision risk exposure a little more efficiently than plausibility of collision. But we don’t have one of those. We need more info about the background rate of collision to define what an acceptable threshold for plausibility of collision would even be.

“But again, none of that fixes the ‘tracking data are garbage’ problem. Last time I checked, these guys don’t even know how to define the tracking resources they need. The Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team seems to treat it as a forbidden line of questioning, even in their 2023 call for proposals.”

−Michael Balch, discussing the 2019 whitepaper “Satellite conjunction assessment risk analysis for ‘dilution region’ events: issues and operational approaches” by M.D. Hejduk, D.E. Snow, and L.K. Newman

22 April 2023

“I have broken down every single episode of Ancient Apocalypse, and through my own research I’ve been able to prove that most of what Graham Hancock says is false. But I’ve noticed something and that is that every piece of information that disproves his claim is easily available to any one of us that just does a little bit of research, and because of that I’ve had a realization, or an epiphany if you will. I started my career discussing pseudoarchaeology and pseudoscience and trying to dispel fiction with objective and well-researched facts, but I realized in filming this series that it’s more than a debate between two opposing viewpoints. It’s about Graham Hancock, because, like it or not, Graham Hancock is a personality. He’s like the dark Bill Nye. He’s got books and [a] Netflix deal and charisma, and that appeals to people. It appeals to the kind of people who want to feel validated that they were right all along and the world really has been lying to them, and those are the kind of people who cannot be swayed with anything that I bring to the table. [...]

“Throughout this series I talked about how amazing it would be to have a science communicator who is as flashy and appealing as Hancock but tell[s] things that are actually true. It’s not worth sitting around and waiting for some knight in shining armor to show up and save science. I’ll just do it myself. There will always be people like Graham Hancock. Conspiracy is a hydra that pulls people in in order to grow its new heads, and the only way to defeat it is at its source by making sure that people are educated enough so that they don’t fall for it. And this is of course no fault of the individual but rather the fault of a system that doesn’t prioritize education, instead championing feelings over facts. So the true way to combat conspiracy is by making education accessible.”

−Milo Rossi (Miniminuteman), in his YouTube video “I Watched Ancient Apocalypse So You Don’t Have To (Finale)”, introspectively asking “How can sensationalized reaction content, no matter how well researched, make a difference?” [Of course Milo should read some Lakatos or Feyerabend and get over it a little bit.]

14 April 2023

In late May of 2021, there was a flurry of viral posts across Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and seemingly every drunk uncle’s lips claiming that people vaccinated for COVID would die within two years. At left is one example, but most of those posts have since disappeared, and the surviving posts have been quarantined by layers of warnings and embarrassed invitations to look at fact checks elsewhere. Newschecker rather generously labelled the post merely “misleading”, perhaps out of an abundance of agnostic or Popperian strictness.

But let’s look at the post. Aside from being a bald-faced lie—as Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, who said lots of crazy shit, did not say this—the hysterical headline claim had a shelf life. So now we are coming upon the end of the two-year window, and we can take an assessment of the effect of those 13.37 billion doses delivered to almost 70% of the human population of the planet. Wonder if I’ll make it another two months. Not counting any chickens, but, maybe, if we see June, Newschecker can update that ranking.

12 April 2023

“Being an engineer, I am, of course, obliged to also provide the algorithms and numerical implementation strategies needed to make this theory come to life on a computer.”

−Dominik Hose, in a blog post about his PhD thesis that does not mention any software

11 April 2023

“This can't even be passing as debunking. This is this is just like…this is just mockery.”

−@DeDunking, on criticisms leveled at Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse by Milo Rossi (Miniminuteman) whose planned career in science communication may not be well augured by snide sarcasm or self-assurance so deep it seems to border anti-intellectualism

8 April 2023

Okay, it’s been five years already since it felt, to everyone apparently, that our global society was teetering on the brink of catastrophe wrought by the excesses of the elites and the inability or unwillingness of social structures to correct the violations. The hand wringing about hypernormalization seems now as hollow as the protestations it criticized. The idea that it is somehow new to this time that “things don’t change after injustice is exposed” is laughable. Ask Black folks in, well, in any state, what happened after the last scathing report about systemic racism that was precipitated by some shocking event. And what happened after the similar report before that? And the one before that? What do you really think is going to happen after the next one?
Unless the right-wing outrage really does bubble over in a flash with open fighting in the streets (as opposed to the slow-motion civil war we are in now), maybe this collapse isn’t quite due. The generic worry and generational malaise about millennials not being able to buy houses is not going to do it. These are big problems, but they are not society-wrecking problems. The UK is pondering fifty-year mortgages, and Japan has offered hundred-year mortgages for decades.
Don’t get me wrong. I certainly agree that misbehavior of elites will be a key contributor in the collapse of our society, just as Jared Diamond predicts, but we’ve not yet exhausted critical resources, nor experienced the extramural shock that brings down our house of cards. One thing to look out for though...one of the most common good jobs in America is truck driver. With light and heavy trucks and delivery and sales drivers, there are almost three million of them. Let me know when self-driving vehicles displace those workers. Those guys might not go quietly into the night.

5 April 2023

Him: “As a Bayesian, we just update based on data.”
Her: “Well, you know, as a Bayesian, you don’t have enough data for likelihood domination, so your choice of prior matters a lot.”
Him: [silence and blank look]
Her: [face showing she’s thinking “You’re no Bayesian.”]

4 April 2023

“I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the chatbot did not teach itself advanced chemistry. Bots don't know things...at all. They are so far from knowing things that we don’t even know, in the abstract, how to get to a place where they could know things. If you are reading this in the year 2023, the one apocalypse you genuinely don’t need to worry about in your lifetime is an AI take-over.”

−Michael Balch

27 March 2023

“When I was doing my PhD work with [car company], I had some work pushed through to ‘delivery’, which is where they try to use research in production. It was software that optimised engine control systems by minimising emissions. They didn't use it that way. They instead set emissions as constraints in the optimisation, which meant they got as close as possible to the EU legislative limits without exceeding them. That is my legacy at [car company].”

−underemployed engineering post doc

24 March 2023

“If you don’t know any statistics, everything is deterministic. If you know a little statistics, everything is normal. If you know a whole lot, everything is lognormal.”

−Andrés Alonso-Rodriguez

19 March 2023

“I was trying to explain to my engineering friends that, yes, I believe in the Engineer King, but engineers are not allowed to take any courses outside the engineering school, and certainly no philosophy courses, so engineers don't know who or what Plato is and the allusion is totally lost on them.”

17 March 2023

“Good software that is hard to access is bad software.”

10 March 2023

−Max Reddel, in his beautifully written blog “Model-Based Policy Analysis under Deep Uncertainty” which appeared on the Effective Altruism Forum

6 March 2023

“No other form of transport abuses our human rights like air travel.”

−Sophie Morgan, as reported by Rachel Dixon in an ITVX article on Morgan’s advocacy for sanctions against airlines mistreating disabled flyers

3 March 2023

“Just wondering, is there a term for the strategy of openly and actively supporting your arch enemy in hopes of creating such instability that, in the resulting turmoil, you can defeat your competitors as well as your enemy? Isn’t this what Slavoj Žižek is suggesting? The strategy is plainly risky, and I am thinking of the famous gamblers who lost, like Ernst Thälmann, and Susan Sarandon and Colby Keller (both of whom I love). The definition of ‘stupidity’ offered by James F. Welles as learned behavior that is self-defeating seems very close. But perhaps it is inappropriately pejorative. Are there examples where this strategy worked? Maybe my historical perspective is skewed, but I can’t think of many examples where fomenting war worked out well for the schemer in the long run. Am I being naive?

“The New Radicals’ lyric ‘The first step to a successful revolution is destroying all competing revolutionaries’ may be ambiguous about timing. Is the step after the overthrow of the ancien régime, or in the throes of, or even before the revolution? Menshevism wasn’t made illegal in the Soviet Union until years after the 1917 revolution. This order makes sense to me. Whatever one might say about Operation Barbarossa, surely it was premature as a matter of strategy. Does it make sense to smash fellow travellers while they are still collaborators? Besides being a double cross, it just doesn’t seem smart.

“Obviously, I’m not talking about the idea of genuinely loving your enemies. The Sermon on the Mount, like the Marshall Plan, and even the state-building practices of ISIS, can be a smart strategy in catching more flies with honey, but it is clearly not the idea at play here.”

26 February 2023

“Your manuscript should be double-spaced in clear, grammatically-correct English with margins on all sides of at least 1 in (2.5 cm) on 8.5″x11″ sized pages.”

−instructions for authors for the journal Risk Analysis, with multiple separate mistakes involving hyphens [double, correct, sized]

observed 24 February 2023

“[A]t no point in history have we had access to more data about our assets than we do right now; but is it really helping or are we simply ‘data rich, information poor’?”

−Jeremiah Wooten, failing to notice we are knowledge bankrupt and perhaps wisdom destitute, and also failing to cite the thoughts of Barack Obama on the issue

18 June 2023

“I coined the term ‘cisgender’ in 1994. Nearly three decades later, the word has had ramifications I never dreamed of. ¶ It began innocently enough. I was in graduate school and writing a paper on the health of trans adolescents. I put a post on alt.transgender to ask for views on transphobia and inclusion on the campus of the University of Minnesota. I was struggling because there did not seem to be a way to describe people who were not transgender without inescapably couching them in normalcy and making transgender identity automatically the ‘other.’ ¶ I knew that in chemistry, molecules with atoms grouped on the same side are labeled with the Latin prefix ‘cis–,’ while molecules with atoms grouped on opposite sides are referred to as ‘trans–.’ So, cisgender. It seemed like a no-brainer. I had no idea that hitting ‘enter’ on that post would start an etymological time bomb ticking.”

−Dana Defosse, compelled to deny that the term cisgender was hateful or intended to other anyone, but admitting the long-suspected truth that the origin of the term is essentially a pun, in “I coined the term ‘cisgender’ 29 years ago: here’s what this controversial word really means” on Huffington Post Personal and setting us up for more etymological jokes like the classic “Polyamory is wrong! It is either multiamory or polyphilia, but mixing Greek and Latin roots is wrong!”

18 February 2023

“[Former waitress] Alexa [Seary] is used to people telling her what to do.”

−Jake Massey, LAD Bible

13 February 2023

We’d rather have myths. This is better than acknowledging our lives are so unmoored.

13 February 2023

“Don’t be too hard on fiducial. It’s true that fiducial doesn’t work—it’s not so different from Bayes, so we can learn a lot about what’s wrong with Bayes through the fiducial literature. In Stein’s [1959 paper ‘An example of wide discrepancy between fiducial and confidence intervals’], for example, the fiducial solution is exactly the default-prior Bayes solution, so whatever complaints there are about fiducial also apply to Bayes. The fact that there are few papers criticizing Bayes isn’t because there aren’t criticisms to be made, it’s that those papers don’t get published.”

−Ryan Martin

10 February 2023

“What is needed is the criminalization of asymmetry of information.”

−Carmen Migueles, discussing the undue control by large multinationals corrupting public policy and damaging public health

9 February 2023

“A young Liverpool undergraduate sported a hoodie with many logos and the words ‘Full of Dreams’, but when I saw him, the folds of the fabric made it seem like it might read ‘Full of Beans’, which is also true.”

3 February 2023

“The[se] kids today with their face tattoos and their murder apps.”

−UiscePreston, on news of the 45-year sentence given to Chance Seneca who used Grindr to find victims for kidnapping and attempted murder

26 January 2023

“Even the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, arguably one of the greatest humans to ever human, was in support of eugenics. For him, however, it had nothing to do with race.”

−Daven Hiskey (author), “What Did the German Public Know About the Holocaust During WWII?”, Today I Found Out

2 January 2023

“The teacher was very interesting and I enjoyed interacting with her in class. Too much slide content, need to simplify.”

−anonymized student with the most useful comment for Scott Ferson’s probability class

20 December 2022

“[...W]e can say with confidence that, in conducting the Oppenheimer proceeding, the AEC failed to follow its own rules. We can also conclude that these failures were material to the fairness of the proceeding. There can be little question that allowing the lawyers charged with making the case for revocation to serve as assistants to the Board and to guide them through the documentary evidence for an entire week before the hearing may have colored the Board members’ perception of the issues and prevented them from entering the hearing with open minds. Further, when the matter proceeded to the AEC for final action, Dr Oppenheimer’s counsel was kept unaware of the actual findings and recommendations presented to the AEC by the General Manager, which differed substantially from those of the Personnel Security Board. By preventing its subject from addressing the charges made against him, the AEC undeniably compromised the effectiveness of its proceeding.

“These failures warrant vacating the AEC’s order and, in the case of an active clearance seeker, would warrant a new adjudication conducted in accordance with the applicable rules. In the case of Dr. Oppenheimer there will of course be no new adjudication. Vacatur of the AEC’s 1954 decision In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer will conclude the Department’s actions in this matter.

“Pursuant to the authority vested in the Secretary of Energy to carry out the functions of the Atomic Energy Commission, I hereby order that the decision rendered on June 29, 1954, In The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer be vacated.
* * *
“When Dr. Oppenheimer died in 1967, Senator J. William Fulbright took to the Senate floor and said “Let us remember not only what his special genius did for us; let us also remember what we did to him.” Today we remember how the United States government treated a man who served it with the highest distinction. We remember that political motives have no proper place in matters of personnel security. And we remember that living up to our ideals requires unerring attention to the fair and consistent application of our laws.”

−Jennifer M. Granholm, U.S. Secretary of Energy, in her secretarial order “Vacating 1954 Atomic Energy Commission decision: In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, after appeals to review the matter from U.S. Senators and current and former national lab directors see also her press release

16 December 2022

“This is just the latest, and he’s just trying to create a sense of crisis and drama around the company, I guess, so people will be talking about him. He likes attention. I don’t know if you noticed.”

−Kara Swisher, asked to comment on PBS News Hour about self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk's suspending the Twitter accounts of journalists who had reported about him and Twitter

15 December 2022

“They just cannot put themselves in other people’s shoes. I don't mean they won’t; I mean it seems like they can’t. Like you tell them, ‘You know, things are pretty bad for blank right now’, and they’re just like ‘Well, I’m not blank’ and you want to go with the obvious follow-up ‘No, I know, but like what if you were though? How would you feel then?’ And, dude, asking these people that question is like asking a Labradoodle to solve for X. Like, they lack the foundational building blocks to even begin to understand what you’re trying to say to them.”

−Trae Crowder, “On the absence of empathy”

14 December 2022

I’m sure I’m not au courant on the buzzwords in engineering, but I presume that ‘durability’ still mostly means strength against impacts. The subject of durable development of engineered systems seems to concentrate on longer lifetimes, sustainable and clean growth and net zero. But I think that it is the topic of resilience, not so much sustainability, that may fit the interests of the country right now. Does durability include resilience? Or is resilience already passé in these quarters? I know some people argue that resilience is a part of sustainability, but it seems to me there’s often a tension or trade-off between sustainability and resilience, because our horizons are always shorter than they need to be. That tension is not explored at all, as if you can have that powerful, low-profile, strong, lightweight, heavily armoured, fast, manoeuvrable, cheap tank whose components are manufactured in every congressional district. There are choices that need to be made.

Maybe it’s just the past two years that leaves me with the diffuse feeling that society is held together by duct tape and hope, at the mercy of pandemics, invasion, unstable leadership in government and business. As some have put it, resilience is the new sustainability. Ecology and scholars like Jared Diamond have some things to say to engineers about resilience. How can we ensure that the designed structures and processes continue to at least partially function even when impaired, rather than forming traps for the users? Compare broken elevators with broken escalators. How can the internet and communication networks still work even when the electrical grid is down? How can roads be useful with no gas? How can you get there, even when you can’t get there from here?

2 December 2022

“Tyndall was much more famous, and male, than Foote.”

−Simon Clark, explaining why the observation that CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere is credited to John Tyndall rather to Eunice Newton Foote who documented it five years earlier, in his video “Global Warming: An Inconvenient History”

30 November 2022

“Russia is now finding out why the US doesn’t have free healthcare.”

−The Infographics Show, in “Why Russia Can't Stop US Weapons”, where the dark humor is embedded in content about the presumptive advantage of weapons provided by allies to Ukraine over the weapons of their Russian invaders described in comments as “fascinating”, “awesome and sometimes hilarious”, “well done, and very entertaining!”, “gold”, “so beautifully done that could be easily confused with poetry”, but also “asinine propaganda”, “misinformation”, “glorification of the military industrial complex”, a “Raytheon infomercial”, or, most generously, “not 100% accurate”

~30 October 2022

Hawkman [played by Aldis Hodge]: “The kind of justice you dish out can darken your soul.”
Adrianna Tomaz [played by Sarah Shahi]: “It’s his darkness that lets him do what heroes like you cannot.”

−Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani in their Dwayne Johnson vehicle Black Adam that self-consciously celebrates unlimited extrajudicial executions with a smarmy relish and open self-satisfaction not seen since the worst days of Dick Cheney’s torture programs

United States film release 21 October 2022

“Perhaps Nostradamus is an unreliable guide to the future.”

−Stuart Jeffries, feature writer for The Guardian in a belated review of the 2006 book Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies for the Future by Mario Reading

10 October 2022

“The news from Brazil, Hungary, the UK, and now Italy has been frightful, and it may be still more so after the next election cycles in France and Spain. Even the Netherlands and Sweden have far-right bubblings. These are not the usual suspects. And, in the US, there is really no place that is safe from the slow-motion civil war, is there? Michigan—which used to seem very much not a part of the rebellious and illiberal South—is just one slipped election (or successful gubernatorial kidnapping and on-line execution) away from the crazies controlling everything. It really seems that every 50 to 100 years, the native fascistic predilections of humans will, unchecked, come to a festering head until they are burnt away by military conflagration of an intensity that unravels society. Or am I being a Debbie Downer?”

25 September 2022

“Tesco is closed today?! Tesco has been the one constant that I have known in England.”

19 September 2022

“More cheese, more satisfaction.”

−Krasymyr Tretiak

11 September 2022

“Not enough PDRs, please add more.”

−Callum Moseley, perhaps with some snark, on the occasion of his Professional Development Review one month before his contract ends

8 September 2022

“Probability can handle both data and belief, but actually it conflates them. The difference is essential when assessing models.”

−Enrique Miralles-Dolz

31 August 2022

“You can always outwork talent.”

−Brandon Blackwell, on University Challenge at 60 about his stunning turn on the BBC Two quiz show being the product of focused effort rather than innate cleverness

broadcast 29 August 2022

“I have an interest in cognitive science, known in philosophy as epistemology. How do we think, and why do we believe what we believe? These are interesting topics right now because of all the weirdness going on around the world.”

−Paul Tonner, as told to Emine Saner, The Guardian

24 August 2022

“I’ve never understood why ‘that’s not new’ is an insult. ‘2+2=4’ is the oldest take in the world. But some of us are not trying to be fresh, we’re trying to be right.”

−Coleman Hughes [@coldxman]

20 August 2022

“It’s no wonder these things are called confusion matrices.”

−Alexander Wimbush

19 August 2022

“Re: False confidence. The basic issue has been known to statisticians for a long time—Charles Stein has a 1959 paper [‘An example of wide discrepancy between fiducial and confidence intervals’] about basically the same problem explored in our satellite paper. But what happened is that this unsatisfactory behavior became associated with Fisher’s fiducial argument (I think because the Bayesians wanted to tear that idea down). Meanwhile, the Bayesians, who knew this affected them too, were desperately trying to find a patch to fix the problem, and they finally arrived at the use of target-parameter-specific reference/default priors, which I find to be totally absurd. The Bayesians [...] have done a terrible disservice to statistics and science by promoting the idea priors can be ‘objectively’ chosen and, more generally, that priors don’t really matter. I’m not as familiar with the [imprecise probability] literature as I could/should be, but my impression is that most people are focused on coherence, which has nothing to do with real life. The belief function and possibility theory guys seem more closely connected with real life, but they take imprecision as a given, as their starting point, needing no justification. A statistician who isn’t familiar with [imprecise probability], however, isn’t going to understand what Dubois & Prade are doing/saying, regardless of how statistically relevant it might be, because they aren’t convinced that imprecision is important. What we added with the false confidence result is the new angle which says that the kind of reliability that statisticians and others care about can only be guaranteed through the use of imprecise probabilities, thus answering the question of ‘why imprecision?’ Prior to our work, no one had explained—let alone really solved—the problem Stein identified (and that Fraser wrote extensively about), not Bayesians, not the CD guys, no one. [... This reliability can] only be achieved with an imprecise probability. That is, if you’re not imprecise, then there’s a risk of systematically assigning high belief/confidence to hypotheses that are false. This has nothing to do with a lack of robustness or models/priors being wrong, it’s solely about achieving the kinds of reliability goals statisticians care about. Historically, the sales pitch for imprecision has been on ‘principle’—one doesn’t actually know the prior, etc, so it’s right to be honest about one’s precision. But imprecision makes computation more difficult and solutions more conservative, and academic statisticians won’t take this performance hit solely on ‘principle’. My hope is that connecting imprecision to the kinds of performance that everyone cares about (Bayesians too) adds a new angle to this discussion, beyond just the introduction of imprecision because it’s the ‘right thing to do’.”

−Ryan Martin

(extended 10 February 2023) 19 August 2022

“Still in limited release in 2022, some 47 years after its premiere, it is the longest-running theatrical release in film history.”

−Wikipedia, on The Rocky Horror Picture Show

15 August 2022

“Time lays waste to all, and love turns to dust. Ruin is inevitable, and all else is prelude.”

−speech at Nador’s wedding by the Sire, the world's first and most ancient vampire, in “The Wedding”, episode 6 of season 4 of the FX series What We Do in the Shadows [writers Sam Johnson, Sarah Naftalis, Marika Sawyer, and Paul Simms]

9 August 2022

“In the land of quantum, words mean nothing, there is only math.”

−GCP Grey, in his video “The Simple Secret of Runway Digits”

7 August 2022

“Everybody’s so creative!”

−TikToker Tanara (@tanaradoublechocolate)

31 July 2022

“[C]hoosing one’s measure of information is literally equivalent to choosing one’s loss function in a statistical decision problem, and thus is significant, consequential, and can not be swept under the carpet.”

−Robert C. Williamson and Zac Cranko, in their manuscript “Information processing equalities and the information–risk bridge”

26 July 2022

“You wanna make an omelet, you gotta kill some people.”

−Lloyd Hansen [played by Chris Evans], The Gray Man, screenplay by Joe Russo, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

theatrical release 22 July 2022

“The Axiom of Choice is obviously pro-abortion”

−LezNerd , in response to MathGeekRob’s posting “I’m a mathematician. Can someone explain to me woke math? Apparently I didn’t get the memo.” which was in reaction to the kerfuffle in Florida in which the state Department of Education is “continuing to give publishers the opportunity to remediate all deficiencies” regarding what the department and Florida governor Ron DeSantis call “woke math” such as an example using polynomials to model data originally reported by Project Implicit which uses self-testing to assess unconscious associations underpinning stereotyping that included the totally unsurprising but apparently disturbing observation that racial prejudice seems to vary by age and political affiliation

15 July 2022

“Few of us stay at the stream [of au courant fashion] drawing what’s new all our lives. For various reasons we often wander away with our catch. Perhaps it’s because we settle into an identity we’re comfortable with, or fear the taboo of not dressing our age, or simply run out of time to care. But when we’re gone the stream keeps changing and we get older and continue to use the mannerisms and styles we grabbed a while back. Eventually, to whatever those styles initially evoked, a new connotation is added: old person. Not because the look or behavior is intrinsically for the elderly, but because those who use it, us, became old ourselves. If you want to look older, what do you do? Well, you can dress the way older people dress. And the thing is, that's often how they used to dress too. We think people looked older in the past because they look the way old people do today.”

−Michael Stevens (Vsauce), described by @aprroxit as “the guy who actually tries to figure out his shower thoughts” in his Youtube video “Did people used [sic] to look older?”

11 July 2022

“When I was working on the Bristol Bay Watershed assessment (Pebble Mine), the State of Alaska insisted on a one-in-a-million probability of tailings dam failure, but they could not and would not say whether that was per year, per life of the mine, or what. It just sounded good to them.”

−Glenn Suter

4 July 2022

Jim Acosta: “Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, all gave assurances.... These were nominees to the Supreme Court giving the country assurances that they were not going to overturn this precedent, and yet they did anyway. [...] What about the fact that we have people who were putting themselves forward for a spot on the high court of this country who were essentially misleading the country about what their true intentions might be if Rowe v. Wade were to come to their desk?”

Jeffrey Toobin: “...And as for the justices themselves, you know, they were playing a game to get on the Supreme Court. All three of them are lawyers. So if you parse their words carefully, the way that lawyers know how to speak, they did not explicitly promise to uphold Rowe v. Wade. They left the impression that they would uphold Rowe v. Wade.” [So they are liars but not perjurers, is that right?]

25 June 2022

“The speakers can be interesting, or enraging, which is better. Another useful teaching tool is the pratfall. One time in a workshop, Stan Kaplan put Bayes’ rule up on the board and started to explain it, but suddenly said, ‘Oh, wait, that’s not right’. After an awkward pause he confessed he was confused and was literally scratching his head. He struggled for a spell and asked himself dumb questions out loud. He spent several painful minutes doubting himself in front of his audience. Watching him, we were kind of engrossed in whether he might completely melt down. It turned out that he had written it correctly, but had just gotten off on the wrong foot. But, by struggling through it, he had dragged the entire audience with him to confident understanding. I never found out whether it was genuine confusion, or just a really clever teaching technique.”

20 June 2022

“I’ve come to the conclusion that Walley has no right to say anything about coherence.”

−Alexander Wimbush, on reading about statistical notions of coherence in Peter Walley’s text Statistical Reasoning with Imprecise Probabilities

10 June 2022

“They clearly knew what they were doing with that title”

−Gordo Insufrible, referring to the video “Two Candles, One Cake” posted by Numberphile

10 May 2022

“[Y]ou were annoyed that [the problem of Bertrand’s paradox] wasn’t well defined. And I think mathematicians do have that sense of annoyance. You want things to be neat, but probability questions are often more philosophical.”

−Ben Sparks, “Two Candles, One Cake” posted by Numberphile

10 May 2022

“The lesser of two evils is LESS EVIL. If you cared at all about any of the things you claim to care about, you’d vote to keep as much of it as you can rather than throwing it all away in a childish fit.”

−Rrhain on Disqus at JoeMyGod, speaking truth to disempowerment about the long-predicted dire consequences of voter apathy and protest voting which have resulted in the current US Supreme Court which is drafting the ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, the coup de grace in a run that has already included gutting the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), unleashing dark money in elections by overturning century-old spending restrictions (Citizens United), excusing unfair treatment as religious expression (Hobby Lobby), and suppressing meaningful punitive damages (Exxon Shipping)

, and may someday review restoring government-led prayer in public schools or abrogating Miranda rights, marriage equality, privacy (Lawrence), contraceptive access (Griswold), or interracial marriage (Loving)3 May 2022

“Plot twist: the rapture has already happened, no one was judged worthy”

−@zenli1407

May 2022

“Ignorance isn’t a defense, unless you’re a cop.”

−@Fanimati0n succinctly summarizing Devin Stone’s explanation of the judicially invented doctrine of qualified immunity by which police insulate themselves from civil litigation when they violate the civil rights of citizens in LegalEagle’s “The Greatest Brief Ever Filed”

May 2022

“When people feel even a little bit of intimidation...that’s what makes people go silent. And when critics go silent, the group gets stupid.”

−Jonathan Haidt discussing his article in The Atlantic about the effect of social media which is “very good at tearing things down” in creating what he calls “structural stupidity” in government, institutions and society in “‘Uniquely Stupid:’ Dissecting the Past Decade of American Life” on Amanpour and Company

18 April 2022

“From here on, I’m just assuming everything I read on line or in emails is just a leftover April Fool’s joke.”

3 April 2022

“There is nothing epistemic about a confidence interval, although there could be if, say, the likelihood were imprecise.”

−Matthias Troffaes

29 March 2022

“If that were a theorem, I would believe it.”

−Matthias Troffaes

29 March 2022

“Engineer’s DisEase is a condition, common among English-speaking engineers, that compels the sufferer to capitalize words referring to schools of thought, disciplines, methods, techniques, new ideas, old ideas, ideas, time periods, apparatuses, or other notions or thingamajigs that are neither proper nouns nor expressions that conventional orthography capitalizes. The DisEase is characteristically inconsistently expressed across any document greater than five words in length.”

28 March 2022

“Will Smith and Trump are the same guy.”

−Howard Stern, a shock jock now become a voice of conscience commenting on Smith’s public and penalty-free crime, which is both sad and funny (but not funny ha ha)

28 March 2022

[Bowen Yang]: “Steam rising from the asphalt after a sunshower! Just percolating, up and up and up and up and upward! Faster! Walking down the street, feeling invincible, like your whole life is ahead of you. You’re on your way to your high school graduation, and you haven’t made real mistakes in life! The sonic groundswell building until suddenly...”
[Chris Redd]: “Is it over?”
[Bowen Yang]: “It’s just beginning!”

−Saturday Night Live homage to the Ohio State University Marching Band’s “Don’t Stop Belevin’ [sic]”, arranged by John Brennan as an instrumental rendition of the 1981 Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’”, composed by Steve Perry, Jonathan Cain, and Neal Schon

19 March 2022

“[A] meaningful calculus on the set of closed and non-closed intervals is most likely never to be constructed. Of course, this does not exclude individual episodic applications of non-closed intervals in certain particular situations. But in general, alas...”

−Sergey P. Shary, arguing that allowing open or partially open intervals in interval arithmetic does “not make much sense” in his manuscript “Non-traditional intervals and their use: which ones really make sense?” available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.03058, but perhaps not making much sense himself

16 March 2022

В отличие от Российского Союза ректоров, Британские ученые считают, что вопросы этики и морали важна. Так думают и некоторые российские ученые. [1,2,3]

4 March 2022

“[Yuval Noah] Harari is correct that humans dominate the planet because we cooperate. Cooperation is our primary adaptation. But he is wrong that the reason we can is ‘imagination’ (7:00). He is confusing how the world looks with why it works. The reason we cooperate so well is that we have reduced the cost of compelling others to cooperate, by remotely punishing (sensu Bingham and Souza) cheaters who don't cooperate. Without this compulsion, non-cooperating free riders would otherwise win the evolutionary game because they reap the social benefits without any costs to themselves from believing the story or toeing the line to uphold it. Yes, biological adaptations such as language, religiosity, and story telling in general, [but also] cheater detection and the knowledge illusion (sensu Sloman and Fernbach) are enhancements that can make cooperation more efficient, but these are adjunct to the peculiarly human solution of remote threat that allows cooperation in the first place, even though mutualisms are usually evolutionarily unstable. Harari goes on to to understate the commonness of imagination, i.e., conditional thinking (Edgington), which is necessary for behaviors such as hunting, avoiding predators, and planning that are exhibited ubiquitously by other animals.”

26 February 2022

“A thing is either accurate or it’s not. There are no degrees of accuracy. You taught me that.”

−Roxanne [Haley Bennett], misunderstanding any notion of validation and surely misquoting Cyrano de Bergerac, in the film Cyrano by screenwriter Erica Schmidt, based on her 2018 stage musical of the same name, based on the 1897 Edmond Rostand play Cyrano de Bergerac [https://www.moviequotesandmore.com/cyrano-movie-quotes/]

film released 25 February 2022

“It’s like a pendulum shifting from feckless to reckless.”

−Garry Kasparov, discussing the responses by previous American leaders, i.e., Obama and Trump, to Putin’s aggression, on the PBS program Amanpour and Company

24 February 2022

“Um, punishing the innocent is society’s primary mode of disaster management.”

20 February 2022

09:00:00 Professor : “Write a silent MATLAB function m-file with the prescribed calling syntax and naming convention that takes range and elevation radar data for a falling body and computes the two roots of the quadratic regression analysis.”
09:27:21 Professor : “Can anyone think of a non-military application of this lab on radar tracking of a projectile?”
09:33:07 Professor : “Ah, wait, I know...it would be the equations of motion needed to predict the behaviour of the moon for the plot of the action film Moonfall, currently in cinemas. Possibly Donald Sutherland’s greatest role.”
09:34:04 Student : “professor, for our class test in two weeks, can we do it online?”

11 February 2022

“We made a mistake fifty years ago, and we’re still paying the price for it today. We thought the brain was a computer, a digital computer. But you see the brain has no operating system. It has no programming. It has no Windows; it has no CPU; it has no Pentium chip. It has no subroutines. The brain doesn’t have anything resembling the brain [sic] except neural activity. Fifty years later, after this wild goose chase, we now understand that the brain is a pattern-seeking neural network, a learning machine, and it learns and rewires every time it learns something new.”

−Michio Kaku, The difference between your brain and a computer, making exactly the same error believing the human brain must be similar to the what computer scientists are currently talking about

6 February 2022

“Generations of programmers have been misled by C and C++. Many have fallen into the black hole of its cult with trite platitudes like ‘under the hood programming’, which means no more than driving along with the hood open, trying to fix the engine, but unable to see the road. Cult followers urge end-users to ‘trust the programmer’, which is stupid and naive, but appeals to the programmer’s ego. And programmers are supposed to have ‘freedom,’ although no one ever says freedom from what. It’s certainly not freedom from the flaws and traps of C++.”

−Ian Joyner, in “As a coding language, C++ appeals to the ego, not the intellect” on efinancialcareers.com, speaking truth to the priesthood who have surmounted the unnecessary and arcane barriers of entry to a circle of special knowledge and who, predictably, delusionally insist that using C and C++ is about performance

1 February 2022

NASA Deputy Director and former astronaut Jocinda “Jo” Fowler [Halle Berry]: “You have blood on your hands too.”

NASA scientist Holdenfield [Donald Sutherland]: “Yeah, well, anyone who follows orders pretty much always does, don’t they.”

−Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser, and Spenser Cohen writing dialog for Moonfall, a film depicting a world where mobile phones, electricity and—most importantly—product placement continue to work despite the Moon coming so close to the Earth that the Moon pokes into the Earth’s atmosphere and people standing on the Earth are pulled into the Moon’s gravitational well, a movie which was ruined by the miscasting of Charlie Plummer as the disgraced-astronaut-who-saves-both-the-Earth-and-the-Moon’s errant son and car driver in the obligatory chase scene that happens as the Earth’s oxygen but not air pressure is sucked away from the planet (even though he was truly wonderful in the 2020 film Spontaneous described by Wikipedia as a romantic black-comedy horror film in which he played the boy who meets girl and then explodes)

released 31 January 2022

James Holden [Steven Strait]: “I hope I did the right thing.”

Naomi Nagata [Dominique Tipper]: “You did. You followed your conscience in the hope that others would follow theirs. You didn’t do it for a reward or a pat on the head. The universe never tells us if we did right or wrong. It’s more important to try to help people than to know that you did. More important that someone’s life gets better than for you to feel good about yourself. You never know the effect you might have on someone, not really. Maybe one core thing you said haunts them forever. Maybe one moment of kindness gives them comfort or courage. Maybe you said the one thing they needed to hear. It doesn’t matter if you ever know. You just have to try.”

−The Expanse, season 6, episode 6, “Babylon's Ashes”, Naren Shankar, Juliana Damewood, and Glenton Richards (screenwriters), based on the novels by James S.A. Corey [joint pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck]

released 14 January 2022

“[...P]leas for ‘civility’ are a fraud. Their goal is to blunt and enfeeble criticism and distract from its truthfulness. Typically, they’re the work of hypocrites. It may be not a little ghoulish to celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents. And it may be proper to express sympathy and solicitude to those they leave behind. But mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled. Nor is it wrong to deny them our sympathy and solicitude, or to make sure it’s known when their deaths are marked that they had stood fast against measures that might have protected themselves and others from the fate they succumbed to. There may be no other way to make sure that the lessons of these teachable moments are heard.” [links omitted]

−Michael Hiltzik on sorryantivaxxer.com and the HermanCainAward subreddit after the death of a politician who opposed vaccine mandates in “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes—but may be necessary”

10 January 2022

“This shocking insight—optimal statistical procedures may behave disastrously even under ‘tiny deviations’ from the ideal model—demonstrates that imprecision in the underlying model may matter substantially. [...]The centrepiece of Bayesian inference is the prior distribution. Apart from very large sample sizes, where the posterior is de facto determined by the sample, the prior naturally has a strong influence on the posterior and on all conclusions drawn from it. In the rare situations where very strong prior knowledge is available, it can be used actively, but most often the strong dependence on the prior has been intensively debated and criticized. Working with sets of prior probabilities (or interval-valued priors) opens new avenues here. This set can naturally be chosen to reflect the quality/determinacy of prior knowledge: strong prior knowledge leads to ‘small’ sets; weak prior knowledge to ‘large’ sets.”

−Thomas Augustin, “Statistics with imprecise probabilities—a short survey”, in Uncertainty in Engineering

book published 2022

Thinking about the identification blocks that people put under their email signatures. They’ve grown recently to include pronoun preferences and often a witticism or favorite quote. They seem a bit self-promotional. Do I really want a self-blurb? If I need one, what should be in it?

Maybe my pronoun statement is clear: “all pronouns are cool”. A nice bubbe on a plane once said to me “Sorry, ma’am” after she hit me in the head with her carry-on bag. Although I was sporting a full beard at the time, I didn’t take offence. Why would I? (She later called me bubala, so I think we were tight.) But what’s so bad about being mistaken for a female? My gay friends refer to me as ‘she’ and ‘her’ pretty regularly. I accept that warmly. As a survivor of an all-male college, I am here to tell you that the toxicity in toxic masculinity is at base just old-fashioned misogyny. I am happy with whatever pronouns you’d like to use for me. Not trying to be provocative here; I genuinely don’t have preferences on this. I can’t control how people talk about me. To be honest, I’m just happy they’re still talking about me. I’m just as happy to know other people’s pronoun preferences, although I hope to be mostly referring to them by their names. Okay, pronoun statement done and dusted?

What about self-description? Well, on formal stuff or when I’m introducing myself in work or professional emails, I’ll use my job title and affiliation. But that’ll only work when I’m employed. What happens if I retire? In the old, old days, people would just give their city name, as if everyone in Philadelphia would know who Ben Franklin is, so just ask anyone from Philadelphia. That seems less helpful in our modern times, in which we are constantly moving about, and we’re trying to be citizens of the planet. Maybe I could steal the joke that Kathy Griffin said about Madonna: “Raised in Indiana, moved to New York, is British.” This is perhaps the modern, snarky version of that old idea about locale as identity.

Now what about the memorable favorite quote? Whew, that’s hard. I recently found “Garden of Your Mind” which is profound and pure and beautiful. I thought he’d said in it “There’s so much in this world we can learn, no matter how young or how old we are" but the closest actual quote I can find is “There are so many things to learn about in this world and so many people who can help us learn.” Never watched Mr. Rogers Neighborhood (we couldn’t get PBS when I was young), but he is my hero now to be sure. But I think the quote might need to be switchable. Sometimes something from Anton LaVey might be more on point than Mr. Rogers. Or Christopher Hitchens, or John Waters, or my young hero David Hogg, or archy.

Do I have to do an epitaph too? Is that due already too? I guess I want a six-word one, maybe “born confused, explored uncertainty, died surprised”. But I reserve the right to change this, especially the surprised part. Of course, there’s a lot of room for beauty and depth in this brevity. And room for levity and denial as well, e.g., Not Quite contributor Matt’s “Full life; impossible to summarize in…” which echoes Neil Patrick Harris’ first tweet “My first tweet, peeps. I apologize in advance for my slow learning curve. Nice to (sort of) meet you. It’s amazing how quickly 140 charac” which was really funny before Twitter changed the message length limit.

31 December 2021

Just as the 1998 Bruce Willis vehicle The Siege correctly foretold that Americans would quickly descend to unthinkable brutality and state-sponsored torture in the wake of attacks on New York City, the binge-watchable TNT series The Last Ship, which must have seemed ridiculously over the top in pre-covid times, seems disturbingly prophetic now: ruthless self-interest weaponized by ignorant certainty creates in situ an up-is-down logic and perverse economy that feeds every tragedy, combined with the numbing relentlessness of the reflexive punishing of the innocent, which appears to be our primary if not only mode of disaster management. Humans are so, so good at punishing the innocent. We punish the innocent like cheetahs run and dolphins swim. Health care workers are vilified and physically attacked. Anthony Fauci, a beacon of rectitude and compassion and intelligence, regularly receives death threats. Even Bill Gates who warned about the dangers of a pandemic is now inexplicably accused of perpetrating covid.

27 December 2021

“When persuading someone to change their mind on a major topic, what’s being said isn’t always quite as important as how it’s said. If a person feels attacked or disrespected or condescended to, they’ll turn off their brain and block out the most rational, correct arguments on principle alone. [Homo sapiens] are odd, emotional creatures, more amenable to a convincing pitch than poorly presented rightness.”

−Charles Bramesco in a review of Don’t Look Up in The Guardian that expresses a deep truth about human social psychology but fails to realize that the point of art can be other than persuasion. Screenwriter-director Adam McKay was obviously not intending to convince anyone to care about any impending catastrophe, as numerous as they are. Art always speaks to us, but in this case the message is that Cassandra will never be believed, that science communication does not work. Our dependably poor reactions in the face of peril result from our collective and individual stupidity that everyone, including scientists, sometimes suffer, but peril is not removed or mitigated by this innocence. Sorry to say, the universe simply doesn’t give a fuck that you’re feeling attacked or disrespected or condescended to.

27 December 2021

“Raw data doesn’t mean shit.”

−Nico Li, arguing it is data science that assigns meaning to raw data

22 December 2021

Pat: “I thought there’d be a happy ending somehow. Isn’t that how American films work?”
Scott: “I thought it was supposed to be a dark comedy. I didn’t realize it’d be a documentary.”
Wikipedia: “The film received mixed reviews from critics, who [...] found [screenwriter]’s approach to the subject heavy-handed.”

−Three reactions saying the same thing, each blithely missing the point of Don’t Look Up that some things cannot be wished away

17 December 2021

Look up, what he’s really trying to say
Is get your head out of your ass
Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists
We really fucked it up, fucked it up this time
It’s so close, I can feel the heat big time
And you can act like everything is alright
But this is probably happening in real time
Celebrate or cry or pray, whatever it takes
To get you through the mess we made
’Cause tomorrow may never come

−Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi [Kid Cudi], and Taura Stinson, lyricists, in their song “Just Look Up” from the upcoming Netflix film Don't Look Up

song released 3 December 2021

“Stability and confidence is really difficult to say, of course this is a completely subjective measure. The country is obviously going through some turbulence, but it has historically been seen as one of he most stable nations in the world, especially for things like banking. [...] Look, it’s still an advanced nation with robust laws, a good financial system, a well regarded currency, and a functioning democratic system, so it gets an 8 out of 10. Five years ago, it would have been the easiest 10 out of 10 ever.”

−Michael Burnand [Economics Explained], in “How Has Brexit Been Going?” discussing the state of the UK since its unforced error

December 2021

“A huge asteroid is set to smash though Earth’s orbital path making ‘close approach’ to our planet, NASA has warned.”

−Hollie Bone and Beth Cruse, “Huge 430ft asteroid set to fly through Earth’s orbit on Monday”, Bristol Live [Bristol Post], expressing a journalistic lie with the words ‘smash’ and ‘warned’ which are in no way justified by the subjunctive—or at least counterfactual—clause “the impact would produce the equivalent energy to 77 megatons of TNT [...] 1.5 times as powerful as the Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear weapon ever tested” because in fact “the [1994 WR12] asteroid will miss the Earth by 3.8 million miles” which is 16 times the distance to the Moon

(updated 29 November) 28 November 2021

“If we get another big covid wave I believe that, with the benefit of hindsight and learning from past mistakes, we can come together and handle it in a way that’s even more dumb and evil than last time.”

−Getting Some Rest @InternetHippo on Twitter

26 November 2021

“There can be a steep cost to us who fight these good fights, a Pyrrhic investment of time and care without the slightest hope of vindication or even a changed mind to show for it. Preserving the dignity of an on-line discussion group may not be worth the never-ending costs. But I am as pessimistic about this as I am about most programs that depend on collegial or social goodwill. I felt this way even before Atwater and Norquist brought poisoning the well to an art form. I've been waiting for years for the Simplification (in the sense of A Canticle for Leibowitz). Despite the overwhelming evidence that Wikipedia is a fantastic success in many respects, it does not seem likely to me that this can persist. Vandalism, commercialism, warfare, propaganda and other government misuse are eternal wellsprings that cannot ever be shut off or always piped away. Wikipedia’s coming down, just as surely as the window of antimicrobials’ efficacy is closing. We’ll talk nostalgically about the times when we could go to the moon, when Wikipedia was reliable, when doctors could cure bacterial diseases, and when the internet hosted insightful discussion. We’ll be looking back fondly on those blissful but brief blips in history.”

24 November 2021

“Conspiracy theories are everywhere and people don’t understand how harmful they are. ¶ I made the original Conspiracy Chart over a year ago. An update was long overdue. This is the 2021 version.”

−Abbie Richards, tweet unveiling https://conspiracychart.com/

23 November 2021

“It was just so repetitive.”

−Pat Mercardante, critiquing the 2021 film Boss Level about a hero trapped in a time loop around the day of his murder

17 November 2021

“There are Twitter accounts. There are people writing compilers. Because, it turns out there is nothing you can do that is so unutterably stupid that people won't waste their time on it.”

−Mark Rendle, “The Worst Programming Language Ever (Mark Rendle, 2014)”

5 November 2021

“I remember the first time I saw a universal remote control. I thought to myself, ‘well, this changes everything.’ Ha ha.”

−Dianna Cowern [Physics Girl], in the coda to “We can see things moving faster than light”

November 2021

“The Englishmen, well-known for their untruthfulness[,] gave us false assurances and enacted deceitful ordinances, which deliberately humiliated the Poles […].”

−recounted in translation by Thomas Starky in the 2017 film True Heroes of Jamestown written by Eugeniusz Starky, based on the 1977 book True Heroes of Jamestown by Arthur L. Waldo and Pamiętnik handlowca purportedly [see James Pula’s article in The Polish Review] written by Zbigniew Stefański in 1625 about his experiences as a Polish craftsman in the first permanent English settlement and the injustices that precipitated the first strike for civil rights in the Americas [there may not have been a Zbigniew in Jamestown but the author of this line has certainly met the English]

released in the UK on 29 October 2021

“You know the old definition of an ‘expert’, doing the same wrong thing over and over again with increasing confidence.”

−Vanessa Quick

18 October 2021

“There are more intersex people than people over 100 years old.”

18 October 2021

“As Hal Sparks always says: ‘If they tell you the percentage but not the actual numbers they’re trying to deceive you.’ So applying that to this: ‘25% of duplicates came in between Nov. 4 - Nov. 9th’ (Yup. All two out of 10 total duplicate ballots came in during that time period...ignoring that all duplicate ballots were Trump voters trying to cheat).”

−Trevor Brown, commenting on the report from the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit

25 September 2021

“Kids only matter when they’re not born yet”

−Emerson Brophy, https://youtube.com/shorts/Cp8jfP3l2Ec?feature=share

14 September 2021

“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

−Amy Coney Barrett, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, cf. “I am not a crook”, R. Nixon (1973)

12 September 2021

“[H]istory is an edit war. Truth, factual and moral, hangs in the balance.”

−Noam Cohen, writing about Wikipedian Ksenia Coffman in “One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia”, Wired

12 September 2021

At the third meeting of the university-wide faculty special committee on the future of “digital” at the university, the chair suggested that we make a newsletter to keep everyone abreast of the various digital-themed activities going on across campus. A newsletter. Several meetings later, after the pandemic had subsided, most people were back on campus but we still used Zoom for people who realized they could stay home and still get paid. During a slide presentation the chat window started to fill up:
10:46 If you are changing the slides, we are not seeing them.
10:52 Just abiout to change them now...
10:52 The slides are not displayed on line. We only see the slide editor.
10:58 Can you see them now? Are they changing?
11:05 Still not seeing them.

9 September 2021

Bobby [Aditya Geddada]: “Aliens like Pop-Tarts?”
Jay [Lucian-River Chauhan]: “Everyone likes Pop-Tarts, Bobby.”

−Michael Pearce and Joe Barton [writers], Encounter

film released 3 September 2021

“I don't know of anyone who uses allozymes anymore. It is kind of strange because it would just as useful as ever but I think people find it too old fashioned. Population genomics is much more common. But rather than using whole genomes, which would be very expensive and computationally difficult, most people are using some kind of single nucleotide polymorphism approach. Almost all forensic analysis uses short tandem repeats that are highly polymorphic because the diversify through unequal crossover. The standard is to use 13 loci that are scattered around the genome and are unlinked. The probability that two individuals will share the same 13 locus genotype is about 1 in 1.5 billion. I have heard that there is an effort to add at least two more loci but I don't know if that has been done yet. The forensics work is pretty state of the art, especially with dealing with minute quantities of DNA, but it does have a pretty specific application. Using SNPs people can generate hundreds if not thousands of markers and address all kinds of questions about the architecture of the genome without having to do whole genome sequencing.”

−Jerry Hilbish

2 September 2021

“I think it is interesting that people, in the midst of business meetings, keep admitting that it feels like the end of the world. It really is overwhelming. The pandemic doesn’t really bother me all that much. It’s climate change, politics, and man-child dudes in body armor that form the mass of my discomfort.”

−Nick Friedenberg

31 August 2021

“A more complex approach is to consider repetitions globally to try to reduce the repetitions by detecting repetitions that happen over multiple lines.”

−Nick Gray

24 August 2021

“[Science] is a safety pin in the nipple of academia.”

−Gary Grooberson [played by Paul Rudd], speaking truth in Ghost Busters: Afterlife, written by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman

film released 23 August 2021

I told my 9yo son the “I can’t operate on him; he’s my son” riddle the other day, and it went like this:
Me: …so how is that poss—
9yo: It’s his mom.
Me: Yeah.
9yo:
Me: Or his other dad, I guess.
9yo: Right.
Me:
9yo: I don’t get how it’s a riddle.

−Sara Warf, @SaraBWarf, on Twitter

22 August 2021

“It’s almost like it wasn’t Trump that was the problem.”

−Alexander Wimbush, discussing the recent tumultuous times in the United States

20 August 2021

Word of the day: ‘clusterfuck’. The day sees competing headlines, including ‘school districts ignoring gubernatorial bans on mask mandates during a unprecedented but predicted surge of the Covid 19 Delta variant’ and the more tragic ‘massive emergency troop reinforcements to Kabul to protect noncombatant evacuations in the midst of long-planned general withdrawal from Afghanistan’. The word is distinguished by Corinne Purtill in her 2018 article in Quartz at Work from related words like ‘fuckup’, ‘snafu’, and ‘shitshow’, as arising from illusion, impatience and incompetence in uninformed decision making by people in power who don’t acknowledge the realities of their environment and don’t confront what they don’t know.

20 August 2021

“There’s a risk we misadopt digitalisation simply to be buzzword-compliant.” [edited]

−Mark Bankhead

17 August 2021

“So sex is a really bananas way to get your genes to the next generation. It’s slow, it’s costly, and it can break up winning genetic hands. But, then, why is sex so common? Only about one in a thousand animal species, only one percent of flowering plants are exclusively asexual. From fleas to trees, pretty much every eukaryote does the birds and the bees. It’s a paradox. There must be a reason, a huge advantage to sex that more than makes up for the huge costs. What is it? Well, shuffling up your winning hand may actually be the winning strategy. Because nature doesn’t always play by the same rules.”

−Joe Hanson, Be Smart, in “Why is Sex a Thing?” concisely explaining the most important reasons argued by Charles Darwin down to George Williams that sex is a, um, thing, but failing to mention why or even that sex is so preoccupying for humans, who often spend hours in copulatory behaviors, not to mention the songs and sonnets and visual arts they devote to the subject.

We humans seem to be a bit different in this regard compared to lots of other species we know well, like cats and dogs, farm animals, and the charismatic megafauna of the African plains. All of those guys seem to take a very matter of fact approach to sexual union. Of course there are lots of animals that go well out of their way, so to speak, in pursuit of sex. A peacock’s fabulous plumage, the elaborate or violent intragender competitions for mates favored by David Attenborough, and the sometimes extreme outcomes of sexual rivalry in horns, antlers, birdsongs and other behaviors are all the results of what biologists call sexual selection, which is widespread in animal, plant and fungus species. And, to be sure, humans have large penises, which completely violates the relevant allometric laws, which may be a sexual display comparable to plumage or horns. Biologists generally accept that the allometry-violating large penis in humans is a result of sexual selection in the form of female choice.

But it seems to me that maybe ultra-focused and languorous human sexual behavior is not related to sexual selection; it’s not entirely about attracting mates. Although copulation can be accomplished in a few minutes by proficient practitioners, humans often spend hours in copulatory behaviors. They fetishize sex and its components and accoutrements in myriad ways, lots of which are decidedly disadvantageous reproductively. And humans think and talk about sex endlessly, using ever-expanding word clouds. They sometimes define their own identities or measure their self worth in terms of their sexualities.

So what explains this human preoccupation with sexuality and its often substantial costs? I have no idea, but maybe it has something to do with sociality. Many species exhibit complex social interactions, and it seems that their sociality is mediated by some biological system that got co-opted for this function. In species with obligate sociality, like humans, individuals have to use some scheme to negotiate those interactions they're involved in.

For instance, dogs seem to use urine and their amazing olfactory abilities to express at least part of their sociality. Other than birds and insects, most animals you care about excrete nitrogenous waste via urine, but dogs seem to care about urine way more than they need to. Dogs seem obsessed with urine in a way that reminds me of how humans are obsessed with sex.

Other species use urine this way as a medium in sociality too, horses, felids,

vocalizations, urine, smell
vocalizations and sexuality

These systems and media cross-react.

In another mammal with massive penile endowment, such as the African ground squirrel Xerus inauris

https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/9020/Manjerovic_Structure(2008).pdf;jsessionid=2C57AFE9F6821460C4870FD16D24E4D9?sequence=1

it looks like it may be sperm competition driving this sex-based sociality.

Human penile anatomy features a efficient semen removal system in its glans morphology and retractable foreskin, which screams sperm competition. On the other hand, human testes are relatively small compared to other primates which would seem to testify to against the explanation that it is sperm competition driving things here.

the advantages under female choice of a large penis are muted, in almost all human cultures, by clothing that obscures

female choice

Large penis and female breasts
Small testes
Hidden estrus
Sexual dimorphism, but strong female choice

30 July 2021

“If you do say so yourself.”

−reacting to the opening narration voicing Oscar Wilde in the 1986 documentary film Oscar Wilde: Spendthrift of Genius of text selected from De Profundis, pages 33f, which is itself extracted and bowdlerized from correspondence by Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol to Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas): “The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colors of things; there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder [... ] I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me [...] I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy.”

Wilde video uploaded to Youtube 30 July 2021

“Roundoff is the big problem. That is always with us, and it can be extremely difficult to deal with. Now attempts have been made to automate error analysis. One such attempt is interval arithmetic. In interval arithmetic you represent every variable by an interval, an interval that contains the true value of that variable. And then, if you combine two variables in an arithmetic operation, the result of that arithmetic operation is something that must include all the possible values that you get from these two interval variables. Now the trouble is that this type of scheme—and there are lots of variations on this scheme—this kind of scheme does not work properly for lengthy programs or complicated ones. What goes wrong? Well, you end up with huge intervals. The intervals do indeed include the true values that you wish you had computed. But the trouble is the intervals include an awful lot more. There are ways to find out about this, and it’s possible, it’s possible in some cases, to make interval arithmetic work by doing something rather subtle. Instead, what I suggest that you do is run a program four times, each time directing the rounding errors in a different direction. Because the IEEE standard says you can. At least in principle, you’re allowed to say I want to round everything up, or I want to round everything down. Well, maybe I’d like to do it again rounding everything towards zero. And the fourth way is rounding to nearest, which is the default. Now it turns out that this very often gives an idea of how uncertain your result is because of roundoff by looking at the four different values and looking at how far apart they spread.”

−William Kahan, primary architect of modern floating point arithmetic, trash talking (i.e., quietly explaining the trouble with and offering a simple solution for) interval arithmetic at JuliaCon2021

28 July 2021

“It’s Gödels all the way down.”

−Marcus du Sautoy, on how adding axioms cannot repair an incomplete theory because it induces other unprovable truths, in his TED-Ed video “The paradox at the heart of mathematics: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem” [do we need to link to the turtles quote?]

20 July 2021

“[A]ll the efforts of Cauchy, Weierstrass, Dedekind, and Cantor (to just name a few) to get a ‘solid’ and ‘rigorous’ foundation to calculus and ‘real’ numbers, was a big waste of time [...]. We can backtrack back to the Pythagoreans, and refuse to accept the existence of square-root of 2 [...]. The only numbers that really exist are rational numbers, and instead of talking about ‘real’ numbers , e.g. sqrt(2), or Pi, we can talk about intervals of rational numbers [a,b], of as-small-as-we-wish size, where they are supposed to lie. In fact, that’s exactly how people treat ‘real’ numbers to get rigorous proofs [...], and it is called ‘interval arithmetic’.”

−Doron Zeilberger, distinguished professor of mathematics at Rutgers, reviewing a book about the history of numbers, accessible via The Edition (see also my pontifications in August 1994)

13 July 2021

“I need to say very aggressively that uncertainty is hard to communicate. If you are trying to acknowledge uncertainty, it is still difficult. People don’t want to hear it. Journalists don’t want to report it. At every step in the communication process, uncertainty gets filed away. So if you want to communicate uncertainty, it’s not enough to acknowledge it. You have to proclaim it. You have to insist on it.”

−Peter Sandman, “Risk = Hazard + Outrage: Three Paradigms of Risk Communication–and a Critique of COVID-19 Crisis Communication”

7 July 2021

“If the essence of precaution advocacy is ‘watch out!’, the essence of outrage management is ‘calm down’. The message is not ‘calm down’ because ‘calm down’ is not a calming message.”

−Peter Sandman, “Risk = Hazard + Outrage: Three Paradigms of Risk Communication–and a Critique of COVID-19 Crisis Communication”

7 July 2021

“Just give me a chance. It wasn't...it’s not my fault. It’s not like I made the conscious decision to be born a straight white male...I probably would’ve....”

−Matt Rife

posted to Youtube on 20 January 2023, performed in 2021

“Don't call our life a joke. Jokes have meaning. Keep up.”

−Jake Barr [barrr_none] on Tiktok

2 July 2021

“Because we had been told, for a month, ‘Forty-nine feet, we’re good. We’re good up to forty-nine feet. Forty-nine feet, no big, you know. Forty-nine feet, unless the dike breaks, forty-nine feet.’ Anybody in a position that knew it was going to get worse should have just laid it out on the line and said, okay, here’s the possibility.”

−Kelly [Straub] Nelson, on The Red River Flood, which crested at 54 feet

documentary published 2021

“If you have to put up a sign, you’ve pretty much already failed.”

−Todd Lithgow, discussing the design of ordinary traffic intersections

30 June 2021

“The existence of non-probabilistic or trans-probabilistic methods such as interval analysis, Dempster−Shafer theory, belief theory, possibility theory—which are collected under the rubric ‘imprecise probabilities’—imply that there is a kind of uncertainty that cannot be expressed by probability alone.”

−Scott Ferson, totally showing off by using hyphens, m-dashes, and an n-dash in a single sentence

30 June 2021

“Historians are silly enough to believe government records, although common folk know very well they are full of mistakes.”

−Vladik Kreinovich

21 June 2021

“This song completely changed everyone’s nationality to Icelandic.”

−Fairuz Hussaini, discussing the inexplicable happiness in hearing “Husavik” written by Fat Max Gsus, Rickard Göransson, and Savan Kotecha for the Netflix film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, performed by Molly Sandén (voice, physically played by Rachel McAdams) as Sigrit Ericksdóttir and Will Ferrell as Lars Erickssong

June 2021

“While the no-prior-information setup is practically relevant, one could also argue that every problem has at least partial prior information available. So as an alternative to the all-or-nothing Bayes vs. frequentist dichotomy that exists in the statistics literature, one can easily imagine a spectrum where the more I’m willing to assume (in the form of prior information), the more precise I can be in my inferential statements. In the case of complete prior information, an additive IM can be given in the form of the precise Bayesian posterior probability; for the classical frequentist case with no prior information, what’s described above (and in more detail in the book) leads to a non-additive IM that’s generally in the form of an imprecise necessity/possibility measure.

“Then there are cases in between the two extremes, ones with partial prior information available. The problems I have in mind are those where the parameter is high-dimensional but is known to have (or we’re willing to assume that it has) a certain low-dimensional or low-complexity structure, such as sparsity. One might be willing to specify a prior distribution for the “complexity” of the parameter but not be willing to make precise probability statements about the particular features of the parameter at a given complexity level. One option would be to ignore the prior information and achieve validity by using the IM developments described above and in the book. But presumably there’s an opportunity to improve the IM’s efficiency by incorporating this partial prior information in some sense. My current focus is on incorporating this partial prior information in an efficient way that retains (some sensible version of) the validity property.”

−Ryan Martin, in his SIPTA blog post suggesting statistical inference could be a spectrum across imprecise probabilities with respect to how much prior information is deployed, with Bayesian inference with precise priors as one pole and frequentist methods using no prior information as the other

6 June 2021

https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/d919fbc9-72ca-42de-9b44-c0bf53a7360b?in=11:40:10&out=11:44:32

−Dominic Cummings

26 May 2021

“What if we don’t even use reasons to reach conclusions?”

−Michael Stevens (Vsauce), “The Future of Reasoning”, an exquisite introduction to the Mercier-Sperber thesis that reasoning is not a mechanism of determining truth, but rather merely an adaption to build arguments that will be compelling to others

28 April 2021

[Pete Buttigieg: “If more guns made us safer, we’d be the safest country on earth.”]

Matheo, in Geneve, CH: “Japan is the least safest because they don’t have any guns...tons of violence and murders and no guns to keep them safe...bodies are piling up on the streets.”

Reality.Bites: “Well yeah, but that’s mainly Godzilla.”

21 April 2021, responding to Buttigieg's 28 June 2019 comment

“Actually, Mckenna’s suggestion of ‘unplugging it and plugging it back in’ is known as <Restart on failure> which is one of several basic strategies that NASA built into its robust guidance control and which Neil Armstrong used repeatedly during the Apollo 11 lunar descent that made him the first human on the moon. Robert Willis gave an amazing talk about this at ‘Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer’. Stop gas-lighting Mckenna!”

−Scott Ferson commenting on the Saturday Night Live sketch “Star Trek Spinoff” about a Star Trek prequel in which the Starfleet crew has some personal drama with Mckenna (played by Carey Mulligan).

18 April 2021

“My friends tell me that I’m being silly to think our technological world is in any danger from modern flat-earthers, luddites and antivivisectionists. But I teach undergraduates, and I’m here to tell you that we might have a problem.”

14 April 2021

Laura (via auto-reply email dated 7 April): “Thank you for your email. I am on leave 1st to 8th April. I will respond to your enquiry upon my return.”

Dominic: “Do we think Laura returns to work tomorrow, or does she return the day after tomorrow?”

Scott: “Ambiguity. It’s slightly better than the vagueness of ‘I’ll return later.’”

7 April 2021

“So ‘vagueness’ is essentially a category error? Okay, if vagueness arises because of a category error, what is the analogous error that creates epistemic and aleatory uncertainties? Cat is to dog as a category error is to....?”

−Dominic Calleja, one-upping the Village Voice writer’s joke about establishing the Law of the Excluded Middle with a proof that starts “Either the Law of the Excluded Middle is true or it is not true.”

6 April 2021

“Well, maybe if we didn’t live under a system that forces people to work or die, products that last forever would not be a problem for workers. We’ve got the technology to make all of our lives comfortable, but we do not use it because we want profit.” [edited]

−Talking Vidya, commenting on the idea in Veritasium’s video “This is why we can't have nice things” that workers supported industrial conspiracies for planned obsolescence

5 April 2021

“It seems clear from the post that the word ‘ontic’ means real, physical, or actual, as opposed to epistemic (which has to do with what is merely known). So, if you subscribed to a particular interpretation of quantum theory, you might say that the uncertainty about quantum phenonena is ontic in the sense that the indeterminism of atomic decay, for instance, has nothing to do with our not knowing or being able to predict it, but rather with an intrinsically (ontic) uncertainty that implies even Laplace’s Demon could not predict it. I have long suspected that people who use the words ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological’ are engaging in philosophical discussion which, although fun and interesting, are really only distractions for us trying to cobble together a practically useful theory of non-Laplacian uncertainty. Does it matter whether the quantity is intrinsically ill-defined or we just don't know the definition?”

27 March 2021

“Yeah, but as far as I’m concerned, a friend is just someone else I’ve gotta shoot before they turn state’s evidence.”

−Mickey Milkovich [played by Noel Fisher], on Shameless 11:7, written by Philip Buiser

originally broadcast over HBO on 7 March 2021

“We’ve accidentally deployed an inhumane way to collaborate.”

−Cal Newport, Georgetown computer scientist professor writing “E-mail is making us miserable” in The New Yorker describing research correlating email and its cost in mental stress, anger and burnout

26 February 2021

“There’s an element of oxymoron in trying to taxonomise ignorance. What we don’t know we cannot categorise. We don’t know it.”

−Yakov Ben Haim, in a ViCE discussion of the question of whether there are multiple kinds of uncertainties

17 February 2021

“For this particular case of numerical uncertainty, my experience is that the overwhelming practice, especially in industry, is to do precisely nothing.”

−François Hemez, in a ViCE discussion, answering how imprecision and uncertainty are handled in industry

17 February 2021

“Dark philosophy lets the truths of all narratives bloom. An arcane study of the role of narrative in the social construction of individual and collective identities has taken to the streets and turned into the everyday application of postmodern relativity. Now, the doctrine of equal rights for all storytelling rules. The corrosive consequences of this thought change are ubiquitous. ¶ Pure falsehoods have been elevated to ‘alternative facts.’ Cynical slogans, such as ‘Fair & Balanced’ for Fox News, cover hyperpartisan rants. Prejudice-reinforcing conspiracy theories can be widely distributed without shame and penalties. Political propaganda outlets are encouraged to practice RT’s black magic of ‘how any story can be another story.’ ¶ [...F]ar from eliminating metanarratives, postmodernism has only succeeded in liberating all narratives from the restrictions of factual accuracy, scientific objectivity, social fairness, moral rectitude, and personal honesty.”

−Wolf Schäfer, discussing the emergence and consequences of a poststructuralist view that metaphorical truth is as valid as factual truth

6 February 2021

“Mathematicians are all about generalisation, aren’t they? So why do the probabilists refuse to talk about sets of probability distributions or generalising probabilities in any way? It’s like a mathematician who only uses equal signs and never allows greater-than or less-than.”

−Dominik Hose

5 February 2021

Of course there are valid alternatives to making decisions beyond von Neumann–Morgenstern. I am not sure von Neumann–Morgenstern is even the most widely accepted theory of decision making. After all, there has been a Nobel Prize awarded for work that has grown out of (cumulative) prospect theory, which has displaced von Neumann–Morgenstern as a description of human decision making. And, if we relax the completeness axiom of von Neumann–Morgenstern, we immediately get a decision theory with imprecise probabilities which works arguably as well but allows for rational agents to decline to either buy or sell some gambles when their uncertainties do not allow them to order every possible pair of gambles. This theory is coherent and avoids sure loss as well, and it seems to be every bit as rational as von Neumann–Morgenstern.

1 February 2021

All models are cartoons, with apologies to George Box. Even the elaborate and intricate models that have become popular since the widespread use of computer simulations, they are only cartoons. You cannot make the model scientific merely by making it more intricate or more complex, even when that complexity corresponds to real phenomena. Very quickly we come to a point where making a model more realistic does not actually improve the model, as we are often more uncertain about the parameters describing the complexity that is added. It is a careful application of uncertainty analysis that transforms such a cartoon into a serious scientific model.

29 January 2021

“Word to the ruling class...If you make tanking the stock market easier than owning a home, then what happens next is 100% on you.”

−Michael Balch, commenting on the GameStop short squeeze

27 January 2021

I was born and have lived in a graced window of time in a civilization, free until this year from scary viral pandemics, when antibiotics worked and before microbial resistance, after the Vietnam draft and before the Great Recession, after the tumult and assassinations of the sixties and before luddite Trumpism, after rock and roll but before TikTok selfie dancing, after serious investment in public education precipitated by Sputnik and before utter unaffordability of college, after hunger in the West but before water shortages, after the pill and before the overturning of Rowe v. Wade, and after we went the moon but before we realized we could not go back.

18 January 2021

It has come as something of a surprise that Arnold Schwarzenegger, literally wielding his Conan sword, has been able to make me cry on this wet winter day.

10 January 2021

“Guys, we are all just overreacting. This week is finally when he becomes presidential. It’ll be glorious. He’ll finally take care of everything. And then he’ll be totally ready for his second term.”

−Ed B, on JoeMyGod commenting on reportage by Bloomberg that Trump is planning a “defiant” final week in office

10 January 2021

“Apparently a public consensus has developed that the president of the United States is psychologically unfit to hold office. Imagine that.”

−George Conway, on Twitter

8 January 2021

“All physical measurements have measurement uncertainty and are best represented with probability distributions.”

−Philip Stanley-Marbell, in the details of his EPSRC grant

project commencing 4 January 2021

“I showed this to my cat. She is now a lion.”

−@AH-er4um, YouTube commenter referring to a music-enhanced recut video from the 2019 Netflix film The King of the speech Henry V gives his army before the Battle of Agincourt, played by Timothée Chalamet, “You expect of me a speech? I have only one to give, and it is the same one I’d give were we not standing on the brim of a battlefield. It is the same one I’d give were we to meet in the street by chance. I have only ever hoped for one thing—to see this kingdom united under this English crown! All men are born to die. We know it. We carry it with us always. If your day be today, so be it! Mine will be tomorrow! Or mine today and yours tomorrow. It matters not. What matters is that you know, in your hearts, that today you are that kingdom united. You are England! Each and every one of you, England is you! And it is the space between you. Fight not for yourselves, fight for that space! Fill that space! Make it tissue! Make it mass! Make it impenetrable! Make it yours! Make it England! Make it England!”

2021

“I don’t believe anything the media tells me. I don’t believe anything academics tell me. I don’t believe much of what the President tells me. I don’t believe a word of what other politicians tell me. I don’t believe what celebrities tell me. I don’t believe what teachers tell me. I don’t believe what doctors tell me. Obviously, I don’t believe what lawyers tell me. I don’t even believe what the Pope tells me. I don’t believe what corporations tell me. I don’t believe what charities tell me. I don’t believe what any government employee tells me. I don’t believe what police officers tell me. I don’t believe what bankers tell me. I don’t believe what judges tell me, or trust their commitment to justice. I don’t have faith in juries. I don’t trust the word of generals or admirals. I don’t trust any book published after 1950. How am I supposed to live?”

−Milo Yiannopoulos, begging a question (?) on Parler

24 December 2020

Life during the pandemic has been different. For instance, today I showered for the third day in a row. My spouse is calling it a Christmas miracle.

20 December 2020

I hope everyone understands that, when the pandemic is over and we go back to the office, I am going to continue to wear pajama bottoms rather than pants to work.

19 December 2020

“An analogy that is sometimes helpful is that of determining whether two cars parked in a large parking lot are parked next to each other. If one knew that one car was parked on the left side of the parking lot and the other on the right side of the parking lot, then one could conclude that it is unlikely that the two cars are parked next to each other: only if both cars park on the boundary between the left and right sides, and then only if they actually choose adjacent spaces, will the two cars be parked next to each other. This is a conclusion enabled by the definiteness of the data. Now, suppose that one knows nothing at all about where the two cars are parked in the parking lot; what is the likelihood of their being parked next to each other? It is also low, but in this case not because one knows that the cars have been placed in different parts of the lot but rather because, in a large parking lot, it is simply unlikely that any two cars will happen to be next to each other. It is a conclusion that follows not from what is known but rather from what is not known; one cannot conclude from the available data that the cars are probably far apart; but at the same time there is no evidence to indicate that they are close. If, therefore, one is required to hazard a guess, the large size of the parking lot makes the supposition that they are not adjacent reasonable.”

−National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Spacecraft Conjunction Assessment and Collision Avoidance Best Practices Handbook, not quite grasping what risk analysis is and perhaps foreshadowing a deep scientific crisis

December 2020

“Sometimes things that are cheap aren’t as good.”

−Pat Mercardante

5 December 2020

“Four minutes is less than five minutes. Even in the United States, that’s still true.”

−Adam Finkel

2 December 2020

“And so now as we add more disasters to this doom chart we can assess how scary they are relative to earthquakes. So anything further up is more likely, and anything further to the right is more deathy. And so those are the things we really want to worry about.”

−Dominic Walliman, “The map of doom: apocalypses ranked”, in the Youtube series Domain of Science

30 November 2020

“There's a myth that linguists are pedants who love correcting people, but they're actually just enthusiastic about understanding language in all its infinite varieties, which is much worse.”

−Randall Munroe, being insightful in the comic xkcd.com/2390, but not being quite as funny as the talk page for the comic

26 November 2020

“I still need to do some obligatory training on bribery. It’s crazy. I know how to bribe.”

22 November 2020

“So we need a culture change where people recognise that certainty is more reflective of deceit than of knowledge. Though we’ve needed that for quite a while.”

−Alexander Wimbush, commenting on “COVID-19: Known Unknowns”, a webinar by the BMJ on covid-19

20 November 2020

“It seems that all exercises in expert elicitation work well, so long as we don’t look too closely at what we’re doing.”

16 November 2020

“Cox’s famous paper arguing that probability is the only possible model of uncertainty is still considered serious by some people, although not by any serious people.”

16 November 2020

“I still have faith left in the system, primarily because I believe so much money is at stake and a civil disruption caused by a coup just doesn’t seem like it would be good for the stock market, but I’m still concerned.”

−Luke Green, on the prospect of a coup in the United States

11 November 2020

“[A]lmost every culture on earth today divides its calendar [into seven-day chunks]. Some historians think the seven day week is so old it may be the oldest known human institution still functioning without a break. [...] It is one of the rare ideas [that] is simply so old, no records remain of exactly who first invented it or exactly why. ”

−Joe Hanson, Be Smart, in “Why Are There 7 Days In a Week? EXPLAINED” featuring a comic descent into madness starting after about seven minutes into the video

9 November 2020

“An optimist is someone who thinks the future is uncertain. A pessimist is right [about the future], but he gets no satisfaction from being so.”

−Robert Downey, Jr.

21 October 2020

Maya [Katherine Langford]: “Children can be so cruel.”
Dylan [Charlie Plummer]: “We’re all cruel.”

−Brian Duffield, screenwriter of Spontaneous, which The Hollywood Reporter called “explosively funny and touching”

film released 2 October 2020

“Person: what’s your favourite song?
“Me: it’s hard to explain.”

−Erfaneh Mhm, about “Iran (So Far Away)” by The Lonely Island, featuring Adam Levine and samples of Aphex Twin's “Avril 14th”, in an SNL Digital Short with Andy Samberg and Fred Armisen from Season 33 (2007) of Saturday Night Live, about which Daniel Mullarkey had previously remarked “how the hell can a love song between andy samberg and mahmoud ahmadinejad make me tear up?”

September 2020

“Suddenly the Amish are the top of the technological heap.”

−Bill P, commenting on the prospect of a solar coronal mass ejection ending our technological civilization, described by Anton Petrov in How World Almost Ended in 2012 And Still Might Later!

September 2020

“Trump: I am illegally defunding the Post Office so less people can vote.

“Democrats: *fewer”

−Michael Green

13 August 2020

“Our goal is to do for uncertainty what Arabic numerals did for numbers. Now, appropriately bombastic. But actually, mathematically, it’s sort of what we’ve done. Very basically, we represent uncertainties as arrays of realizations. That is, the way we would represent rolling a die would be to roll it ten thousand times and store it as an auditable data. Now, that’s fantastic because you can take these arrays and you can add them together row by row to see what happens under, say, a thousand or ten thousand scenarios…. Forget probability distribution. What? It has way too many syllables. Okay. All you have to do is write some goal in your spreadsheet. ‘Ooh, I want a profit of at least a million dollars.’ And then I’ll tell you the chance you’ll achieve your goal. Oh, and you can change your goal to whatever you want. Whatever you change it to, I’ll tell you the chance of achieving your goal. No probability distributions here though. Okay, that actually was the definition of a probability, but, shh! We don’t have to tell people.”

−Sam Savage, The goal of probability management

posted on 10 August 2020

“Patients requiring mechanical ventilation and those who had died were considered to have experienced poor outcomes.”

−Feng et al. 2020. Clinical Characteristics and Short-Term Outcomes of Severe Patients With COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. Frontiers in Medicine https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2020.00491

6 August 2020

“So you’re suggesting the BLM movement is a moral panic? The outrage we feel is not about the sheer numbers. It is about the shameless way the police close ranks, deny, lie, or even actively foment trouble themselves, and especially the way the good cops do not seem willing to reign in the bad ones. If you’ve got one bad cop and forty-nine good cops who don’t expose and drum out the bad cop, then you've got fifty bad cops.”

−scadqwqw, responding to “Sam Harris Breaks The Silence on BLM and Police Brutality” and ignoring the stunning difference between 2% and 20% in the estimate of 20 to 25 bad cops out of 110 sworn officers in Vallejo, California

1 August 2020

“And, finally, new rule. America’s top health officials have to find the courage to do what the health officials in Huntington, New York, did. They told the entire town of 200 hundred thousand to go on a diet because, as the head of the program put it, ‘[With] COVID-19, you’re twice as likely to have a poor outcome if you’re obese’. Actually it’s worse than that. Public Health England found that people with a body mass index of 35 to 40 have a 40% greater risk of dying from COVID. And, over 40, it’s a 90% greater risk. Even being mildly obese makes it five times more likely that catching the virus will land you in the ICU [intensive care]. […] I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the countries with the lowest rates of obesity have had the fewest COVID deaths. Maybe China isn’t hiding all their COVID deaths. Maybe their secret is that their obesity rate is six percent, and ours is 42. And pointing all this out doesn’t make me a dick. In fact, the shame is on everyone in media and government who is too cowardly to emphasize how important an issue this is. Because the virus made it an issue. Obesity was already killing us slowly, but you mix it with COVID and it kills you fast. You can scream all you want at me for saying that, but it won’t change the scientific truth of it.”

−Bill Maher, “New Rule: The Quarantine 15” segment from HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, with an important message but failing to understand that 90% greater is actually less than twice as big (unless, to be fair, he is distinguishing poor outcome from its subset dying)

posted on YouTube 31 July 2020

“We are just past the halfway point of 2020, and if nothing else happened this year, it would still go down as one of the strangest years in history. The best word to describe it, I believe, is ‘uncertainty’ [...]. No one knows when the [R]apture will come (Matthew 24:36; Mark 13:32). [...] It would take a book to make an exhaustive study of the chronological order of the [R]apture and future events; much more tha[n] space allows me. Rest assured, however, as of right now, the Christians are still here, and the Tribulation has not started.”

−Timothy Johnson, whistling in the dark in “The Pre-Tribulation Rapture”, in the Greenvile, Ohio, daily newspaper Daily Advocate

31 July 2020

“The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history”

−SublimeSparo, channeling Hegel, commenting perhaps in a ‘meta’ way on a shakily researched video “The Spanish Flu & How The World Recovered (1918-1929) History Documentary” by History Time that called World War I soldiers the Greatest Generation and said that American Midwest farmers of the 1930s “starved to death in droves” (that that did not happen may explain why there is no right to food in the US)

25 July 2020

“Bayesians look at the world through their posteriors.”

25 July 2020

“I don't think Joe Biden or Donald Trump will be president a year from now. I don't even know if the presidency will be a thing a year from now.”

−Michael Balch

22 July 2020

Enrique [discussing the progress report for his PhD project “Uncertainty Quantification in Fusion Power Plant Design” with no prior knowledge of Abbott and Costello]: “Figures 19 and 20 show the Greenwald factors as functions of net electric power from a multiobjective optimisation using a genetic algorithm and the resulting Pareto frontier after 100 generations.”
Scott: “What is the unit of net electric power in those figures?”
Enrique: “Watt.”
Scott: “What is the unit of net electric power?”
Enrique: “Watt.”
Scott: “The net electric power. What is its unit?”
Enrique: “The unit is watt.”
Scott: “Yes, that is what I'm asking.”
Enrique: “What?”

22 July 2020

“Despite a slight time delay in getting back to you, I am still interested...”

−Andrew McArdle, responding to an email sent to him at 9:10 am on Monday, 3 September 2012 [about eight years earlier]

15 July 2020

“You know, I think I made a mistake.”

−purported death-bed statement by a thirty-year-old Covid patient who had attended a ‘Covid party’, reported by Jane Appleby, chief medical officer at San Antonio's Methodist Hospital, perhaps uncredibly implying self-awareness by someone who would attend a Covid party

reported by San Antonio duopoly WOAI-KABB 10 July 2020

“The AI has a vast number of potential strategies to choose from, but some are unethical—by which we mean, from an economic point of view, that there is a risk that stakeholders will apply some penalty, such as fines or boycotts, if they subsequently understand that such a strategy has been used.”

−Nicholas Beale, Heather Battey, Anthony C. Davison, and Robet S. MacKay in “An unethical optimization principle” [Royal Society Open Science 7: 200462], leading to the question of whether their definition of ‘unethical’ as likely to attract penalties is more or less terrifying than their reference to something called ‘The AI’

published 1 July 2020

Hello! I am Katerina Kamprani and this is The Uncomfortable; a collection of everyday objects that have been intentionally redesigned to be impractical. My work is intended to challenge assumptions about the functionality and purpose of common objects, and to encourage us to rethink our relationship with the world around us. Thank you for visiting, and I hope that my designs will make you laugh, look at the world around you with fresh eyes and perhaps even spark conversations about the role of design in our daily lives.

Such

a screendoor on a submarine

Gasoline-powered turtleneck sweater

fur sink

The qwerty keyboard array was designed to slow down typists who would otherwise jam the keys on the original typewriters.

A visit to failblog

The very symbol of modernity is the smart phone, but it is hard to a tool that must be manipulated by hand that is so slippery one can barely hold it and has one face that is entirely touch-sensitive and multiple buttons all over its edges

set of all sets

'This sentence is false'

“How do you deal with uncertainty? What is wisdom in a situation no one can fathom? Intervening and seeing how it turns out, or doing nothing before you know more?”

−Tamar Stelling, “No one knows what problem The Ocean Cleanup actually solves”, The Correspondent

written 22 June 2020

No, sorry. It wouldn't help to turn on my video for the Zoom meeting. During the lockdown I have evolved past the need for a body. I have become pure energy, pure thought, totally incorporeal, not life as you know it at all.

17 June 2020

“[...] Ferson, who turns out to be a meaty heat seeker for the blind spot and the point of pain [...]”

−automatic translation by DeepL.com of an aside in a Dutch article by science journalist Tamar Stelling reporting on a symposium about environmental engineering strategies in Ocean Cleanup [alternative expressions might be considered: (meaty) hefty ... fat ... jolly, (heat seaker) provocateur ... troublemaker ... shit-stirrer ... ringmaster, (blind spot) arguments by both sides with unexamined assumptions, (point of pain) embarrassing weakness or omissions in the argument]

12 June 2020

“Given the virus, the rioting, the destroyed economy, I’m starting to think maybe we should have elected the email lady.”

−Alex Cole @acnewsitics

31 May 2020

“All confidence distributions, fiducial distributions, and (most) Bayesian posteriors suffer from a structural defect in which particular propositions are guaranteed or nearly guaranteed to be accorded a high confidence (or belief) value, regardless of whether or not those propositions are true. It is not hard to imagine that distribution-like confidence structures—that is, confidence structures that are only slightly non-additive—will suffer from a similar, if slightly less severe, false confidence phenomenon.”

−Michael Scott Balch, in his 2020 paper “New two-sided confidence intervals for binomial inference derived using Walley’s imprecise posterior likelihood as a test statistic” (International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 123: 77–98)

available online 29 May 2020

“Yes, you’ve heard right, Python is identical and as easy as Lua, although Lua is easier than Python. Beginning from Lua and then escalating to Python is recommended.”

−Rafey Iqbal Rahman, perhaps channeling Orwell on animal equality in a reply on StackShare about which coding environment is better for microcontrollers

21 May 2020

“Homo erectus almost certainly hunted and butchered prey. And the researchers even suggest that hominids might have hunted each other. Like maybe Homo erectus hunted and ate Paranthropus, which is how that link in the transmission chain could have happened. Now, the research does also suggest that the virus could have been transmitted by mating, which I’m sure has crossed your mind, but they think the hunting pathway was more likely.”

−PBS Eons in “The two viruses that we’ve had for millions of years” [writer Darcy Shapiro], acknowledging their viewers’ dirty minds in their explanation of associations between herpesvirus strains and primate species

20 May 2020

“Today people view expertise as in service to something else, an agenda, emotions, a conspiratorial plot and so on. [...] It’s hard to unilaterally condemn this suspicion of [experts]. You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to know that experts can and do have political agendas, or they simply fail to see the collateral damage of their policies. Davies writes that ‘The resentment of elites that we see around us today is fueled by a sense [that the promise of experts] is now bogus. [...] Revelations of their personal moral failings, via media exposés, leaks, and social media searches make the distinction of these figures ever harder to sustain. Their claim to represent our interests becomes nothing but a shroud for their own political agendas.’ And that’s why this [level of distrust of] experts is so complicated. It’s sometimes justified, sometimes not. But it raises a much deeper problem for society. As Rosenbloom argues, it’s not just trust in institutions or science that’s at risk, but our trust in each other. Whereas older conspiracy theories often targeted those at the top, the wealthy elites pulling the strings, today’s conspiracy theories often target people on the bottom as well: survivors of school shootings who are called crisis actors, scientists and teachers deemed spherist shills, pizza shop owners labeled pedophiles, and Youtube channels theorized to be fronts for the Illuminati. At the same time, people at the top who were formerly the perpetrators of conspiracies can now be the victim, like, say, people in the highest offices of government. Davies argues that our lack of trust in elites or each other has resulted in a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all. It’s not that we want to murder each other, but that in any kind of disagreement we distrust the basic premise of our so-called opponents. They’re either a hypocrite, a liar, politically tainted, or so on. The phrase virtual signaling for instance is not an attack on the virtue itself, but rather a statement that it’s done inauthentically. Similarly, arguments have become a place to win this so-called war rather than to seek truth. The Internet has become not a place to advance knowledge but a place to go to see people destroyed or dumped on in the game of truth. And it’s this gamification of truth that is particularly worrisome. Beyond the Internet we see tons of knowledge produced for think tanks, lobbyists or advocacy groups, and while some might simply suggest that a marketplace of ideas will separate the good ideas from the bad, Davies warns that the facts alone won’t save us. There is no overwhelming victory of truth against fiction, especially on the Internet. While some platforms have recently cracked down on conspiracy theory content, paranoia and fear are still incredibly shareable. We could also ask if fake news and post truth are more symptoms of arguments accelerating to the point where only superficial judgments are possible as Davies writes. Instead, he suggests we defend slowness, the ability to restrain our impulse toward reactivity and commit ourselves to thoughtfulness. So what do you think [audience]? How can we continue to build a society based on trust while still promoting healthy skepticism and criticism? Or do we truly live in a post-truth society?”

−Alec Opperman, read by Jared Bauer, How Conspiracies Changed, Wisecrack, apparently not having noticed that the point of argument has never been ‘to seek truth’

11 May 2020

“The University of Liverpool’s motto is haec otia studia fovent, which means ‘these peaceful times foster learning’. I’ve translated otia as ‘peaceful times’ but it also means ‘leisure’ or ‘idleness’ or even ‘emptiness’. I think today we’d say ‘free time’. Be smart about how you use your covid otia.”

10 May 2020

“Research is not a technical activity. It is political. As has always been true, and will continue to be true, information is power. Power can be wielded for public good or to further vested interest. And statistical research can serve citizens and support democracy or cloak a political claim in a veneer of respectability and hoodwink people into a fantasy that ultimately only serves those who already wield power. It is no wonder people are skeptical when any one of us says, ‘Give us your data and we will do good, good things with it.’ To succeed, we must show respect, earn trust, and differentiate what we do as something to be valued. This is not about being difficult; it is an essential part of every researcher’s license to operate.”

−John Pullinger, “Lots of lovely numbers, but why does everyone make it so difficult?”, Opinion 1(2), 100033

8 May 2020

“They say that education is the telling of smaller and smaller lies. Research, similarly, is a sequence of realisations of tinier and tinier exceptions to broad theses.”

2 May 2020

Apophis: I'm gonna end civilization in 2068.
Corona virus in 2020: hold my RNA

−Grey Troll, commenting on Anton Petrov's video “Russian Scientists Warn Apophis May Hit Earth in 2068”

~April 2020

“More like Bias-ian statistics, am I right?”

−Alexander Wimbush, commenting on Andrew Gelman's blog post as reported in Kevin Drum's article “What’s the Deal With Bayesian Statistics? (from the hard-hitting journalism of Mother Jones) which has something fun in every paragraph and illustration

29 April 2020

people during evacuation: “I don’t wanna leave my house.”
people during lockdown: “Get me out of this prison.”

−Setsuna Aottg, in comment about Abacaba's Youtube video Coronavirus: Are the lockdowns actually working? (April 21st update)

23 April 2020

“If the unofficial song of social distancing is Alec Benjamin’s ‘Six Feet Apart’, I think I may have found the song for the lockdown in ‘If the World is Ending’ by JP Saxe, ft. Julia Michaels. It’s poignant, even beautiful. Maybe I am overly sentimental on our fifth Friday in lockdown. Fifth, right? Pat is laughing at me because there are tears on my face. Yes, sure, it rhymes ‘for the hell of it’ with ‘relevant’, but, hey, artistic license. What gets me is that, in the song, their relationship has been over for a year. It’s like the Lady Antebellum song ‘Need You Now’ or that song ‘Dust’ by Matt Simons, ft. Betty Who. It’s emotionally equivalent in a certain way with ‘I Wasn’t Expecting That’. I think Spotify has been trying to make me cry this afternoon.”

17 April 2020

“I heard it was developed in the basement of a pizza shop in Bowling Green, Benghazi.”

− Steal My Memes, responding to Trevor Noah's review of coronavirus origin conspiracy theories

17 April 2020

“As soon as people started saying ‘Ok, boomer’, all of a sudden we’ve got coronavirus and old people are dying. That can’t be a coincidence.”

−Trevor Noah, The Daily Show on Twitter, discussing the conspiracy theory suggested by Roseanne Barr and others that coronavirus is a bioweapon created to take down old people

17 April 2020

“I remember restaurants...In the before times.”

−Guy Incognito

10 April 2020

“Of course, all the experts agree that the only way out of this pandemic is to increase, in any way possible, widely available reliable testing.”

−Stephen Colbert, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RQ4f4nujT4&t=4m19s

(the very day that “No test is better than a bad test: impact of diagnostic uncertainty in mass testing on the spread of Covid-19” is drafted) 9 April 2020

CDs are less useful for obtaining confidence for all possible statements that can be made concerning the full parameter, as in a sense is the goal of the Inferential Model and the Bayesian method, where false confidence might occur at least in the Bayesian case.

−Cunen, C., N.L. Hjort, and T. Schweder. 2020 Confidence in confidence distributions! Proc. R. Soc. A 476: 20190781. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2019.0781

accepted for publication 9 April 2020

“Notes from the fourth week of my coronovirus lockdown: This afternoon I fell asleep and slept so hard that I strongly suspect I may have been rooffied.”

7 April 2020

“After my computer has now rebooted, whatever this program is has installed and opened itself (in flagrant and vicious disregard of the principle of human assent...which I've never heard of but which ought to exist and ought to be a fundamental element in humane algorithms). It suggests, bossily but rather unconvincingly, that I should message @Gray, Nicholas or @De Angelis, Marco. Ah ha, judging by the fact that it knows you both as your surname-comma-firstname, I deduce this must be a clunky Microsoft program. It seems like it’s straining to look like Slack, with options Activity, Chat, Teams, Assignments, Calendar, Calls, Files, ‘...’, Apps, Help, and a phone icon. Oh, it also has an eye icon and the word ‘Team’ in the corner. Ah, this must be Teams, which I never installed, opened, assented to use, or ever willingly or knowingly used. Is there a gender-neutral way to say ‘poor man’s Slack’? I guess there isn’t.”

6 April 2020

“Actually, I have long felt sure that I would live long enough to see the collapse of our civilization. What I didn’t anticipate is that that collapse would be so boring. ¶ For the last ten years, I have been routinely saying at dinner parties and the like that the End might be in the form of a great Sino-American war, which in my judgment is itself a near certainty. For many years earlier, I had presumed it would be a Simplification à la that novel Canticle for Liebowitz or Cambodia in real life (and recent events in the US made me circle round to this presumption lately). ¶ Of course I never believed that the End would be in the form of This is the End. Though it was possibly my favorite film of 2013. To be fair, competition was weak that year. Dallas Buyers Club, American Hustle, Gravity, all great, but hardly life-changing. Never saw 12 Years a Slave…too depressing. I don’t know whether you saw This is the End, or whether your sensibilities are such that I should recommend it to you. Think of the Nicolas Cage’s Left Behind, only not a horrible movie. The funniest scene in the entire film is when the boys, having just witnessed the Rapture on the streets of Los Angeles with people dramatically sucked up in blue spotlights into Heaven, return to a huge crowd at a party at James Franco’s house in Hollywood where not a single person was raptured. ¶ It’s funny how humor works in films like this as they take the Biblical account completely seriously, and the joke is profoundly at the expense of the non-believer, showing them in the depths of their shallowness, vanity and, yes, their depravity. (Can you say ‘depths of shallowness’?) Yet I suspect believers would not approve. Could it be just the count of the F-words in the dialog? ¶ What was I saying about the covid sequestration being boring?”

5 April 2020

“What’s hard is when social distancing conflicts with mating season.”

4 April 2020

“We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”

−Jeremy Konyndyk, formerly USAid, reported by Pilkington & McCarthy in “The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life”, The Guardian

reported 28 March 2020

“We now live in a time Zoroastrians refer to as, the Gumezishn? Or, the Mixture. Good and Evil, Truth and The Lie, both exist together in our world. But Angra Mainyu’s presence is temporary. They are a stain on the world rather than a permanent fixture. Zoroastrians see the physical world as a trap that Ahura Mazda lured Angra Mainyu into. Now trapped in the physical world Angra Mainyu can be defeated slowly by the good thoughts, good words, and good deeds of humans working with Ahura Mazda. [Section] 2, Heaven and Hell: Zoroastrians believe that when a person dies their soul leaves their body. The soul is then led to the Bridge of Judgement. Above this bridge lies heaven, below, hell. Here, the soul’s good and bad deeds are weighed on a scale. Depending on the balance of good to evil deeds, the soul ascends to heaven, a paradise of infinite bliss, called the Abode of Song. Or falls down to hell, to suffer, quote, ‘long age of misery, darkness, bad food, and the crying of woe’. This is called England….I mean, sorry, sorry, this is called Duzakh.”

−Cogito in his YouTube video “Zoroastrianism Explained” starting at 7:14

28 March 2020

“Well, I’m guessing the ‘indivisble’ in US constitution takes a wh[o]le new meaning. It just means its citizens can’t divide 2 numbers”

−Robi_CK , commenting on Matt Parker’s Youtube exposition “Why do people keep getting this wrong‽” of the Internet meme of the form “317 million people in America and you spend 360 million on just introducing Obamacare? Just give each citizen a million bucks” [high marks for Robi_CK’s witty and apt point, but marks off for misspelling indivisible and for forgetting that the word appears in the US Pledge of Allegiance but not actually the US Constitution, but full marks to Matt for his explanation, and on his use of the interrobang]

24 March 2020

“Not to make light of the situation but, so far, the surest prediction I can make about this pandemic is that we will see a global, exponential explosion of emails.”

−Scott Ferson

14 March 2020

“We are making every misstep leaders initially made in table-tops at the outset of the pandemic planning in 2006. We had systematically addressed all of these and had a plan that would work – and has worked in Hong Kong/Singapore. We have thrown 15 years of institutional learning out the window and are making decisions based on intuition. Pilots can tell you what happens when a crew makes decisions based on intuition rather than what their instruments are telling them. And we continue to push the stick forward….”

−James V. Lawler, reported by Eric Lipton in “The ‘Red Dawn’ emails: 8 key exchanges on the faltering response to the coronavirus” in The New York Times, 11 April 2020

12 March 2020

“Parasite was a good film on how urban pluvial flooding disproportionately affects poor neighbourhoods due to (but not only) outdated drainage, low/no investment or green infrastructure, less political clout, & high population densities. Rest of the film was fun if unnecessary imo”

−Simon D.A. Clark (@Sunkensie), displacement tweeting while finishing his dissertation on ecological services and hydrological phenomena

19 February 2020

“The lies aren’t meant to be consistent. The goal is merely to disrupt the truth from being exposed.”

−Nancy LeTourneau, writing in Washington Monthly

18 February 2020

“Although health care expenditure per capita is higher in the USA than in any other country, more than 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, and 41 million more have inadequate access to care. ... [A] single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually.... Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1.73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo.”

−Galvani, Alison P., Alyssa S. Parpia, Eric M. Fostera, Burton H. Singer, and Meagan C. Fitzpatrick (2020). Improving the prognosis of health care in the USA. The Lancet 395(10223): 524-533. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/abstract

published 15 February 2020

“Most of my science outreach is now either done: A) in the back of a taxi B) on Grindr.”

−Simon D.A. Clark (@Sunkensie)

4 February 2020

“We have always been strangers to the night.”

−narrated by Samira Wiley, with editor Paul Kiff, composer Edmund Butt and director Bill Markham, but no credited writer, in the episode “Dusk Till Dawn” from the hypnotically exquisite Night on Earth, a British documentary series made for Netflix using the latest low-light camera technology revealing previously unobserved animal behaviours after dark

original release 29 January 2020

“Instead of trying to design things for an average human, they embraced the variability.”

−Matt Parker, discussing the reaction of the US Air Force to the recognition that the centroid of a high-dimensional anthropometric study is sparsely populated in “Does the average person exist?”, Standup Maths

19 January 2020

“[The first order second moment (FOSM) approach] is an extremely versatile approach and works when the moments are sufficient information to proceed with the problem. For most Civil Engineering problems this is adequate, therefore FOSM is the ‘workhorse’ of propagating uncertainty.”

−Robb Eric S. Moss, page 74 in Applied Civil Engineering Risk Analysis (second edition), Springer

2020

“A decorator function is basically a function that adds new functionality to a function…”

−Estefania Cassingena Navone, in her helpful post “The @property decorator in Python: its use cases, advantages, and syntax”

19 December 2019

“For the most part, the nerds have inherited the earth, you know? So, they were right.”

−Brent Spiner in the film Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary

film released 26 November 2019

“Nobody welcomes uncertainty. But a sample size of one doesn’t imply zero variance, and not repeating a measurement doesn’t imply it is repeatable. An expert with no uncertainty is no expert.”

−Scott Ferson

26 September 2019

23 September 2019

“Plantinga himself had a colleague from the medical faculty when he was teaching somewhere and this colleague was supposed to be a solipsist (believed that he was the only person in the world) and his graduate students used to say to Plantinga, ‘You know, we take very good care of that professor because, when he goes, we all go.’”

−Daniel Hill, “Alvin Plantinga, Part 1”, Timeline Theological Videos (https://stjohnstimeline.org/)

uploaded to YouTube on 19 September 2019

“Their evil is still not gone”

−Sam Fender, “White Privilege”, Hypersonic Missiles, Polydor

13 September 2019

“Got a big laugh in my class this afternoon. ‘In most sciences if reality and the model don’t match, then the model is deemed wrong. In economics that’s taken as evidence that there is something wrong with reality.’ Thing is, I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

−Robert J. Frey

12 September 2019

“So when he sings and dances in public [it’s] ‘historic’ and ‘amazing’ but when I do it it’s ‘weird’ and ‘embarrassing’.”

Emma Wasilewski, commenting on Ben Platt’s choreography in his video “Rain”

uploaded to YouTube 10 September 2019

Josh: “I know that ASME has a VVUQ journal, and I know that SIAM has a UQ journal. I was wondering what other UQ journals you are aware of?”

Scott: “It is a jungle out there:

I am confident there are more. Why do you ask?”

6 September 2019

“In school you notice that jokes about Jews have become funny again. Those kinds of jokes are acceptable again.”

−student in Köln gymnasium play about the Holocaust in Jan Schmitt’s Deutsche Welle documentary “What neo-Nazis have inherited from original Nazism”

Episode aired 21 September 2019

“Fake is when it’s wrong, Mr. President, not when it’s unpleasant.”

−Neil Cavuto, Fox News host, in his closing monologue (https://thehill.com/homenews/media/459365-foxs-cavuto-roasts-trump-over-criticism-of-network)

29 August 2019

“There are three forms of [inferential uncertainty] presentations: confidence density, confidence distribution, confidence curve.”

−Min-ge Xie, speaking at the Data & Information Fusion Conference in Santa Fe

21 August 2019

“Reliability is a part of trust, sure. But it’s a very small part.”

20 August 2019

“Do we really need explainability? Maybe just better calibration.”

−Rajeev Mittu, Branch Head at Naval Research Laboratory , discussing the future of machine learning

20 August 2019

Jim (lecturing): “Relations aren’t properties of entities. Philosophers say relations are non-monadic. You can’t tell my relationships with the world just by looking at me.”

Scott (sotto voce) “Wha? One look at your haircut and we know your relationship with the world.”

20 August 2019

“The uncertainty is hard for doctors as well as patients.”

−Lisa Sanders, Netflix series Diagnosis, “Déjà Vu” (season 1, episode 6)

16 August 2019

“Orgulity is the opposite of humility. Not being a native speaker, I had to open a dictionary when I saw Gordon Belot’s paper “Bayesian Orgulity” (Philosophy of Science 2013). ¶ This putative orgulity concerns two sorts of theorems about subjective probability, frequencies, and calibration. Informally put, the first sort shows that a Bayesian agent will, indeed must, be sure that his probabilities are the right ones, and that statistics would bear that out in the long run. “Sure” means here that in his self-assessment, he will give zero probability to the contrary. Equally informally put, the other sort of theorem shows that Bayesian agents will, in an overwhelming majority of possible cases, be wrong in just that respect.”

−Bas van Fraassen, in his blogpost “What is Bayesian orgulity? (1)”

11 August 2019

“How much do I want to be a party to essentially making fun of people on their worst day of their lives, even if they have done something wrong. Like, who gave the internet the right to add to someone’s punishment?”

−Freddie Campion, explaining why he retired his Twitter account @_FloridaMan

reported by The Washington Post “Is it okay to laugh at Florida Man?”, 15 July 2019

“If a service is given to you for ‘free,’ you are not the customer, you are the product.”

−Olandp, discussing the Facebook’s five-billion-dollar fine by the FTC

12 July 2019

“Don’t burn bridges...but set the house on fire.”

−Nick Gray, giving the best advice I’ve ever heard about how to give a talk to a room of academics

10 July 2019

Don't take yourself so seriously
Look at you all dressed up for someone you never see
[...]
Don't let those demons in again
I fill the void up with polished doubt, fake sentiment
[...]
Oh I hope somehow, I'll wake up young again
All that's left of myself
Holes in my false confidence

−Noah Kahan, “False Confidence” on his debut album Busyhead

album released on 14 June 2019

“Did you see the 2004 film The Aviator with DiCaprio? It argued that Howard Hughes was a genius not despite his craziness, but because of it. I find that everyone is crazy to some extent. Literally everyone. The only question is whether you get enough out of the interaction to make bearing that craziness worth it.”

9 June 2019

“The future is uncertain, but the science of uncertainty is the science of the future.”

−Ian Stewart, Do Dice Play God, page 266

publication date 6 Jun 2019

Archangel Gabriel [Jon Hamm]: “God does not play dice with the universe.”
Demon Crowley [David Tennant]: “Where have you been?”

−Good Omens [S1:E6], written by Neil Gaiman for Amazon Studios and BBC Studios

31 May 2019

“We humans are lousy at detecting deception.”

−Joe Navarro, former FBI agent, “Former FBI Agent Explains How to Read Body Language”, Tradecraft, WIRED

21 May 2019

“Ladies and Gentlemen: The saddest and funniest testament to American bigotry we've ever seen in our data.” [image below]

−John Dick (@jdcivicscience), on Twitter

11 May 2019

“What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: ‘Who is to blame?’”

−Valery Legasov [played by Jared Harris] in the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin

release date 6 May 2019

“I’m not doing anything unethical. I just wanna ask people about growing plants.”

−Francis Baumont de Oliveira, on the ethical approval process required to interview business people about their businesses

3 May 2019

“How did we end up in this situation? // [H]umanity has already been digging the earth for centuries to take its industrial resources. Humans start using CO2-emitting fossil fuels, mining coal from the earth on a massive scale, at the beginning of the 19th century. This kind of energy source is largely responsible for the environmental turmoil we live in today. // The origins of this venture can be found in England.”

−the French film Breakpoint: A Counter History of Progress [L'homme a mangé la terre], written by Christophe Bonneuil, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, and Jean Robert Viallet, dependably contextualising totally accurate facts about the Industrial Revolution with a subtle dig [no pun] on the English, which is quickly overshadowed by the subsequent not-as-subtle allusion to English involvement in transatlantic slave trade

released on Arte 24 April 2019

“so str function does not convert to a real string anymore. One HAS to say an encoding explicitly for some reason I am to lazy to read through why. Just convert it to utf-8 and see if ur code works. e.g. var = var.decode('utf-8')”

−Charlie Parker, posting at 23:32, presumably after a long day, on Stack Overflow

22 April 2019

“I look back on pictures of me when I was eighteen, and my eyes looked like I still had a soul.”

−Francis Baumont de Oliveira

18 April 2019

“I am so blissfully unaware of everything”

−Sam Fender, “Hypersonic Missiles”

March 2019

“Karl sounds like another Jack to be honest.”

3 March 2019

“The Swedish can fetishize anything.”

−sotto voce reaction to the notion of an “uncertainty show” [osäkerhetsshowen] discussed in the presentation “Using games to train or test our ability to express epistemic uncertainty” by Prof Ullrika Sahlin from Lund University at a conference held in Berlin on uncertainty in risk analysis hosted by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) and European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)

21 February 2019

“But there is no word for the unique agony of uncertainty.”

−Michael Burnham [played by Sonequa Martin-Green], “Saints of Imperfection”, Star Trek: Discovery [season 2, episode 5], written by Kirsten Beyer

release date 14 February 2019

Dominic: “Machine learning for predicting rare events? How would that be possible?”
Scott: “What are you talking about? Machine learning can do everything. Just ask any young person. They’ll tell you it can do anything.”
Enrique: “Why are you so jaded?”
Scott: “You used to be a believer!”
Dominic: “No, I agree machine learning’s been massively oversold.”
Enrique: “It’s just a tool.”
Scott: “Yes, as are the people who use it.

11 February 2019

“[From their 1912-1915 correspondence on solipsism, Bertrand Russell] famously mentions his encounters with [Christine] Ladd-Franklin, hinting at a difference of opinions and her inability to see the inconsistency in what she claimed. After analysing the correspondence, with some letters resurfacing only recently, one sees a completely different picture: Russell not only does not object to what she claims, he even agrees with her!”

−Adam Trybus (2019). Two of a kind: setting the record straight on Russell’s exchange with Ladd-Franklin on solipsism. The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 39(2): 97-192.

25 January 2019

“Police forced to intervene as Brexit tensions rise outside Parliament.”

−Evening Standard, caption for the above photograph of Francis’ mum and her radical, vaguely terroristic, ‘remoaner’ colleagues

16 January 2019

“[1] Indeed, one might say that ‘the Crain and Crain fails mainly to explain.’”

−Adam Finkel, the footnote to his comments to EPA on its moribund “secret science” regulation: “Perhaps the most well-known ‘study’ of the aggregate costs of regulation is the article by Mark Crain and Nicole Crain suggesting that regulations ‘cost’ the U.S. nearly $2 trillion per year. This work is of no real value, since it relies on comparing the GDP growth rates of different countries to a subjective index of ‘regulatory quality,’ which of course has no relationship to regulatory burden. And I hope needless to say, even a robust correlation between GDP and actual burden would not be useful for estimating ‘cost.’ [1] ”

2018

“There used to be a time when I thought I could rely on Future Francis, But I’ve come to realise that I can’t trust that guy. It’s up to me to get things done.”

−Francis Baumont de Oliveira

28 September 2018

“I had wanted to wrap this up in a neat little package, about a girl who is a comedienne from Detroit, becomes famous in New York with all the world coming her way, gets this horrible disease of cancer, then fights it, and then miraculously things neatly tie up and she gets well. I wanted a perfect ending. So I sat down to write the book before there even was an ending. Now I’ve learned the hard way. It’s about not knowing. Having to change. Taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what’s going to happen next.”

−Gilda Radner [1946−1989], in archival recordings assembled in the documentary film Love, Gilda [directed by Lisa D’Apolito and edited by Anne Alvergue and David Cohen], apparently reading aloud from her posthumously released book It’s Always Something, where she had written “I had wanted to wrap this book up in a neat little package about a girl who is a comedienne from Detroit, becomes famous in New York, with all the world coming her way, gets this horrible disease of cancer, is brave and fights it, learning all the skills she needs to get through it, and then, miraculously, things are neatly tied up and she gets well ... I wanted a perfect ending, so I sat down to write the book with the ending in place before there even was an ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Like my life, this book has ambiguity. Like my life, this book is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”

book released 1989; film released 21 September 2018

All my role models are on TV for the wrong reasons
And, I will unravel if you rip away my best pieces
Would’ve never come so far without someone there to start it
Can I truly love the art when I kinda hate the artist?
But, all my role models are on TV for the wrong reasons
Wrong reasons

−AJR, “Role Models”, The Click (Deluxe edition), AJR Productions

album released 21 September 2018

Scott: “Has [the executive pro-vice chancellor with whom we are about to meet] had his lunch yet?”

Personal assistant to the executive pro-vice chancellor: “We don’t have lunch at this level.”

21 August 2018

“When Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living—he didn’t mean for you to use social media to force the rest of us to examine your damn life.”

−Adam Crowe

10 August 2018

“Mispronunciation is a sign of the autodidact. Making fun of mispronunciation is a sign of the fool.”

−Robert J. Frey

30 July 2018

“Yes I’ve heard this word. I think sociopaths use it in an attempt to discredit the notion of empathy”

−John Cleese, in a tweet on the word snowflake as an insult to liberals

8 July 2018

“I loathe error bars, because they call attention to the least probable values.”

−David Spiegelhalter

June 2018

“Transportation safety regulations and the rule-making process in the U.S. is very reactive, slow and usually, unfortunately, written in blood of past victims.”

−Najmedin Meshkati, quoted in a news report which added “The U.S. has long trusted automakers to guarantee their cars’ safety and it hasn’t always ended well.”

May 2018

Isola [Katherine Parkinson]: “She’s only four years old. What can she understand?”

Amelia [Penelope Wilton]: “I’m older than time, and I understand nothing.”

−Kevin Hood, Don Roos, and Tom Bezucha (screenwriters), The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, on human capacity to comprehend the meaning and finality of death

film release in the UK, 20 April 2018

“I mentioned in the title there was this one phrase which maybe is not familiar, what is called ‘probability dilution’. This is a bit of an unusual kind of a paradox which says that the noisier data that I have in my measurements of the satellites’ position and their velocities, etc., this actually leads to a higher non-collision probability. Right, so what this indicates is that [...] data which is of lower quality actually can give these analysts false confidence, some kind of higher certainty that their satellites are safe. Alright, and so it’s a paradox in in that kind of sense, that worse data actually suggests that we know more about the situation at hand. [...] Probability dilution is this phenomenon where the noisier data is implying that the the non-collision probability will be higher. [...] So this is strange in that somehow the lower quality data can actually give you more confidence in the the safety of the satellites.”

−Ryan Martin, in his lecture “Probability dilution, false confidence, and non-additive beliefs” [4:02] at the Rutgers Foundations of Probability Seminar

2 April 2018

“These sort of tactics are very effective: instantly having video evidence of corruption, putting it on the internet. [...] I mean, it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they are believed.”

−Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica CEO

secretly recorded 16 January 2018, broadcast 19 March 2018

“Instead of standing in the public square and saying what you think and then letting people come and listen to you and have that shared experience as to what your narrative is, you are whispering into the ear of each and every voter and you may be whispering one thing to this voter and another thing to another voter. We fragmenting society in a way where we don’t have any more shared experiences and we don’t have any more shared understanding. If we don’t have any more shared understanding, how can we be a functioning society? [...] If you want to fundamentally change society, you first have to break it. And it’s only when you break it is when you can remold the pieces into your vision of a new society.”

−Christopher Wilie, discussing Mercer-funded Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting Facebook data, The Guardian

17 March 2018

“That the video is essentially fiction hasn’t stopped it from becoming extremely popular. At typical YouTube ad rates, it’s likely pulled in tens of thousands of dollars in earnings. But though its offerings are fringe, the operation is bankrolled by major corporations. Advertisers on Ridddle videos on YouTube include insurer Geico, mattress seller Purple, and even The New York Times. Stranger still, Ridddle’s English-language videos seem to be translations of clips that originally appeared on a second channel, which is entirely in Russian. The Russian-language Ridddle videos have also accumulated millions of views, and have picked up extensive coverage in the Russian media.” [quote omits three links]

−Jon Christian, in The Outline piece on popularity of the fake science video “If you detonated a nuclear bomb In the Marianas Trench” by Ridddle

9 March 2018

Robert Goldman on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence [UAI] listserver: “I’m looking for some advice [...] for handling the case where one’s prior is qualitatively wrong. For example, imagine that I have chosen a normal distribution for a random variable, and when the observations come back, they are bimodal. What does the Bayesian philosophy say about cases like this?”

Jason Eisner on UAI: “Why did you ‘choose a normal distribution’? Did you really believe that it was impossible that your variables [...] followed any non-normal distribution? If so, then you should attribute the apparent bimodality of the observations to a coincidence in the sample, because no other explanation is possible. It seems that you are not willing to do this―you are willing to be convinced by a finite sample that the distribution is not normal. So apparently your true mental model must place some probability mass on non-normal distributions. In other words, for engineering purposes, you were apparently applying a prior that didn’t actually match your true prior state of belief.”

27 February 2018

“I stopped reading after Annex B1 if I’m allowed to lie, and after the Executive Summary if I’m not.”

−Willem Roelofs

19 February 2018

“Newspaper comment sections are basically a gathering spot for backwards, grammatically challenged idiots.”

−ErnestMc

17 February 2018

“Maximum Likelihood (ML) methods are a Bayesian approach to data analysis.”

−David Dunstan [in an abstract for a public lecture]

13 February 2018

“The common thread running through these approaches [...] is the idea that normative statistical inference can be achieved without requiring analysts to express more information than they actually possess.”

−Michael Balch

February 2018

“Truth is a gateway drug to science.”

−Stephen Colbert, responding to Joel Kinnaman's claim that Scandinavians hate Donald Trump because “we have this relationship with truth”

30 January 2018

“I am so good at witty YouTube comments. The greatest!”

−okrajoe, commenting on a Youtube dialog about the Dunning−Kruger effect, in which Sam Harris says “mentioning the Dunning−Kruger effect is often a symptom that one is suffering from it”

January 2018

Carolyn: “You complain all the time. All the negativity is hard to take.”

Edo: “Do you recognize that you are now complaining about how much I complain? I am a very positive person.”

Scott: “Risk analysis is a discipline for positive people who still love to complain. Risk analysis is great because it allows you to complain about things that don't even happen.”

Carolyn: “But what if it comes true?”

Scott: “Ah, then you get the greatest joy of all: getting to say ‘I told you so’.”

16 January 2018

“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”

−David Frum, in his book Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

published 16 January 2018

“The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”

−David Frum, in his book Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

published 16 January 2018

“Florida is the peninsula of the lotus eaters.”

15 January 2018

“Saying ‘I don’t know’ is never acceptable [...] If a child asks you what Tinker Bell eats [...] you better come up with an answer quickly. (Answer: very tiny apples.)”

−former employee of Florida’s Walt Disney World, anonymously (“so the mouse won't track me down”) in “32 Fun Disney Facts From a Former Cast Member”, POPSUGAR, because not knowing destroys the illusion of a perfect fairytale world

9 January 2018

“Given what I saw on the roads last night, this must be a hard concept for people to understand. So, today, we’re going to break down the science behind wiping the snow off your car.”

−Derek Kevra, meteorologist for Fox 2 Detroit, introducing his video segment describing the use of a “scientific swiping motion” with a ice scraper

14 December 2017

“It’s very good to study probability”

−Anali Rico, inscrutable “reason for downloading” recorded on Academia.edu for the iconoclastic (or just bombastic?) paper “Different methods are needed to propagate ignorance and variability”

December 2017

Gordonstoun School founder and headmaster Kurt Hahn [played by Burghart Klaußner]: “I don’t expect you to get on with everyone. What I do expect of all my pupils is to conform with Platonic ideals to argue without quarreling, to quarrel without suspecting, to suspect without slandering.”

−Tom Edge and Peter Morgan, writers of “Paterfamilias”, S2:E9 in the Netflix series The Crown

episode released 8 December 2017

“I think it was Gandhi who wisely said, ‘We seek justice just as we seek love. And neither is found in online comments.’”

−Nicholas A. Friedenberg

4 December 2017

“Conspiracy theories are nothing new, but in the age of the internet, they spread like ‘chemtrails’ in the wind. The theory that the world is flat, for example, gained so much popularity online that this year 500 people gathered for the first ever International Flat Earth Conference. The belief that the world is flat has kind of been around forever, but it picked up steam in 2015 with a rash of online communities, YouTube videos, podcasts, and even songs preaching the gospel. At some point, Kyrie Irving of the Boston Celtics started talking about it too, which really seemed to blow the lid off the heliocentric model. So, the time was right for the Flat Earth International Conference, the first of its kind, held at the beginning of November outside of Raleigh, NC. Sold out since May, the conference brought together hundreds of people who had before only really interacted online. It was an opportunity for believers to network, share research, meet thought leaders, find a flat-earth compatible mate, show off various NASA parody t-shirts, and talk shit about Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

−VICE News, “People from around the globe met for the first flat earth conference”, HBO

published on 28 November 2017

“When you’re young, they say you don’t understand until you’ve gone to school and been educated. In school, and certainly after you graduate, you find out you don’t fully understand something until you see it in actual practice, or maybe until you actually do it yourself. Professionals realize, however, that you don’t really understand a subject until you’ve had to teach it. But the actual truth is that you don’t really, fully understand a subject until you’ve programmed it. Programming is teaching the actual practice to the stupidest possible student, a computer. And, once the computer can handle it, you don’t have to understand it anymore.”

17 November 2017

“Sometimes people don’t know what decision they’re making, and they don’t even know what variables are important in the consideration, so they display a lot of them together on the screen and call it a dashboard.”

−Simon Maskell

16 November 2017

“Emails are supposed to be asynchronous, so don’t let anybody shame you for not getting back to them on their schedule. If they want that, they have to try to use phones.”

11 November 2017

“Vertical farming is getting a lot of investment now. I guess it’s either this or we starve. Which do you prefer?”

−Francis Baumont de Oliveira

10 November 2017

“His ratio of certitude to knowledge is nearing record highs.”

−Richard H. Thaler, Chicago University professor and Nobel laureate, speaking of President Trump

10 October 2017

“The New Scientist editor who selected the cover illustration [depicting Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump as Khrushchev and Kennedy pensively engaged in a game of chess] may not appreciate the full scope of the problem.”

23 September 2017

“When a mathematician writes an integral, it means ‘this is one of those things I’d like to be able to compute.’”

−Brendan McCabe

23 September 2017

“A Bayesian belief network can handle aleatory uncertainty, and it can handle epistemic uncertainty, but not at the same time, please.”

−Ullrika Sahlin

23 September 2017

“I was observing with my French colleague the strangeness of the fact that Bayesianism is named for Bayes and not Laplace (which by rights it should be). I tried to say this in French. When I pronounced the name Bayes, he said ‘oh, be careful....’ It took me a moment to realise that Bayes is a near homonym for baise, which is the French word for fuck. It dawned on me that this is probably why the French let the English get away with pretending that Bayesianism was invented by the Englishman Bayes. They just think it’s funny the English are going around all day saying baise, baise, baise.”

22 September 2017

“Classification is a branch of machine learning.”

−Alfredo Garbuno, causing the irises on Ronald Fisher’s grave to move slightly as he spun

22 September 2017

“The initial motion is a little uncertain because of the significant cloud structure change during the past 6 hours. Shortwave and enhanced BD-curve infrared imagery reveal a more north-northeastward short term motion, with the center possibly as far east as 71.1W. However, an earlier GPM microwave image and the satellite classification fixes indicated a position bit farther to the west near 71.2 to 71.5W. As a compromise, I elected to split the initial position between the two solutions which yields a northward motion, at about 360/8 kt.”

−Forecaster Roberts of the National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center in Miami, “Hurricane Jose Discussion Number 52”

18 September 2017

“As human beings, false belief is our birthright.”

“Most of what we believe is not based on what’s in our heads, and there’s a good reason for that. There’s not much in our heads.”

“Thinking is a social process. Rather than happening inside your head, it emerges from your interactions with those around you.”

“Everything great we do as human beings depends on this ability to share knowledge and to collaborate.”

“The sense of understanding is contagious.”

“We can build cathedrals but we can also build houses of cards.”

“Knowledge is not in my head, and it’s not in your head. Knowledge is shared [...].”

“Ignorance is a feature of the human mind, not a bug.”

−Philip Fernbach, les meilleurs bons mots in “Why do we believe things that aren't true?”, TEDxMileHigh, Youtube

13 September 2017

“Most of what we believe is not based on what’s in our heads, and there’s a good reason for that. There’s not much in our heads. [...] As human beings, we are just not made to store a lot of detailed information. [...] We do not have to know a lot because we’re not made to think on our own. It’s natural to think about thinking as what happens between your ears, but that’s not where the magic really happens. [...] Thinking is a social process. Rather than happening inside your head, it emerges from your interactions with those around you. [...] On our own, none of us knows all that much. We don’t have to. We each have our own little slice of expertise, and our minds are built to collaborate and to share knowledge, which allows us to pursue incredibly complex goals, when none of us has anything approaching the knowledge to understand it all. This is the Milan Cathedral. It’s one of humanity's great works. Construction began in 1386 [...and it] was completed when they consecrated the final gate in the 1960s. Six hundred years! In that time, there were 75 chief engineers responsible for the project and thousands upon thousands of people involved. None of those people had anything remotely approaching the knowledge to understand it all, not even close. Everything great we do as human beings depends on this ability to share knowledge and to collaborate. So that’s the positive side of the knowledge-sharing story. When we put our minds together we can do incredible things.

“But there’s also a dark side. Because we are built to so seamlessly draw on knowledge outside of our heads, we often fail to realize the limits of our own understanding. [...] The sense of understanding is contagious. And when contagious understanding is paired with individual ignorance, it can be a toxic recipe. The danger is that I may express a strong belief because I feel like I understand. But my sense of understanding is false. It comes from those around me expressing strong beliefs because they feel like they understand. But their sense of understanding comes from those around them and so on. Individually, none of us knows enough to tell what’s true and what’s false. And, yet, because we feel like we’re on firm ground, we don’t do enough to verify, and that is how entire groups of people can come to believe things that aren’t true. We can build cathedrals but we can also build houses of cards.

“Now, the real tragedy occurs in how we relate to people who have different beliefs than us. We live in the illusion that we have arrived at our own positions via a serious analysis, and that we can support and justify what we believe based on what we know. Therefore, when someone doesn’t believe what we believe, it’s obvious what the problem is: they’re too stupid to see the truth! And there’s actually a sense in which you’re right when you think that. It’s true! They did not arrive at their position via a rational process of evidence evaluation, and they don’t understand the issue in depth. But neither do you! [...] When we express our beliefs, we are all just channeling our communities of knowledge. That’s what we do. Knowledge is not in my head, and it’s not in your head. Knowledge is shared. [...] Now, the point is decidedly not that people are stupid. It’s true; we are all ignorant, but that’s not something we should hide from. The world is far too complex for any one of us to understand much of it. What makes us special is the ability to thrive amidst that complexity by sharing knowledge. From our individual ignorance can arise collective genius. Ignorance is a feature of the human mind, not a bug. But we don’t have to be so darn sure about things we don’t understand.”

−Philip Fernbach, “Why do we believe things that aren’t true?”, TEDxMileHigh, Youtube

13 September 2017

“Number 10, Twinkies. In 2012 this parent company of Hostess filed for bankruptcy, and the public went mad. How would we satisfy our sugar cravings now? Luckily, one eBay seller thought it was best to cash in and placed a box of the tasty treats up for sale. The box of delicious treats ended up selling for around $60. That’s over 95% more than the grocery stores were charging. If only the buyer would have held out a little longer. In March of the following year Twinkies returned to American shelves.”

−“Strangest things ever sold on eBay”, Talltanic, self-described as “where we push the boundaries with unbelievable facts that will blow your mind”, like the fact that a price doubled

2 September 2017

“So the Republicans don’t even believe in weather?”

−Name, on the news that Trump’s budget has an unprecedented 6% funding cut for the National Weather Service, a 26% cut for NOAA’s oceanic and atmospheric research, and a 22% cut in its weather satellite information program, as well as other cuts in computer modeling of storms and tsunami research

25 August 2017

“My definition of creativity has long been that it’s what happens when you are struggling back from confusion. Steve Jobs famously said that creativity was just about finding connections that hadn’t been noticed before. I guess graduate school is about teaching you what dots exist so that you can connect them. Graduate school is about creativity, for sure, but not in the way you think. Yes, the classes you take and the other stuff you have to do for graduate school are mostly getting in the way of creativity. In fact, the whole enterprise of graduate education is actually to try to stifle some of your creativity so that you don’t turn out crazy...which is what happens if you study by yourself. In autodidacts, creativity can take over completely, and you lose the ability to tell what is making sense and what will fly with others.”

23 August 2017

“Ignorance is your enemy. Knowledge is a weapon.”

−une bannière de la manifestation d’Act Up-Paris représentée dans le film français 120 Battements par Minute, écrit par Robin Campillo et Philippe Mangeot

released 23 August 2017

“The basic truth about UQ is that people don’t want to do it. We are hopeful creatures, constantly underestimating the uncertainty that surrounds us. The financial market is an easy example. In an industry where estimating risk is synonymous with success, financial analysts continue to use methods that can kindly be called optimistic, but which are plainly just wrong.”

−Lev Ginzburg

17 August 2017

Arthur P. Dempster
Born 1929
(age 87–88)

Kari: “Isn’t Art Dempster in his nineties?”

Scott: “I’ll look it up.”

Scott: “Wikipedia says his age is an interval.”

Kari: “Very few people would get that joke.”

13 August 2017

−UBS, in their “UBS Investor Watch: Global perspectives / Q2 2017”, seemingly suggesting that, in the past, predictability was the norm in investing

second quarter 2017

“FEMA calls the long-term period between the recovery from the impact of some hazard and the next hazard the ‘mitigation phase’. We know that people don’t mitigate during this phase.”

−Allison Reilly

8 August 2017

“There is a neighbor effect. If your neighbor buys an emergency generator, you are more likely to buy a generator. Social scientists call this conspicuous consumption, but, to me, that is just risk communication.”

−Allison Reilly

8 August 2017

“It’s good to have old technology, and new ideas. It’s better than having new technology and old ideas.”

−Reinhard Viertl, as he reverted to overhead transparencies after the Powerpoint slides failed

8 August 2017

“Hypocrisy used to be a thing. Is it still?”

−Bill Maher, capturing in nine words, what I was feebly trying to say in the 800 words (below) earlier in the week

5 August 2017

The rise of uncertainty as a theme of modern life is certainly a well discussed topic. Morris Kline’s great book Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty traces the progressive embrittlement of notions of consistency that developed during the twentieth century since Gottlob Frege’s charmingly naive logicism in Begriffsschrift that mathematics is based on logic and could therefore be formally proven to be correct. My favorite college professor Paul McKinney once wrote a vers libre poem about uncertainty made up of five mathematical formulas. It started with the tautology from symbolic logic, p or not p, followed by expressions from statistical mechanics and the Heisenberg principle saying we can’t escape imprecision. The poem ended with the eternally pessimistic second law of thermodynamics that says disorder increases. The poem’s title was “There was a time when I was absolutely sure, a happy time when it was all together”. I guess I am glad that the chemistry professor cum poet did not have to witness the state of the world today. Today, the lack of surety is the least of it.

It has been trite for years now to say that we live in a post-truth age. Bill Maher has pointed out that Donald Trump sometimes holds contradictory positions in the same sentence. The New York Times described an incident in which Steve Bannon was standing too close to a hot light while deciding what to enter into a teleprompter for the candidate’s speech when his pant leg literally caught fire, life parodying the childhood chant. But whining about a post-truth age or ‘alternative facts’ just a few decades after Joseph Goebbels seems quaint at best. It just doesn’t seem serious to complain that statements from authorities or leaders feel like gas-lighting after the report by the Church Committee, after revelation of the disinformation operations, or even after reading 1984 or just seeing Wag the Dog. People lie, corporations lie, and governments lie; of course they do. Some do it more or less artfully; some do it more or less gallingly.

We are unsure about many important things. And the more important those things are, the more people may have reason to feed us lies about them. This has always been true. What seems different in recent times is the level of apathy about the truth of our concerns. What is novel is the argued belief that, not only don’t we know, but no one can know. The new blistering starkness is that the lie doesn’t matter, that a lie is just as good as a truth.

In the prehistory of my own youth, and apparently for the last century or two, at least the difference between truth and falsity mattered, or very much seemed to. Maybe we have been teetering on this edge for years. Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message”. South Park noticed that commentary is the content. And even the ever-young-at-heart Hank Green begrudgingly agrees that nobody should invest in ‘content’. Perhaps this is merely a nod to the perennial inventiveness of people, the idea that interesting and compelling content will self-generate and bubble up to fill any void, like energy and matter do in the latest astrophysical models of universe creation, multiverses, and the on-going Big Bang. But I come from a time before the word content was used to mean amorphously the stuff shown on television, uttered in speeches, broadcast on radio, acted out in movies and plays, and written in books and newspapers. I come from a time when we thought it mattered what you said. A time when true and false were at least different, if not always discernible.

One might call this the final and utter triumph over substance, but it’s more than that. Worse than that, it is the erasure of substance. But that hardly expresses the depth of the dissolution we have seen in our lives. This is well beyond post-truth. Today, we live in a post-meaning age. Originally, stone inscriptions, and later paper and electronic files were made surely because someone had a message to convey. It’s hard to carve words into stone. It’s difficult to make paper. You really had to want to say something. Even if the cuneiform etchings were records of inventories and transactions, you know they were important to somebody. Why should we bother to record anything anybody says nowadays?

It’s not that I’m looking for scripture. I don’t think everything matters, but I think that some things do. Meaning is only important if it excludes something. If everything can be switched out, without changing the valence, what could that value possibly be?

2 August 2017

“Dare to be curious, but don’t drink the koolaid.”

−Thomas Westbrook, aka Holy Koolaid, later paraphrase of the outro for the tragic “The Holy Koolaid Origin Story” from his Youtube channel Holy Koolaid

16 July 2017

1978: In 2017 there will be flying cars
2017: People still believe that the earth is flat

−h9h1ker, commenting on Is Earth actually flat?, Vsauce

(edited) 9 July 2017

“Family is life’s greatest lottery, and I feel like I’ve scratched off a losing ticket.”

−Jonny Pierce of The Drums

July 2017

“The pioneering American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey from Indiana University is certainly a hero of modern science, if not of modernity itself. In his time, the importance of sampling randomness had not yet permeated the science of biology. Statistician John Tukey criticized Kinsey’s sampling technique, saying ‘A random selection of three people would have been better than a group of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey.’ Although Kinsey drew conclusions that can’t strictly be justified given his nonrandom sampling methods, [Tukey’s] stark criticism seems hyperbolic and statistically wrong; 300 nonrandom samples can tell us many things about a distribution that 3 random samples cannot. For instance, such samples will typically be a much better characterization of the range of a variable, and they will give a lower bound on a frequency as the number of unique reports divided by the population of reference class, which was ~100 million Americans at the time. And, by the way, the number of Kinsey’s samples wasn’t 300; it was over 12 thousand.”

6 July 2017

“Eighty percent of the material we work with is made of atoms.”

−Andrew Harrison, head of the UK’s national synchrotron science facility Diamond Light Source

4 July 2017

“[The synchrotron facility] is ten years old. We’re not finished constructing it yet. But, when we are, then we’ll begin the process of rebuilding it.”

−Andrew Harrison, head of the UK’s national synchrotron science facility Diamond Light Source

4 July 2017

“In the framework of the probability theory and mathematical statistics of uncertainty quantification, there is no need to distinguish these two type of uncertainty [aleatory uncertainties and epistemic uncertainties] (and we simply say Uncertainties) because the tools are exactly the same,

for the stochastic modeling of uncertainties,
for analyzing the propagation of uncertainties in the computational model,
for the identification of the stochastic models by solving statistical inverse problems.”

−Christian Soize, page 2 in Uncertainty Quantification: An Accelerated Course with Advanced Applications in Computational Engineering (Springer)

2017

“He’s got a Ph.D. in chemistry.”
“Oh? I got a D in chemistry too.”

4 July 2017

“We’re not going to let these people win. And I keep saying, if me having a gin and tonic with my friends, flirting with handsome men, hanging out with brilliant women is what offends these people so much then I’m going to do it more, not less, because that’s what makes London so great.”

−Richard Angell, firsthand witness to Saturday’s attack in London, keeping calm and carrying on by returning Sunday to pay his restaurant bill and tip the staff (highlighted by John Oliver, Last Week Tonight)

4 June 2017

“It really turns out that if you’re going to act—and you have to act—you have to make assumptions. And the reason for that is: what the hell do you know? You gotta put your ignorance somewhere. And people put their ignorance, they box it up inside their assumptions.”

−Jordan Peterson, on veganism (he also panders to his audience of college students, “You’re the most complicated thing that exists.”)

2 June 2017

“The Knowledge Illusion described by Sloman and Fernbach has some serious implications. As individuals, we know less and less as technological civilization gets more complex. Science education efforts don’t work, and they never will. Indeed they often backfire because telling people a whole bunch of stuff (effectively telling them they’re stupid) isn’t an effective way to teach, but it is a good way to make them mad. Our personal knowledge is a result of a communal process determined by the tribe or group we are a part of. Groupthink is the only think. We know it here in Liverpool―you’ll never think alone.”

17 May 2017

“We have learned many different distributions for random variables and all of those distributions had parameters: the numbers that you provide as input when you define a random variable. So far when we were working with random variables, we either were explicitly told the values of the parameters, or, we could divine the values by understanding the process that was generating the random variables.

“What if we don’t know the values of the parameters and we can’t estimate them from our own expert knowledge? What if instead of knowing the random variables, we have a lot of examples of data generated with the same underlying distribution? In this chapter we are going to learn formal ways of estimating parameters from data.

“These ideas are critical for artificial intelligence. Almost all modern machine learning algorithms work like this: (1) specify a probabilistic model that has parameters. (2) Learn the value of those parameters from data.

“It turns out there isn’t just one way to estimate the value of parameters. There are two main schools of thought: Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and Maximum A Posteriori (MAP). Both of these schools of thought assume that your data are independent and identically distributed (IID) samples: X1,X2,...Xn where Xi.”

−Chris Piech and Mehran Sahami, in their chapter (?) “11. Parameter Estimation” [emphasis added]

May 2017

“[T]o guide our analysis, we adopted an operational definition of uncertainty as a broader, more overarching construct than ambiguity, based on theoretical work that construes ‘uncertainty’ as a fundamental metacognitive state consisting of the conscious awareness of ignorance (Han et al., 2011, Smithson, 1999). In this view, ambiguity represents not a psychological state but a subordinate phenomenon, a specific feature of information that produces uncertainty. This conceptualization is consistent with the work of the decision theorist Ellsberg, who specifically defined ambiguity as a feature of information—namely, its lack of reliability, credibility, or adequacy (Ellsberg, 1961). The broader implication is that ‘uncertainty’ is the more fundamental psychological state constituting the ultimate referent of tolerance, and ‘uncertainty tolerance’ is an all-encompassing phenomenon including tolerance of ambiguity as well as other potential sources of uncertainty, such as probability (the indeterminacy or randomness of future outcomes) and complexity (features of information that make it difficult to understand) (Han et al., 2011). Although we acknowledge that not all measure developers would have shared this operational framework, we believe it provides a useful framework for the current analysis.”

−Marij A. Hillen, Caitlin M. Gutheil, Tania D. Strout, Ellen M.A. Smets, and Paul K.J. Han in their article “Tolerance of uncertainty: Conceptual analysis, integrative model, and implications for healthcare” which appeared in Social Science & Medicine 180: 62-75

May 2017

“Can’t you wait for the music?”

−mother to her vigorously dancing 5-year-old daughter as they await a street band to begin playing in Liverpool One

29 April 2017

“I kind of pooh-poohed the experience stuff when I first got here . . . but this shit is hard.”

−anonymous White House official, as reported by J. Dawsey, S. Goldmacher and A. Isenstadt in "The education of Donald Trump", Politico

filed at 5:15 AM EDT on 27 April 2017

«A toi, je voudrais te dire que tu vas rester dans mon cœur pour toujours. Je t’aime. Restons tous dignes, et veillons à la paix, et gardons la paix.»

−Etienne Cardiles in a eulogy for his husband Xavier Jugelé, a policeman killed on the Champs-Élysées by a terrorist

25 April 2017

James [in a scientific presentation]: “We’re not in the business of generating hype.”

Scott [under his breath]: “Speak for yourself.”

19 April 2017

“Poor analysis with good visualization is probably more dangerous [than good analysis with poor visualization].”

−James Cheshire

19 April 2017

Tom Servo [voiced by Baron Vaughn]: “This is why everything you thought was true is, in fact, untrue. And everything you thought wasn’t true, totally true. That’s what I call Tom Servo’s Five Principles of Counter-Intuitivity.”

Jonah Heston [played by Jonah Ray]: “Oh, hey. Welcome to the Satellite of Love. We’re in the middle of Servo’s Tom Talk. It’s like TED Talk, except it’s mostly vague gibberish that doesn’t actually mean anything when you think about it later.”

Crow T. Robot [voiced by Hampton Yount]: “So, a TED Talk then?”

−Mystery Science Theater 3000 (season 11: The Return, episode 12 “Carnival Magic”), written by Joel Hodgson, Paul Chaplin, Mary Jo Pehl, Elliott Kalan, Dan Harmon, and Justin Roiland

released 14 April 2017

“Yes, our numerical examples are simple, without very many variables or complications. You might even ungenerously call them ‘toy problems’ as some reviewers have. But I think our solutions are far from toy. They are the rich, complete answers that take a serious and assumption-free accounting of epistemic uncertainty. In contrast, you have complex problems but stick-figure solutions. They are stick figures that assume linearity without justification, normality without evidence or warrant, and assume independence counterfactually. They are really only placeholders for solutions that might exist.”

4 April 2017

“I think the president is somewhat indifferent to things that are true or false. He has spent his whole life bullshitting. He has succeeded by bullshitting. He has gotten to the presidency by bullshitting. It’s very hard to tell somebody at that point that bullshit doesn’t work because, look at the results. Right?”

−Fareed Zakaria, on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon

17 March 2017

“You can be combative, it can be confrontational, but it’s always a long-term much better strategy to engage with the press.”

−Massachusetts attorney and Democratic strategist Scott Ferson, quoted in a Politico article about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s recent openness with local reporters

18 March 2017

Simon: “We know correlations are important.”
Scott: “Do you know what the correlations are?”
Simon: “No.”

8 March 2017

“[Set-based design] is standard theory, particularly here in Liverpool.”

−Simon Coggon

8 March 2017

“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.”

−Python instructor (played by Ulka Simone Mohanty), about the city of Monte Carlo, in “A random walk & Monte Carlo simulation || Python tutorial || Learn Python programming”, written Michael Harrison

6 March 2017

“Telling patients about the uncertainties and side-effects of a cure causes them to feel the original disease is less scary.”

−Chris Cummings

3 March 2017

“Uncertainty analysis [on a deterministic risk assessment] is really not that important. It gets exponentially more complex, expensive, hard to explain to bosses, and it obfuscates the decision.”

−Bernie Goldstein, arguing that environmentalists should take their cue from economists who neglect uncertainty altogether

2 March 2017

“Risk assessment is like beating a spy under interrogation until to get the answer you want.”

−Bernie Goldstein

2 March 2017

“I was innocent and certain; now I’m wiser but unsure.”

−Belle (played by Emma Watson) in “Days in the Sun”, Beauty and the Beast, lyrics by Tim Rice

London release date 23 February 2017

“That your consciousness continues after your body dies is pretty much a proven fact. Tens of thousands of testimonies, and a good number reveal that the temporarily ‘deceased’ was able to describe specific events that took place in the operating room and in waiting rooms, when they should have had no brain function. It’s not a debate anymore, except among those who have not studied the evidence, or who are ideologically committed to absolute materialism. More importantly, we need not fear leaving this world—beauty, peace and profound love await us.”

−Iam Hudsdent, commenting on the recorded symposium “Medical Center Hour” entitled “Is There Life after Death? Fifty Years of Research at UVA” held at the University of Virginia, which used to be a university in the United States, and at which UVA professor emeritus Bruce Greyson revealed “We have identified dozens of cases of this type [where people report they acquired knowledge they should not otherwise have during a near-death experience]”

after and during the symposium held on 22 February 2017

“Imagining a greater flexibility in a go-it-alone approach, a majority of voters in the United Kingdom have decided they’d like a divorce from the European Union. But if your dream doesn’t work out and you realize that being in a club is better than seeing it through a plate-glass window, I invite you to consider petitioning the United States Congress for statehood. You’d be the biggest state population-wise, even if you broke yourselves into England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to get more senators. You’d kind of have to ditch the monarchy, but, hey, win win. You’d also have to get rid of the state religion. Win win win. But you’d get to keep the swagger and thoughtlessness; they're all-American fun. ¶ It’s been done before. Texas won its independence from Mexico and sued to join the United States. Had the movement for Québécois sovereignty been more successful, the anglophone provinces from a fractured Canada might well have joined the United States. Of course, there’s no chance of that anymore. Not because Québec will never be free, but because Canadians will have seen the picture of Justin Trudeau standing next to Donald Trump.”

13 February 2017

“If we live through this precarious moment, if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank this president for, because he will have woken us up to how fragile freedom really is. [...] His whisperers will have alerted us to the potential flaws in our balance of power in government, to how we’ve relied on the good will and selflessness of previous occupants of the Oval Office, and how quaint notions of custom, honor, and duty compelled them to adhere to certain practices of transparency and responsibility, how easily all of this can be ignored, and how the authority of the executive in the hands of a self-dealer can be wielded against the people, and the Constitution and their Bill of Rights. The whip of the executive can, through a Twitter feed, lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimize the press and all the imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability.”

−Meryl Streep, speaking at the Human Rights Campaign

11 February 2017

“France is your nation.”

−Emanuel Macron, in his invitation to American climate change researchers to move to France, strengthened perhaps by the snarky advice of US conservatives, which was “Go.”

uploaded to Facebook on 9 February 2017

“Any sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice.”

−Deb Chachra, reappropriating Hanlon’s razor (about stupidity) and Clarke’s third law (about technology and magic)

a few years before, but publicly claimed on, 9 Feb 2017

“Fisher was quite clear about 0.05 being a rule of thumb for the kind of field work he was doing, but as you know, for almost a century now, people have nevertheless treated p-values [being less than] 0.05 as though it were god’s holy finish line.”

−Michael Balch

8 February 2017

“So many tweets, so little truth.”

−Randy Rainbow, “Fact-checker, fact-checker”

6 February 2017

“Whispered to myself ‘that’s so cool’ at the probability distribution curve today. Two years in the Risk Institute has changed me.”

−Simon D.A. Clark

1 February 2017

Scott [to engineers pointing at the derelict Chadwick tower]: “Are you going to do anything to it?”
Engineer: “Might do.”
Scott: “We’re risk analysts, and we’re wondering if it’s going to fall on us.”
Engineer: “No, probably not. It's not that bad.”
Scott: “Are pieces falling off?”
Engineer: “Just the little mosaic tiles. No windows or anything. Nothing to worry about.”
Scott: “Famous last words.”
Engineer: “Don’t tell anyone we’ve had this conversation.”

24 January 2017

“Like zoos, [international] borders are immoral. Fences in general I’m dubious about.”

January 2017

“Finally gets code to run // First minute: celebration // Every minute after: suspicion and self-doubt”

−Simon D.A. Clark

16 January 2017

“A function that doesn’t function shouldn’t be called a function.”

−Thorsten Altenkirch, arguing that the set-theoretic definition of a function is awkward, Computer Science ∩ Mathematics (Type Theory), Computerphile

11 January 2017

“Living systems in general hate uncertainty.”

−Beau Lotto in Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

2017

“Since the election, more Americans have learned about the problem of online ‘fake news’. The term doesn’t refer to political spin or overheated opinion, but rather to completely false, made-up stories like these:
FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email leaks found dead in apparent murder-suicide
WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS...
Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump
There is nothing new about conspiracy theories or internet hoaxes, but one report found that some of those stories I just showed you were the most read items on Facebook heading into the election, reaching tens of millions.

. . . Some are [now] trying to flip the script and say that stories about real facts are just fake news. . . . [O]ur debates about politics are increasingly debates about legitimacy, about what is true and who has the right to decide. That is why there’s been such an intense effort to dilute this label ‘fake news’ because the label was helping beat back some of this nonsense.

We have to keep calling out lies and misinformation. And we have to do it even more forcefully. Spreading the falsehood that an FBI agent was murdered or a child sex ring was run out of a DC restaurant—two real canards from this election season—that’s not just fake. The Tooth Fairy is fake. That is a lie. It is a fraud. We are in a world that is now full of fraud news. And just as free speech doesn’t mean it's okay to shout 'fire’ in a crowded theater, the free internet doesn't mean it’s okay to perpetuate fraudulent stories online that threaten real harm offline.”

−Ari Melber, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell

4 January 2017

“This is actually how stock markets work [...] the value is determined not by the intrinsic value, but what others think the asset’s worth.” [edited]

−Muzhi Li, commenting on the 1987 Saturday Night Live sketch “Common Knowledge” about a quiz show with questions supplied by Princeton professors but answers determined by a survey of American high school students

2016

“At first, sales were up a significant amount over the previous year, even more than Coca-Cola had expected. According to surveys run by Coca-Cola, most people preferred the new flavor over the old. [...] Coca-Cola stock went up, and things were looking really good. But then the vocal minority started kicking up their heels. Complaints trickled in, and angered Coke fans started enlisting the aid of the media. Soon that trickle developed into a flood. One man, Gay Mullins, even started the Old Cola Drinkers of America organization to lobby for the return of old Coke or at least try to get Coca-Cola to license out the formula to someone else. The fact that, in a blind taste test, Mullins picked New Coke over old Coke as his favorite didn’t stop him from attempting to sue Coca-Cola over the switch. The dissenters started convincing others. Many who had never even tried New Coke decided they hated it before even tasting it, primarily because they were upset at the fact that the original Coke was no longer available. Finally, just three months after New Coke was introduced, the public outcry forced Coca-Cola to release the old formula under the name Coca-Cola Classic.”

−Simon Whistler, “Why Coke Tried to Switch to New Coke”, Today I Found Out, describing a backlash by an incoherent minority toppling broad consensus

27 December 2016

“This is the deepest part of the deep dark woods. Nobody speaks for the prez-elect [Donald Trump], not even himself.”

−Charles P. Pierce, referring to Trump’s often contradictory statements and tweets

23 December 2016

“It’s going to be a constant battle, but I think you need to look for the signal of truth, rather than just the signal of what pushes people’s buttons.”

−Derek Muller, discussing how computers might help to distinguish fake news from reputable news, "Post-truth: Why Facts Don't Matter Anymore", Veritasium

20 December 2016

“Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) of the parameters of a Non Bayesian Regression model or simply a linear regression model overfits the data, meaning the unknown value for a certain value of independent variable becomes too precise when calculated. Bayesian Linear Regression relaxes this fact, saying that there is uncertainty involved by incorporating ‘Predictive Distribution’.”

−Ben Zaman, helping on StackExchange, in which the phrase “unknown value for a certain value” probably means the unknown value for a particular value and the phrase “Non Bayesian Regression” presumably refers to ordinary linear regression or, perhaps, generalised linear regression

8 December 2016

“This is all a matter of opinion . . . there are no such things as facts.”

−Trump stalwart and self-described “classically studied journalist” Scottie Nell Hughes on The Diane Rehm Show, see also the reaction by James Fallows

30 November 2016

“So many homophobes turn out to be secretly gay that I’m nervous I’m secretly a giant spider.”

−Jeremy Kaplowitz

28 November 2016

“Not appearing racist is more important to them than making sure that they don’t reproduce racism.”

−Sean Mandell, commenting on Hanna Ingber's NYT article about artist Isaiah Lopaz's t-shirts about racism

21 November 2016

Gina [Ana Gasteyer]: “What do you want? I'm sorry. How are you?”

Margaret [Nancy Lenehan]: “Oh, well, this’ll be quick. I'm struggling with the emptiness of my life, and I need to buy a throw pillow.”

−Emily Heller (writer) “Past, Present and Future”, People of Earth

broadcast 14 November 2016

“No man’s ignorance will ever be his virtue.”

−Sara Bareilles, “Seriously” [performed by Leslie Odom, Jr.], This American Life

28 October 2016

“Why do bad things always happen to mediocre people who are lying about their identities?”

−Eleanor (played by Kristen Bell), “Chapter 8: Most Improved Player” [season 1, episode 8], The Good Place, written by Michael Schur and Dan Schofield

broadcast on NBC 27 October 2016

“That’s what I’m saying is like I realized I just was worrying about things that I could not possibly control. Whether it be today, the future, life. And then I just kind of realized one day that, I mean, it was just...that’s the beauty of life itself. It’s completely not knowing what is going to happen tomorrow, cause if we knew what was happening tomorrow, what would be the point of seeing tomorrow? So I just snapped out of it and realized: wow, this is what being human is like.”

−Kid Quill, “Dose of Reality (feat. Alex Hall)”, The Name Above the Title, Norham Road Records

album released 14 October 2016

“How ironic then that a culture which rejects moral standards—and, make no bones, folks, we do. Standards? Moral standards? You stand up for moral standards, you are going to be mocked and laughed out of the room. Do you know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in Americans’ sexual mores today is one thing. You can do anything. The Left will promote and understand and tolerate anything as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine, whatever it is. But if the Left ever senses and smells that there is no consent in part of the equation, then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the Left.”

−Rush Limbaugh, American right-wing commentator defending Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump after release of a recording in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women (and perfectly exemplifying variation in the concerns of different actors in the moral foundations theory of Jonathan Haidt et al.)

12 October 2016

“How does this work? Remember, probability got its start describing gambling games, and the probability of rolling snake eyes does not depend on who you ask. [...] How do you make that leap from a description of physical phenomena, physical processes which are the same for everyone, to a situation where the probability of the sun coming up changes depending on who you ask? And the answer is, of course, this is subjective probability. We aren’t talking about the actual probability of the actual sun coming up tomorrow. We’re talking about our state of belief that the sun will come up tomorrow, which of course depends on what you happen to know. How did Laplace make this leap? How did he go from a description of random events to a description of a state of belief as the interpretation of probability, and why on earth didn’t he tell people that that was what he was doing? Well, the answer is because Laplace didn’t think he was making a leap at all. Laplace did not believe in randomness. It was actually pretty common during Laplace’s time to believe that the world was entirely deterministic and predictable and that if you just had enough knowledge of starting conditions and of the laws of physics you could predict every event, including the roll of a die, going out into eternity. And it wasn’t until the 20th century that we started to see scientific and mathematical revelations that made people start to question this. So, to Laplace, the only kind of uncertainty there was was uncertainty due to ignorance, was the kind of uncertainty you describe with subjective probability.”

−Kristin Lennox, discussing the unease about Bayesian methods because different people will get different results from their different priors

27 September 2016

“These days you can be minding your own business, reading the news, and all of a sudden, bam! Bayesian statistics happens. This is particularly common in election years. I blame Nate Silver. ¶ Let’s face it, most people view all statisticians as sort of a hybrid of an accountant and a wizard, which is ridiculous, we have nothing in common with accountants. ¶ Probability is a mathematical concept; it is exquisitely well defined. Uncertainty is an English word. What it means kind of depends on when you hear it. ¶ I have shown you four different kinds of uncertainty, not exhaustive, and all of these styles of uncertainty are quantifiable, and all of them can be described using probability. However, if I use probability to describe all these different kinds of events, clearly that probability is going to mean something different in different situations. ¶ [The idea of combining ‘objective’ frequentist probability and ‘subjective’ Bayesian probability] really is almost a units problem (even though probability is unitless) where it can be used to describe two very different kinds of uncertainty. ¶ So what’s Bayesian about Bayes’ theorem? Absolutely nothing. Bayes’ theorem is a theorem which means it works for probability no matter what your interpretation of probability is. If you want to be Bayesian with Bayes’ theorem, then you need to take an additional step [and wrangle subjective probability]. ¶ So my take on inference is that if it makes sense to you for your problem, and if you are upfront about why you made the modeling decisions that you made, it’s all good. If somebody disagrees with you, that’s fine, they can analyze it their way. Maybe they get the same answer. Maybe they don’t, and then you get to learn something.”

−Kristin Lennox, pronouncing the word Bayesian as BAYzhun

27 September 2016

“It’s incredibly frustrating when you’re talking to people and not getting any answers. [...] You just get a sense that people are fearful to speak out.”

−Laura Richards, discussing her attempts to interview the Ramseys’ friends twenty years after JonBenét Ramsey’s death, The Case of: Jon Benet Ramsey

broadcast 18 September 2016

“But what are news organizations if not truth squads?”

−Evan Puschak, “How To Correct Donald Trump In Real Time”, the nerdwriter

14 September 2016

“Chris Wallace’s job is apparently exactly the same as that of Gwen DeMarco on Galaxy Quest, to simply repeat whatever she is told.” [Gwen DeMarco (played by Sigourney Weaver in 1999 film Galaxy Quest) explained why she repeats everything said by the computer voice by saying “Look, I have one job on this lousy ship! It’s stupid, but I’m gonna do it, okay?”]

14 September 2016

“Hillary Clinton’s made clear, she is mentally impaired.”

−Louie Gohmert, the Texas congressman who previously suggested the Sandy Hook tragedy wouldn’t have happened had teachers been armed

9 September 2016

Scott: “A scientist put special glasses on pigeons that inverted what they see. At first they struggled around in this upside-down world, but in a few days they got used to it. When the scientist took the glasses off the pigeons, they again stumbled about for a while, as though the world for them was again suddenly upside-down.”

Brian: “Why do we do such things to pigeons? Oh, right, the statues.”

7 September 2016

Brian: “Some people say the best part of a journey is what happens along the way.”
Scott: “Those people don't have anywhere to go.”

7 September 2016

Howard Kurtz: “What do you do if they make assertions that you know to be untrue?”
Chris Wallace: “That’s not my job. I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad.”
in an interview of Chris Wallace on his selection to moderate the last 2016 presidential debate

5 September 2016

“do you see what happens when people are allowed to have free contact with each other from all over the world thanks to the internet? you no longer can control them and keep them in a bubble...people start thinking and asking questions instead of following propaganda...this is a big blow to the controllers, and they are in panic mode...if you are in your 40s, it is almost impossible for you to escape the matrix because your mind needs it to stay sane..”

−May Lee, commenting on “Flat Earth -- If it`s here to stay ! [ Why hide it ? ]”

4 September 2016

“I’m from the UK where it’s not just Downtown Abby and posh peeps. Don’t believe those lies, like you heard them from Ryan Lochte.”

−Riz Ahmed, in an impromptu rap on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

29 August 2016

“The cost of democracy is uncertainty.”

−Edward Snowden, It's Only Getting Better, hitRECord

19 August 2016

“You take the minimum of the minima and the maximum of the maxima and form the union. I don't want to say union ... because mathematicians and words.”

−Melissa Hoffman

17 August 2016

Scott: “What’s the singular of data.”

Christian: “Datum.”

Scott: “No, anecdote.”

16 August 2016

“And I don’t think we really have a good way of choosing these computational procedures [for filtering, transforming, measuring and testing data], other than that this is something you’re meant to learn through some sort of apprenticeship with the elders, which is the same as saying that we really don’t know.”

−Tom Nielsen, in his lecture “Typed functional probabilistic programming—ready for practical use?” at Microsoft Research

posted on Youtube on 8 August 2016

“It appears that you have not read Hegel.”

−Hans Wurst, commenting on a complaint by another Wikipedian who had written “In one section ‘he asked to be sent to a military unit instead, and joined a regiment in Cherbourg’, while in the Beliefs section ‘Weil refused to do military service’. This doesn't make sense.” in the Talk page for the Wikipedia article on Bourbaki mathematician André Weil

28 July 2016

“My point is I would have hoped that rednecks of all people could have empathized with this whole thing [about aggressive and brutal over-policing]. But we don't, and I wonder why. Just kidding. I don't wonder. Nobody does, because everybody knows the reason.”

−Liberal Redneck Trae Crowder, Black Lives Matter

19 July 2016

“Sometimes things that are expensive are worse.”

−Freckle (played by Jason Greene), explaining her not-soft linens, The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo, episode 4, written by Brian Jordan Alvarez

June 2016

“Recent events made me aware of just how important this famous peanut butter burger really is. In my opinion it’s one of the strongest pieces of evidence of worlds crossing over and the existence of multiple realities. My initial research led me to discover five different restaurants that served a Jiffy Burger, but upon further investigation I discovered countless establishments across the country that offer a famous peanut butter Burger named Jiffy.”

−MoneyBags73, who believes that the American peanut butter Jif was, in his youth, actually called Jiffy, and that his and other people’s collective pseudomnesia is evidence that the Mandela Effect is real, in one of his many videos “Proof Of The Mandela Effect Is In The World Famous ‘Jiffy’ Burger / Part 2”. MoneyBags73 and many others claim to believe in the Mandela Effect, that is, the existence of multiple realities and of worlds and themselves “crossing over” between these realities. They say they have personally been shifting between parallel universes but retaining memories as they shift. In some of these universes, Nelson Mandela died in a South African prison, in others he became president of his country. Rather than believing they were just not paying close attention to news about Nelson Mandela, or are simply misremembering stuff, they claim their memories constitute evidence that the universe does not exhibit a single reality. (To be fair, though, they share this opinion with physicists working in quantum theory.) Rather than suspecting they might have just conflated the brand name Jif with its competitor’s brand name Skippy, or with Jiffy Pop Popcorn or even Jiffy Lube, these people apparently believe that object permanence is occasionally suspended for all material reality except for those molecules involved in the neurons encoding their personal memories...across multiple individuals’ neuronal configurations. These folks think Steven Wright’s bit [“Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates. When I pointed it out to my roommate, he said, ‘Do I know you?’”] is not a joke, and that the plots of the films Yesterday and Everything Everywhere All at Once are not fanciful but actually hyper-realistic. I confess these people are unlike me. Although I too have had a dull sense of false reality or a feeling of living in a simulation ever since late in 2016, I am not quite as confident as these folks seem to be about what my feeling means for the world. When my memory is shown to be inconsistent, I usually think I might have misremembered. For instance, I would suspect that the peanut butter brand was never ‘Jiffy’. Now, actually, in this case, I don’t even share the Mandela Effect. For me, it was always Jif. At least in all the realities through which I’ve been surfing. I suspect disbelievers could be snapped back to this reality if they were asked to complete the tagline “Choosy [mothers/moms] choose [Jif].” For context, note that MoneyBags73 explains in his YouTube About section, “This channel was originally about purchasing precious metals to protect our wealth from a hidden tax called inflation and from the U.S. dollar that is on the road to destruction. There are also many different types of economic and political videos in the archive as well. However, In March 2016 I was hit with the Mandela Effect like a ton of bricks and have devoted over 16k of hours of research and over 1000 videos to this incredible phenomenon. The Mandela Effect is one of the most incredible things to ever happen in human history and I don’t anticipate a return to financial issues anytime soon.” He is saying he made over 1000 videos in those four months of 2016.

video posted to YouTube on 16 June 2016

Q: “What is the definition of a dam failure?”

A: “You’ll know it when you see it.”

−anonymous, overheard (or perhaps misheard) at the REC2016 meeting in Bochum

16 June 2016

“Three engineers enter a bar in South Carolina. The bartender asks ‘Y’all want some beers?’ Technically, that's a question about EACH of the three wanting beer, which is a joint event of imbibition. They indeed do all want beers, but if they had not mutually confirmed this fact beforehand, then each would make a mental calculation of some kind.

“If the engineers were Bayesian probabilists, then the calculation for each would be the same: I want a beer, so the probability of ‘wanting a beer’ is one for me. But I don’t know whether my colleagues do too, so I should use an uninformative prior for them. That would mean the probability of ‘wanting a beer’ would be 0.5 for each of them. Thus, the probability assuming independence of ALL wanting a beer would be 1.0 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25 implying that the answer is ‘probably not’, and each engineer would arrive at the same conclusion.

“On the other hand, if the engineers are imprecise probability jocks, the calculations would be entirely different. Each engineer would naturally say ‘I don't know’, but after two of the engineers verbally expressed their uncertainty, the third engineer could instantly revise her inference to a ‘Yes’. Had the first engineer not wanted a beer, that engineer’s answer would have been ‘No’ since it would have been clear that not ALL wanted beers. Thus, the response ‘I don't know’ implies the engineer wants a beer. The same reasoning applies to the second engineer. So the only way the first and second engineers say ‘I don't know’ is that they both want beers. Because the third engineer does too, she thereby knows that ALL want beers.

“Interestingly, this is an example of the famous aphorism of Francis Bacon: the (specious) certainties lead to uncertainty in the Bayesians, and, in the case of the imprecise probability jocks, uncertainties lead to certainty.”

−Robert Mullen [paraphrase], in his talk “Static analysis of structural systems...”, at REC2016

15 June 2016

“Predicting the future is dangerous because we sometimes believe our predictions [...].”

−Scott Ferson and Kari Sentz, in “Epistemic Uncertainty in Agent-based Modeling” at REC2016

15 June 2016

“If the way you talk makes people not take you seriously, then maybe you’re not very good at what you do.”

−Kelli Johnson, reacting to received wisdom about vocal fry

26 May 2016

“Everything obviously I’m going to say tonight, quite clearly, [unintelligible] cup Manchester. Don't believe a word I say. You don’t have to believe a word I say. But I’m not like the guy on the BBC News, staring right into you every night, hypnotizing you, telling you what to think. Please go and research every single thing for yourself. Every single thing has come from the Internet. It’s all researchable for yourself, quite clearly.”

−[unidentified speaker], Flat Earth --The Truth will seem utterly Preposterous

published on Youtube 23 May 2016

“The most important thing in programming is the ability to give something a name. The second most important thing is to not be required to give something a name.”

−Andy (Krazy) Glew in this blog post on the limits of scoping in Python

20 May 2016

“I wish I wished for things, man.”

−Holland March (played by Ryan Gosling), The Nice Guys

released in the United States 20 May 2016

“[W]e have access to more information than at any time in human history, at a touch of a button. But, ironically, the flood of information hasn’t made us more discerning of the truth. In some ways, it’s just made us more confident in our ignorance. We assume whatever is on the web must be true. We search for sites that just reinforce our own predispositions. Opinions masquerade as facts. The wildest conspiracy theories are taken for gospel.”

−Barack Obama, in his commencement address at Rutgers University, see the full transcript

15 May 2016

“Secret knowledge is a very intoxicating thing.”

−Edward Snowden, reported by Andrew Rice in “I, Snowbot”, New York (June 27−July 10, 2016, page 142)

12 May 2016

Carl [played by Jonathan Purdon]: “I wish that I believed you.”

Cassie [played by Catherine Bell]: “Belief is just a wish you make happen.”

−“[The] Trouble with Love” (season 2, episode 4 [numbered 6 on Netflix]) of Good Witch, written by Amy Palmer Robertson, Jed Seidel, and Rod Spence, who have no idea what belief is

aired 8 May 2016

“Man y’all ain’t gonna believe this, but turns out some people on the internet are the worst. I know. I was shocked too.”

−Trae Crowder, on Twitter

30 April 2016

“The broad-sweeping, unqualified, and unsupported statement [in a proposal review] ‘any alternatives to Bayesian methods have repeatedly been shown to be inferior’ warrants further explanation as this logically entails dismissing all of frequentist-based statistics, much of machine learning, information theoretic approaches, logical models, physical models, etc. This is a very extreme position to hold and one that does not find consensus even amongst statisticians, much less should this be upheld amongst a broad scientific community without a rigorous technical justification.”

−Kari Sentz, who got in some trouble for this “aggressive” response in asking for clarification of a review

April 2016

“You gotta knock them off their axioms.”

−Rick Picard

April 2016

Scott: “So how many pro-vice-chancellors are there at the University of Liverpool?”

Matt: “It seems like there’s a new one every day.”

25 April 2016

“In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first ‘war on drugs’ and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest. ¶ At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. ‘You want to know what this was really all about?’ he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. ‘The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.’”

−Dan Baum quoting John Ehrlichman (who died in 1999) in an article “Legalize it all: how to win the war on drugs” in Harper’s Magazine

April 2016

Scott: “The one unforgivable thing about this proposal text is the redundancy.”

Nick: “You’ve said that so many times.”

5 April 2016

“Should I be embarrassed that, whenever I type a ‘W’ on my phone, it auto-completes it with ‘Why aren't you returning my texts?’”

31 March 2016

A Mayan elder wearing traditional Mayan garb walks into a bar. He sits down and strikes up a conversation with the bartender. And the bartender says, ‘Hey, you don't look like you’re from around here. Where are you from?’ The Mayan elder says, ‘Earth’. And the bartender says ‘So what do your people believe in?’ And the Mayan elder replies, ‘Well, our people believe that the earth rests on a giant crocodile, sitting in a lake of waterlilies.’ And the bartender says, ‘Wow. That’s fascinating. Tell me more.’

An Anishinaabe elder wearing a traditional feathered headdress walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Hey, pardner, where’re you from?’ And the Anishinaabe elder says, ‘Around these parts.’ The bartender says, ‘The last guy I had in here believe the earth was on a crocodile. What do your people believe in?’ And the Anishinaabe elder replies, ‘Well, our people believe that the earth sits on the back of a giant turtle resting in a great ocean.’ The bartender says, ‘Wow. That's incredible. Tell me more.’

A gentleman sitting at the bar then walks up to the bartender and says, ‘Hey, I heard you talking with those native wisdom keepers about the earth. Do you know what I believe?’ The bartender says, ‘No, what?’ The bar patron says, ‘I believe that the earth is flat.’ The bartender says, ‘The earth is a ball, you idiot. Get the fuck out of my bar.’

−Marty Leeds, “Flat Earth - The Ultimate Litmus Test”

15 March 2016

Marco Rubio [in his speech in Miami suspending his campaign for the presidency]: “My mother was one of seven girls born to a poor family. Her father was disabled as a child. He struggled to provide for them his entire life. My mother told us a few years ago she never went to bed hungry growing up, but she knows her parents did, so they wouldn't have to. She came to this country in 1956 with little education, no money, no connections. My parents struggled their first years here. They were discouraged. They even thought about going back to Cuba at one point, but they persevered. They never became rich. I didn't inherit any money from my parents. They never became famous. You never would have heard about them if I had never run for office. And yet I consider my parents to be very successful people. Because in this country, working hard as a bartender and a maid, they owned a home and they retired with dignity. In this country, they lived to see all four of their children live better off than themselves. And in this country, on this day, my mother, who is now 85 years old, was able to cast a ballot for her son to be the president of the United States of America.”

Scott [talking back to the television]: “Yeah, and she voted for Trump.”

15 March 2016

“We’re talking about the most protected building in the world, where a president can’t even get a blow job without the rest of the world knowing. How is a 16-year-old kid meant to be doing that? You couldn’t even go for a pee without security.”

−Erkan Mustafa [Roland “Ro-laaand” Browning] of Grange Hill, denying the decades-old rumor he smoked a blunt in the White House during a cross-branding photo op with Nancy Reagan of their single Just Say No

quoted in an article in The Guardian on 7 March 2016

“I understand that the French didn't make the mistake the English made in their mathematical language. The word for positive in French, positif, includes zero. I propose to use that word in mathematical English too. So the positif integers are [0, 1, 2, 3, ...]. I hate saying nonnegative integers, to define things by a negative property, by saying they don't have a negative property is really awful. They have a positif property.”

−John Conway, introducing surreal numbers in a lecture at the University of Toronto, failing to explicitly say that zero itself is both positif and negatif

23 February 2016

“If scientists can’t understand p-values, I don’t expect non-experts to be able to.”

−Matthew Kay

17 February 2016

“Transparency really helps a lot in these kinds of systems.”

−Matthew Kay, in a lecture answering a question about why he does not suggest that scales should automatically adjust values to reflect probable bias

17 February 2016

“I've been misunderestimated most of my life.”

−George W. Bush, stumping in South Carolina for his brother Jeb who went on to a resounding defeat there and withdrawal from the primary race

15 February 2016

“There's a stock exchange in Saudi Arabia. Its all-shares index is the TASI. It's highly correlated with oil.”

−Luke Green

2 February 2016

“Practice often outpaces theory.”

−Michael Balch, at the 18th AIAA Non-deterministic Approaches Conference

8 January 2016

Nick: “What proposal are you working on?”

Scott: “[The proposal on algorithms to protect patient] Privacy.”

Nick: “Ooooh. Sorry! [Walks away]”

5 January 2016

“[H]is parents encouraged him to give up college and pursue an acting career.”

−Wikipedia entry for Canadian actor Justin Chatwin known for roles in War of the Worlds, Shameless and Dr. Who

4 January 2016

“Those things are true until they're not. History is not a statistically significant sample size.”

−Betsy Woodruff from the The Daily Beast, discussing the prospect that New Hampshire voters would behave as they have in the past, on All In with Chris Hayes

28 December 2015

“Modernity has two major elements: individualism and oil. And those two we have to transform.”

−California Governor Jerry Brown, quoted by Justin Worland in Time article "How cities and states took the spotlight in Paris climate talks"

8 December 2015

The Wizard: “And Scarecrow, you say you got no brain. The surest sign you talkin’ to a dummy is when he tells you he knows it all. It takes a quality mind to know there’s always something to learn. You, my friend, are of that brainiac persuasion.”

Scarecrow: “So, knowing that I know nothing means that I know something? Well, what do you know.”

−The Wiz Live! television special on NBC, written by Harvey Fierstein, far surpassing the Wizard’s starkly anti-intellectual speech to the Scarecrow in 1939 film, which was “Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma.”

broadcast 3 December 2015

“Hiding uncertainty essentially severs the decision making process from scientific inquiry, and inevitably replacing it with a politically constructed reality that employs the moralistic fallacy at every turn.”

−Clark Carrington, on the Riskanal listserv

3 December 2015

“I don’t think, therefore I am Marco Rubio.”

−philosophy major Chris Hardwick, in response to presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s campaign statements about philosophers, during @midnight with Chris Hardwick

broadcast 11 November 2015

“[E]very baby cries when it hears the cries of another.”

−Prince Ea (Richard Williams), "I Am NOT Black, You are NOT White.", invoking emotional contagion

2 November 2015

“We used to dig them up at night and take their hearts out. That’s how it was done in the old days. But that’s really old-fashioned. People are smarter now. Now we have new medicine. Now we pierce the heart during the funeral, and that’s that.”

−Romanian man Mircea Mitrica describing practices to protect his village from vampires, PBS series Secrets of the Dead, “Vampire Legend” episode

broadcast 27 October 2015

“You’ll have to do more work. You have to do a bit more thinking when you’re talking about not knowing than you’d have to do if you were talking about knowing something. That’s not a Zen koan; it’s just true.”

−Naomi Wolf, in her lecture at Stony Brook University on op-ed writing

26 October 2015

“It’s wrong to have secret knowledge.”

−Naomi Wolf, in her lecture at Stony Brook University on op-ed writing

26 October 2015

“We have a monkey brain. And this brain is not adapted to build long-term computer architecture. This brain is adapted for the quick acquisition of [stops talking, looks away into the distance, scene reframes to more distant shot of speaker who is focused on eating a banana, return to original frame]. Therefore we need a structure to hold ourselves a accountable. And that structure, my friends, is mandatory code reviews.”

−Mattias Petter Johansson, “Unit testing: how to get your team started” Fun Fun Function

11 October 2015

“Human beings are actually foolish enough to think that their conventional worldviews are the highest form of rationality. They don’t factor in intentional deception.”

−Jeran Campanella, in Google Project Loon Proves Flat Earth, apparently with no understanding of pot-kettle, or speck-plank

10 October 2015

“I noticed that quantitative language comes into value judgments...without helping.”

−Nick Friedenberg, discussing the tendency of philosophers to invoke mathematical ideas such as utility

18 September 2015

“[S]aying you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. It’s a fundamentally un-American principle and, more than just nationalism, more than just what this country is about, it’s a deeply anti-social principle. Because rights are not just individual; they’re collective. What may not have value to you today may have value to an entire population, an entire people, or an entire way of life tomorrow. And if you don't stand up for it, then who will?”

−Edward Snowden, in an interview on Al Jazeera

15 September 2015

“I wish I was more apathetic. Then I wouldn’t care so much about how much I don’t care.”

−Jesse Pepe

4 September 2015

“Oh, oh, oh, what do you mean? Better make up your mind. What do you mean? You’re so indecisive....”

−Justin Bieber, Jason Boyd and Mason Levy, “What Do You Mean?”, Purpose, Def Jam Recordings

released 28 August 2015

“Right down the road, we have Jeb. Very small crowd. [...] So Bush had, I heard, 140−150 people. We have 2,579 people.”

−Donald J. Trump, speaking in a theater that, according to the local fire marshal, holds 890 people

19 August 2015

“I can't believe you think I'm narcissistic.”

−Chris Meyers

9 August 2015

“I am not a violent person, but I will throw a drink on a bitch.”

−Victor Medolia

9 August 2015

“You cannot hide General Motors or Walmart in a dataset. It’s too hard to anonymize the data in a way that would still make them useful.”

−Margaret C. Levenstein, in an article on synthetic data in The Atlantic

30 July 2015

“Unlike some engineering disciplines, the ‘sweet science of size reduction’ is not governed by any general theory. Rather, it’s been mastered pragmatically over time, backed by knowledge of basic physical laws and a lot of trial and error, i.e., the scientific method.”

−Processing Solutions for the Process Industries, revealing the startling fact that engineers think the scientific method is the same as trial and error

8 July 2015

“An expert with no uncertainty is no expert.”

−Kari Sentz, at the NIST symposium on forensic science error management

21 July 2015

“[F. James] Rohlf and I were at an anthro meeting once where the world’s top anthropologists gathered around a table to look at casts and fossils. They said things like, ‘That’s STS5, right?’, and ‘And then there’s OH9'. Rohlf said, ‘I don’t know what to think of a field where everyone’s data points are named.’”

−Dennis Slice, recounting the 2003 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists

9 July 2015

Everybody always tells you that to make it big in the city you’ll end up having to be a sellout. I’m not a sellout, but mostly because I’ve never been able to find a buyer.

8 July 2015

“Dave Davies interviews Adam Benforado on NPR about his new book Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. They mention disturbing scientific research that finds undue effects of physical characteristics of witnesses and defendants at trial. Apparently, people who are attractive are more likely to be believed as witnesses. As defendants, they are less likely to be convicted, and they get lighter sentences if they are convicted. Amazingly, the same goes for thin people, and for tall people and people who project confidence. I’m not sure why such people are more believed than others, but as a short, fat, homely person with a professional interest in uncertainty, I consider this to be a very serious problem.”

6 July 2015

−Robert J. Frey, “An analysis of 180 years of market drawdowns”, explaining that, despite a consistent growth trend over two centuries, a myopic stock market investor would be in regret 74% of the time

30 June 2015

“It only makes sense to do it that way if everyone wants you to do it that way.”

−Anne Bichteler

30 June 2015

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times.”

−Justice Anthony Kennedy

26 June 2015

“slow is not a speed. It’s a mindset that most of us somehow lost. Let’s make time to bring slow back into our life. be slow...”

−advertising copy for the brilliant and beautiful slow watches which have one hand that cycles once in 24 hours (but I don't understand why they are wearing ties in a park as they climb monkey bars and sled down a hill)

2015

“wtf i just grew a beard....”

−Alexey Bakh, commenting on a stunning rendition of “Song of the Volga Boatmen” by the Red Army Chorus, featuring Leonid Kharitonov (Леонид Харитонов)

2015

“If you want to administer tests in schools, you need to get permission from the parents.”

−Elena Yakubovskaya, discussing the use of pre- and post-testing in research in public education

23 June 2015

“These poor kids live in a multiple choice world. They don’t know there could be more than one answer to a problem.”

−Elena Yakubovskaya

23 June 2015

“Money, in fact, is the most successful story ever invented and told by humans, because it is the only story everybody believes. Not everybody believes in God. Not everybody believes in human rights. Not everybody believes in nationalism. But everybody believes in money, and in the dollar bill.”

−Yuval Noah Harari, talking about something he believes in, in “Why humans run the world”, TED

June 2015

“Now suppose I’ve managed to convince you perhaps that, yes, we control the world because we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. The next question that immediately arises in the mind of [an] inquisitive listener is: how, exactly, do we do it? What enables us, alone of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? The answer is our imagination. We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. As long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values. All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. [...] Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality but also to create new realities, fictional realities.”

−Yuval Noah Harari, in “Why humans run the world", TED, utterly exasperating anyone who is aware of either (i) the commonness of imagination, i.e., conditional thinking (sensu Edgington), which underlies behaviors such as hunting, avoiding predators, and planning that are exhibited ubiquitously by many animals, or (ii) the fact that shared belief cannot explain long-term cooperation which requires some kind of social coercion (sensu Bingham and Souza) against non-cooperating free riders who would otherwise win the evolutionary game because they reap the social benefits without any costs to themselves from believing the story or toeing the line to uphold it

June 2015

“Something went wrong. I don’t know how. But you never do at first.”

−Anne Bichteler

3 June 2015

“Seems like a myth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRZ5400UKSc”

−metropolan, answering the question of whether Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland actually said the respective lines “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” and “We can use my dad’s barn!”

May 2015

“I used to have real thoughts in my head.”

−Anita Creed, in recovery from a stroke, who elaborated “I still have real thoughts in my head, but they’re not connected to anything.”

11 May 2015

“If I’d given up the fight the moment I realized I was on the losing side, my career would have been a short one.”

−Harry Pearce (played by Peter Firth) in the film Spooks: The Greater Good (released in the United States under the title MI-5)

film released 8 May 2015

“You can do good, or you can do well.”

−Will Holloway (played by Kit Harrington) in the film Spooks: The Greater Good (released in the United States under the title MI-5)

film released 8 May 2015

“I wanted to be a thought leader, but it turns out I’m just a knowledge worker.”

30 April 2015

“Scholarship and science have proven the Turin ‘shroud’ a fake, from its incompatibility with first century burial cloths and procedures, its lack of historical record, and a bishop’s report that the forger had confessed, to the suspicious-looking ‘blood’ that is really tempera paint, pigments making up the body image, and the radiocarbon dating that confirms the cloth originated at the time of its documented appearance in the fourteenth century—when it was fraudulently claimed to the be Holy Shroud of Christ. Such evidence against any secular object would be considered clear proof of inauthenticity. ¶ Frank Viviano’s article is a disservice to science and unworthy to appear under the respected name National Geographic.”

−Joe Nickell, in his article “Fake Turin Shroud deceives National Geographic author” for Skeptical Inquirer commenting on Frank Viviano’s ridiculous article “Why Shroud of Turin’s secrets continue to elude science” which scandalously appeared in National Geographic

23 April 2015

“Why is it up to anyone?”

−Ava, an artificial intelligence in the film Ex Machina (played by Alicia Vikander) responding to a discussion about whether or not she lives

film released 10 April 2015

Scott: “Sorry I’m late for the meeting. Has Nick made you laugh yet?”
Emily: “Not yet.”
Nick: “We were watching Nine Inch Nails before.”
Scott: “What? The one with him hanging from the meat hook?”
Nick: “But what’s fun is right after that watching ‘Wrecking Ball’.”

1 April 2015

“The original mmm whatcha say isn’t from Jason Derulo. My life is a lie.”

−Kris Malbo, annotating Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” after finding it via Jason Derulo’s “Whatcha Say”, perhaps also realizing the difference between vocoder and auto tune

~1 April 2015

Max Emerson: “After all, videos are the new textbooks.”
Willam Belli: “Books! [laughs]”

−“Max’s Underpants Episode One - VPL, Guest Starring Willam Belli”

11 March 2015

“I know it seems kind of strange.”

−Michelle Obama, "Billy On The Street with First Lady Michelle Obama, Big Bird, And Elena!!!" (4:40), who followed up (at 6:35) by agreeing that One Direction are very cute

published 19 February 2015

“Wouldn’t that be something, if the ads were useful to us.”

−Kai Ryssdal, Marketplace, American Public Media, discussing a possible benefit of profound privacy invasions expected in marketing and commercialism

13 January 2015

“Statisticians are people who like numbers but don’t have the personality skills to become accountants.”

−anonymous [attribution sought]

n.d.

“I need to learn more about the Weibull distribution. I’m only familiar with the ‘bull’ part.”

−Nick Friedenberg

9 January 2015

“Careful the things you say / Children will listen / Careful the things you do / Children will see / And learn” // Careful the spell you cast / Not just on children / Sometimes the spell may last / Past what you can see / And turn against you // Careful the tale you tell / That is the spell / Children will listen

−Stephen Sondheim (sung by Meryl Streep), Into the Woods (adapted from his 1986 Broadway musical of the same name)

theatrically released 25 December 2014

“The Internet of Things? Oh, that was when humans finally realized that there is no all-seeing god constantly watching them and they felt compelled to build one.”

19 December 2014

“Today, commentary is the content.”

−Lorde's manager in the South Park episode "#REHASH"

3 December 2014

“One thing I will never forget was a panel of venture capitalists […] four rich guys on the stage who were each asked, ‘What, if anything, would you definitely NOT invest in right now?’ Every. Single. One. Said. ‘Content.’”

−Hank Green

1 December 2014

“It was there the first time they acknowledged it is easier to change a community, it is easier to change a society, than to change your own identity, and it does much less damage that way.”

−Thomas Lloyd, “Why am I so gay?” TEDxGeorgetown

published on 19 November 2014

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.”

19 November 2014

“The motto of the State Department should be ‘we talk to foreigners so you don’t have to’.”

−State Department official, in a light moment

22 October 2014

“The only thing remotely surprising about this is that there are people who supposedly clean airplane cabins.”

−Scott Ferson, on reading the Washington Post article beginning “Fearful of exposure to Ebola, about 200 of the people who clean airplane cabins walked off the job overnight at LaGuardia International Airport.”

9 October 2014

“Does it seem to you that it’s during the ‘off decades’ that scientific vocabulary abruptly shifts for no apparent reason? I mean, if you compare the seventies with the nineties and with the current decade (what is it, the teens?), we see that ordination became multidimensional scaling which became self-organizing maps. And classification became discriminant function analysis which eventually became support vector machine. I’m not saying they’re exactly the same thing through the decades, but I’m not sure why the overarching term—the very metaphor for what the thing is—had to change.”

October 2014

“Viruses won’t be so bad in the future.”

−Jason O'Rawe, discussing the possible medical use of enzymes that cut genetic molecules

25 September 2014

“If scientists could be bought, these motherfuckers [Koch Industries, Peabody Energy, Murray Energy Corporation] would have already made it rain in nerd town. Trust me.”

−Jon Stewart, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, discussing the idea that scientists are motivated to fabricate evidence of climate change by the juicy research grants they receive

23 September 2014

Scott: “There are a thousand people in this room, and six of you [customs agents at JFK international baggage claim]. How can you be effective?”
Agent: “We can’t. We try, but this is a joke. Today is kind of light. You should have seen us last month. ... Welcome home.”

20 September 2014

“Fun fact: 95% of the people who use the phrase ‘fun fact’ are misusing the word ‘fun’, or the word ‘fact’, or both.”

−Dave Gorman, Dave Gorman: Modern Life is Goodish

16 September 2014

“And we’ve added more and more con to it, or content to it this year, and so there’s increasingly more things that you can do on there.”

−Tim Cook, discussing Apple TV on Charlie Rose, while Charlie pretended not to notice the Freudian slip

12 September 2014

“I would love to be plagiarized. For ideas to survive in the world, they have to have many parents.”

−Scott Ferson

3 September 2014

“So, Baha Men, it was the mesolithic south western Chinese...who let the dogs out.”

−Michael Stevens, in Dord., Vsauce, discussing the mitochondrial DNA evidence that all modern dogs may be descended from a wolf domestication event in China over eleven thousand years ago

12 August 2014

“Big data claims to be neutral. It isn’t.”

−Solon Barocas and Andrew D. Selbst, in their paper “Big data’s disparate impact” in California Law Review 104: 671-732

paper published in June 2016, but originally posted 11 August 2014

“What she’s upset about is the money in politics. People think they’re too young to know about this stuff, but, trust me, they know. The Supreme Court is making babies cry.”

−Nick Friedenberg, reacting to an infant crying in a restaurant

6 August 2014

“The smartest answer you can give if you don’t know the answer is ‘I don’t know’.”

−Jay Carney, former Press Secretary to Obama on The Late Show with David Letterman

30 July 2014

“...picture-based science...”

−Nick Friedenberg, referring the seeming triumph of form over substance in the recent rise of graphics, maps, animations that dazzle but do not inform or even carry meaning

29 July 2014

Scott: “Have you heard of the generalized method of matching moments?”
Nick: “Only in a very general way.”

28 July 2014

“You know, we often think about the Second Law [of Thermodynamics] as a curse. As though everything which is ordered is going towards disorder. But, maybe, I mean it’s only in a universe where this law is obeyed that the truly unexpected can occur, that the future can be actually undetermined. For us, really, to have free will, we need the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Now you might think that these quantum events are too small to have any meaningful impact on the evolution of the universe, but that is not true. And that’s because there are physical systems which are so dependent, so sensitive to the initial conditions that any tiny change will end up making a big difference later down the track. That’s called ‘chaos’, but it’s also known as the ‘Butterfly Effect’. So you and I could be such physical systems, chaotic systems, and our free will could come from quantum events in our brains.”

−Derek Muller, “What is NOT random?”, Veritasium

16 July 2014

“There’s a whole literature on interval calculations.”

−newcomer at the ICVRAM-ISUMA meeting, addressing Vladik Kreinovich

13 July 2014

( Identify information needs ) ←←¬
↓ ↑
( Make decisions ) ↑
↓ ↑
( Conduct science) →→→→→↑

−graph in scientific presentation by government scientist (the graph provoked no comment from the audience)

10 July 2014

Discussant: “These issues affect everyone in the same way I see a lot of common ground that we all walk on. No one's trying to shirk their responsibility. But there’s a lot of data we can share; I see a lot of things we can collude on, a lot of ways that we can come together to cooperate on in our common interests.”

Moderator: “Don’t say collude.”

9 July 2014

“In probability theory and statistics, the Dirichlet process is one of the most popular Bayesian nonparametric models. [...] A Dirichlet process DP(s, G0) is completely defined by its parameters: G0 is an arbitrary distribution and s is a positive real number.” [italics added and parentheticals omitted]

−Alessiobe, in the Wikipedia article “Imprecise Dirichlet process”, exemplifying why I cannot understand when Bayesians talk

1 July 2014

“Perhaps one day we will learn this lesson of the Tamarians: that understanding how the world works is a more promising approach to intervention within it than mere description or depiction. Until then, well: Shaka, when the walls fell.”

−Ian Bogost, “Shaka, when the walls fell”, The Atlantic

18 June 2014

Every morning we’re born brand new
Dreams are funny little things, they only work if you do

−Kid Quill (Mitchell Brown), “Brand New”, Ear to Ear, Norham Road Records

album originally released 14 June 2014

“Our very first tool in the book is learn to say ‘I don’t know.’”

−Stephen J. Dubner, “How to think like a freak: learn how to make smarter decisions with the authors of Freakonomics”, intelligence2

28 May 2014

“That’s the thing about infinity. You never run out of it.”

−Derek Muller, Misconceptions about the universe, Veritasium

27 May 2014

“With Big Data comes big uncertainty, Peter.”

−Jason O'Rawe

26 May 2014

“Overfitting models is in vogue right now. Isn’t that the whole idea behind machine learning?”

−Jason O'Rawe

16 May 2014

“We now have the ability to manage risks with more than a color chart.”

−Robert Garrett

7 May 2014

“Philosophically, models are assumption analyzers.”

−Omkar Aphale

7 May 2014

“In GLUE, the choice of the objective function is subjective.”

−Omkar Aphale

7 May 2014

Pat: “You’d be proud of me. I hardly spent any money.”
Scott: “Good for you.”
Pat: “You wanna see the jewels I got?”

16 March 2014

“Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”

−Alain de Botton, quoted in an article on procrastination by Megan Mcardle in The Atlantic

published 12 February 2014

“Spaceship!!”

−Benny, a “1980-something space guy”, voiced by Charlie Day, in The Lego Movie

7 February 2014

Scott: “[Our colleague here in France] seems to be away from the office a lot.”
Sébastien: “There are a lot of vacations.”
Michel: “No, no. We’re not always on vacation. Sometimes we’re on strike.”

27 January 2014

Dan: “The population growth models [in the global climate change assessments] are all done by economists. They just use logistic growth.”
Scott: “Larry Slobodkin lived and died in vain.”

9 January 2014

“Clearly, app-based health care is the future of modern medicine.”

−Stephen Colbert, reviewing Doctor on Demand

8 January 2014

“What Condi Rice and the old guys at RAND failed to realize is that, although game theory is more relevant than traditional decision theory, game theory is not always the correct metaphor for dealing with competing human agents. We need a new theoretical approach, one that is based fundamentally on the interactions of agents, one that eschews the crippling naivete of game-theoretic constructions. People do all kinds of things that are decidedly not in their self interest. They are not rational sensu Carnap. Instead, noblesse oblige and spite, the other side of the coin, animate almost all ancient and modern notions of honor and duty and a goodly chunk of what we call justice. Utility theory is this century’s version of Ptolemaic epicycles. It can explain everything, but this means that, in the end, it explains nothing. I can tell you one thing: the apologists for game theory will never understand what is going on if their models suggest that the terrorists were doing it for the virgins.”

27 December 2013

“Uncertainty analysis is too important to be left in the hands of the analyst.”

−Scott Ferson, suggesting that it should be done automatically by computer

5 December 2013

“I love the claim that it is unrealistic to expect experts to provide estimates of bounds on a median, but that it’s fine [to expect them] to provide a fixed number instead.”

−Willem Roelofs, about the guidance of EFSA "Guidance on expert knowledge elicitation in food and feed safety risk assessment" (to appear in EFSA Journal), particularly section 2.1.2 Uncertainty Elicitation

11 November 2013

[interview of former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael J. Morell by 60 Minutes correspondent John Miller in episode “The Deputy Director: Mike Morell”]
Miller: “After Iraq, CIA analysts were required, not just to analyze the intelligence, but also give an assessment of their level of confidence in what the Agency spies were reporting.”
Morell: “And so what we really learned from that experience was that analysts need to think about their confidence level and to be very, very clear with policy makers about it.”
Miller: “That would happen today?”
Morell: “That would happen today.”
Miller: “As a matter of...?”
Morell: “As a matter of course. As a matter of discipline. As a matter of the trade craft of doing intelligence analysis.”

(broadcast date) 27 October 2013

“Raisin cookies that look like chocolate chip cookies are the main reason I have trust issues.”

−Will Mckenzie, continuing the use of cookie psychology to explain profound issues that may have begun with the classic but unattributed (and multiform) quip “I was eating Oreos and I was dunking it in milk, and the cookie broke and sank to the bottom...so now I’m just staring at the glass and wondering why bad things happen to good people.”

17 October 2013

“...There’s a lot of uncertainty about uncertainty estimation. And there’s good reason for that...because there’s no right answer.”

−Keith Beven, in a lecture “Breakthroughs in Uncertainty” at the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan

3 October 2013

A: “Well, the software essentially reads the web, and it understands the natural-language statements that appear there, including their logical implications. It accesses the entire corpus of English text on the indexable web, and employs sentiment analysis and partially unsupervised learning in a multidimensional classifier based on Bayesian networks.”
Q: “Really? Does it handle sarcasm?”
A: “I don’t know, but the software is very sophisticated. I’m sure it has a way to deal with it.”
Q: “Are you being sarcastic?”

September 2013

“Arts degrees are awesome. And they help you find meaning where there is none. And let me assure you, there is none. Don’t go looking for it. Searching for meaning is like searching for a rhyme scheme in a cookbook: you won’t find it and you’ll bugger up your soufflé.”

−Tim Minchin

25 September 2013

“Kolmogorov’s axiomatization of probability theory liberated the theory of probability from discussions of the meaning of probability, enabling it in particular to become a vibrant part of modern pure mathematics. Statisticians do not have the luxury of escaping such concerns with meaning: indeed in a sense most discussions of the last 200 years and more of the basis of statistical inference have centred around the relation between contrasting views of the meaning of probability.”

−Nancy Reid and David R. Cox in a paper at the World Statistics Congress of the International Statistical Institute in Hong Kong, later memorialized in Reid, Nancy, and David R. Cox (2015). On some principles of statistical inference. International Statistical Review 83(2): 293–308 doi:10.1111/insr.12067

August 2013

“I really do believe every word, but I know that I may not have been careful and cautious in the arguments up to your standards. So I’m interested in where you think I am sloppy and where you thing I am wrong and where you think I am lying. You may note that I did not offer delusional as an option. Let me know if I should have.”

−Scott Ferson, in instructions to a reviewer

25 August 2013

Nick: “The slide is cluttered and ugly.”
Scott: “An ugly slide can be improved. The real problem is that the slide is specious. You can’t fix specious.”

2 August 2013

“The Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects or the “Common Rule” was published in 1991 and codified in separate regulations by 15 Federal departments and agencies, as listed below.”

−http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/commonrule/

accessed August 2013

“You see, everybody, just because it’s unlikely doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal.”

−Bill Nye, the Science Guy, “Could We Stop an Asteroid, Feat. Bill Nye” on AsapSCIENCE

23 July 2013

“[I]t is possible and worthwhile to compute with what we actually know, rather than making pretend-calculations with what we would like to know.”

−Scott Ferson

17 July 2013

“Compared to the breadth of knowledge yet to be known, what does your life actually matter?”

−Rosa Dasque (played by Anamaria Marinca) in the film Europa Report, screenplay by Philip Gelatt and directed by Sebastián Cordero

released 27 June 2013

“[Probabilistic risk analysis] allows us to get away from the dichotomous language about Type I and Type II errors.”

−Bruce Hope of CH2M Hill at a meeting sponsored by CropLife America in Washington

20 June 2013

“I was tested a number of times for the same medical condition, but the results of the tests were inconsistent. My physician recommended pursuing a treatment with unpleasant side effects, although a second opinion from another reputable authority disagreed about both the diagnosis and treatment. My physician said he had sent my bloodwork to a lab using the ‘most sensitive test’. I asked about the Type 1 and Type 2 errors of that test given its sensitivity. I had to clarify that this meant false positives and false negatives. The physician said that, not only did he did not know that information, but he had no idea how it would be possible to obtain such information about a medical test.”

−[medical patient, anonymized for privacy]

19 May 2013

“Being lectured by statisticians about my bad notation is like being lectured by the United States government on my war making.”

−Scott Ferson, in response to reviewers

15 May 2013

“Now, I know this for a fact because I know the people that are, you know, are concerned about this and so, so there’s no downside if I’m wrong on this.”

−Senator James Inhofe, discussing a putative government conspiracy to buy up ammunition to keep it from gun owners, The Laura Ingraham Show

29 April 2013

“You know what? If people are going to call Gaussian Process models ‘nonparametric’, then I am going to use the word ‘bootstrap’ however I want.”

−Michael Balch

18 April 2013

“He made a sound argument, in that he made a sound.”

−Steven Colbert

4 April 2013

“There will always be sampling error.”

−Statistics Learning Centre, in Understanding Confidence Intervals: Statistics Help, neglecting the case where the entire population is measured

26 March 2013

Andrei: “[As a child] I was a pioneer in the Soviet Union. It’s like boy scouts. We had to wear a red handkerchief around our necks, and it had to be properly ironed or they’d punish you.”

Nick: “You think it’s different here? In Brooklyn, if you’re not ironic, you’re out.”

22 February 2013

“I like to quote because I think dead people shouldn’t be excluded from the conversation.”

−Stuart Firestein, in his TED talk “The pursuit of ignorance”

February 2013

“So I’d say the model we want to take is not that we start out kind of ignorant and we get some facts together and then we gain knowledge. It’s rather kind of the other way around really. What are we us[ing] this knowledge for? What are we using this collection of facts for? We’re using it to make better ignorance, to come up with, if you will, higher-quality ignorance. Because, you know, there’s low-quality ignorance, and there’s high-quality ignorance. It’s not all the same. Scientists argue about this all the time. Sometimes we call them bull sessions; sometimes we call them grant proposals. But, nonetheless, it’s what the argument is about. It’s the ignorance. It’s the what-we-don't-know. It’s what make a good question.”

−Stuart Firestein, in his TED talk “The pursuit of ignorance”, which he opens with the analogy about the difficulty of finding a black cat in a dark room

February 2013

Chris: “I’m not sure whether I can get with this girl or not. I don’t think any angling will improve my chances―the outcome is probably already determined. I won’t find out until I go for it.”

Wells: “I see. It’s like Schrödinger's pussy.”

7 February 2013

“...I’m going to forget about the official statistics-textbook interpretation, in which a 95% confidence interval is defined as a procedure that has a 95% chance of covering the true value. For most of the examples I’ve ever seen, this interpretation is pretty useless because the goal is to learn about the situation we have right now in front of us, not merely to make a statement with certain average properties.”

−Andrew Gelman, candidly answering a question about confidence intervals in his blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

14 January 2013

“Research has long shown that spreadsheet developers are 96% to 99% accurate when they enter information into spreadsheet cells. For large spreadsheets, unfortunately, a cell error rate of 1% to [4]% will almost certainly lead to incorrect results. [...] General human error research has shown that when humans do simple but nontrivial cognitive tasks, they inevitably have comparable error rates. [...] [There is] no difference in error rates between paper and electronic medical records. While many developers are confident that their prescriptions for reducing errors are highly effective, this confidence is meaningless.”

−Raymond R. Panko, “The cognitive science of spreadsheet errors: why thinking is bad”, Proceedings of the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

10 January 2013

“One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age [...] is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.”

−Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail―but Some Don't

2012

“[...T]he ratings agencies’ problem was in being unable or uninterested in appreciating the distinction between risk and uncertainty.”

−Nate Silver, in his book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail―but Some Don't, which went on to say "The alchemy that the ratings agencies performed was to spin uncertainty into what looked and felt like risk. They took highly novel securities, subject to an enormous amount of systemic uncertainty, and claimed the ability to quantify just how risk they were. Not only that, but of all possible conclusions, they came to the astounding one that these investments were almost risk-free." and "Too many investors mistook these confident conclusions for accurate ones, and too few made backup plans in case things went wrong.”

2012

“We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren’t very good at it.”

−Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail―but Some Don't

2012

“[N]umber, the traditional language of science, is actually quite ill adapted for managing the sorts of uncertainty that we now confront. [...] We need an arithmetic that reflects this [reality]. [...] Quality control is not a regular, formalised activity among scientists in many fields.”

−Jerry Ravetz, in his essay “Dealing with uncertainty in numbers”

circa 2012

“Suppose that it turns out that their uncertainty bounds are so very broad, and their quality in relation to the decisions is so low, that they are of little use as a basis for decisions. Well, then we learn something very important indeed: the depth of our ignorance. This could be one of the most important lessons that science can give us at the present time: to learn of our ignorance of what we are doing to the world around us. But so long as we believe that somewhere, somehow there is a magic number to be found which will define our problem and also its solution, we are fumbling in the dark. This is what we imbibe in traditional scientific education, and it is a lesson that needs to be unlearned without delay.”

−Jerry Ravetz, in his essay “Dealing with uncertainty in numbers”

circa 2012

“The great thing about the past is that it’s already happened.”

−Adam Finkel, in response to a school superintendent who said he couldn’t see how current 8th-graders were doing on standardized tests when they were in 6th grade

circa 2012

“Random sampling is terrible at finding worst-case scenarios, but terrorists are pretty good at it.”

−David L. Alderson of the Naval Postgraduate School, at Society for Risk Analysis annual meeting, San Francisco, California, also quoted as “Monte Carlo is not good at finding the extreme outcomes, but terrorists are pretty good at it.”

12 December 2012

“They had the idea of five cows. But the idea of five, not so much. The idea of fiveness they didn’t quite understand.”

−James Grime, discussing the origin of numbers in “Is zero even?”, Numberphile

2 December 2012

“In the city of Florence during the Crusades, the Catholic Church banned the use of the number zero because it was, they thought, invented by the enemy.”

−Roger Bowley [paraphrase], “Is zero even?”, Numberphile

2 December 2012

“[...] Statisticians are the new sexy vampires, only even more pasty.”

−Paul Rudnick, in a love letter to Nate Silver “A Date with Nate”, in the The New Yorker

19 November 2012

“We’re not the fastest. We’re not the strongest. We don’t have sharp teeth; we don’t have long claws. I mean we are weaklings physically. There are creatures all around us that can beat the whatnot out of us and do evil things to us, but we can cooperate. We can be smart, and we can cooperate. And that turns out to be [a] good strategy. I mean there’s no way we can outlive the ants, but that’s another issue. Okay, and they aren’t going to be able to outlive the viruses, so, you know, ultimately it’s all viruses. They will inherit the earth.”

−Keith Devlin, “5. How Did Human Beings Acquire the Ability to do Math?”

29 October 2012

“[Imp]lausibility has never been a barrier to the spread of popular urban legends.”

−David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/rockstar.asp

19 October 2012

“If an analysis is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

−John G. Pope, sagely arguing that it may not be smart to wait for the perfect data set

18 October 2012

“We attempt in this book to circumvent the use of measure theory as much as possible. However, in several places where measure theory is essential we make an exception [...].”

−Guy Lebanon, a good idea thwarted, in Probability: The Analysis of Data, Volume 1

9 October 2012 [also internally marked as 2013]

“The social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century conceived of an institution which he called the panopticon where all the inmates could be observed twenty four hours a day without ever knowing whether they were being observed or not. The Internet of Things is the ultimate global panopticon. Privacy as a concept under the Internet of Things may become meaningless.”

−John Barrett of the Cork Institute of Technology, in a TEDxCIT talk

5 October 2012

“Last December, me and my fellow Nobel Laureates were asked by a journalist if there was one thing that we could teach the world, what would it be? And to my surprise, two economists, two biologists, a chemist, and three physicists gave the same answer. And that answer was about uncertainty. So I’m going to talk to you today about uncertainty. To understand anything, you must understand its uncertainty.”

−Brian Schmidt, “There is certainty in uncertainty”, TEDxCanberra

3 October 2012

“The first real evidence we have for abstract numbers was money. Why do we have numbers? It was money, folks. You want to find out where numbers came from? Follow the money. [...] You need numbers to have money. [...] You didn't have numbers until you needed money.”

−Keith Devlin, “1. General Overview and the Development of Numbers”

1 October 2012

“Using confidence structures, many of the classically difficult problems of frequentist statistical inference can be reduced to a matter of straightforward uncertainty propagation.”

−Michael Balch, International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 53: 1003–1019

2012

“The [United States] nuclear stockpile has become more reliable since they’ve stopped testing it.”

−unnamed observer at the NNSA describing the annual certifications of the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear arsenal mandated under US law in the wake of its signing the CTBT (see also this and this)

July 2012

“The greatest thing I ever learned is I don’t know a thing.”

−Jay Brannan, “Rob Me Blind”, Rob Me Blind, Great Depression Records

27 June 2012

“Imagine all the food mankind has produced over the past 8,000 years. Now consider that we need to produce that same amount again—but in just the next 40 years if we are to feed our growing and hungry world.”

−Paul Polman and and Daniel Servitje

17 June 2012

“You can grow ideas in the garden of your mind.”

−Fred Rogers, on the PBS television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, remixed or ‘songified’ by John D. Boswell for PBS Digital Studios, long after Rogers’ death in 2003

remix posted to YouTube on 7 June 2012

“Q: What’s negative information? A: I could tell you, but then you’d know even less [...].”

−http://openstaxcollege.org/John Baez, who perhaps unjokingly also claimed he “understood less after reading” a paper about negative information, in a post

2 June 2012

“[College Physics from OpenSTAX is] an excellent text—as far as it goes—but [it] has almost NO discussion of margins of error or confidence intervals–and the central role of such measures as THE method for distinguishing ‘just so stories’ from science! It’s bad enough that high schools do so poor a job in this respect. Let’s hope OpenSTAX quickly fixes this.”

−Len Ornstein, commenting on Sean Carroll's blog entry about nonprofit textbooks at OpenSTAX

21 May 2012

Dr. Julia Hoffman [played by Helena Bonham Carter]: “Now, where were you born?”
Barnabas Collins [played by Johnny Depp]: “Liverpool.”
Dr. Julia Hoffman: “Can you describe it for me?”
Barnabas Collins: “Filthy! The air is choked with soot, and the streets reek of freshly hurled chamber pots. The smell of urine permeates the air.”

−Seth Grahame-Smith in his screenplay for Dark Shadows [t=53m07s]

film released 11 May 2012

“Russell’s paradox shows us that if ‘the set of all sets’ exists as a set, then set theory contains false statements (and is therefore inconsistent and worthless).”

−Tom Cuchta, on the difference between a set and a class, in Math StackExchange

1 May 2012

“You can’t say anything bad about interdisciplinarity. It’s the easiest way to be original. The easiest way is to import some body of knowledge from one place into another place where it looks new.”

−Mark Petersen, in an interview about his book Galileo's Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts

5 March 2012

“You were wrong. You shouldn’t have thought that.”

−Louis Virtel

2012

“[...T]here does not exist any evidence that the truth value of [a] conjunction is completely determined by the truth value of individual propositions [in the conjunction...].”

−Baoding Liu, discounting the argument that probability theory is the only legitimate approach to uncertainty, or perhaps doing something else entirely, on page 5 of his article “Why is there a need for uncertainty theory?” which appeared in Journal of Uncertain Systems 6: 3-10

2012

‘‘Implicit in the dictionary definition of uncertainty as a ‘state’ is a conceptualization of uncertainty as a subjective, cognitive experience of people—a state of mind rather than a feature of the objective world. The defining feature of this state, furthermore, appears to be lack of knowledge about some aspect of reality. Importantly, however, the concept of uncertainty also implies a subjective consciousness or awareness of one’s lack of knowledge, without which one could not feel uncertain; uncertainty is a form of ‘metacognition’—a knowing about knowing. Thus the decision scientist [Michael] Smithson [in his 1989 book Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms] usefully distinguishes uncertainty from what he terms ‘meta-ignorance’—the state of ‘not knowing that one does not know.’ At the most fundamental level, then, we may define uncertainty as the subjective perception of ignorance. It is this fundamental perception that makes possible the many manifestations of uncertainty catalogued in conventional definitions of the term—for example, feelings of doubt, perceptions of indefiniteness, indeterminacy, unreliability, and so on.’’

−Paul K.J. Han, William M.P. Klein, and Neeraj K. Arora in their article ‘‘Varieties of uncertainty in health care: a conceptual taxonomy’’ which appeared in Medical Decision Making 31: 828-838

November 2011

Bystander: “You're protesting linear algebra?”
Tim Lee: “Yeah.”
Bystander: “For real?”
Tim Lee: “Yeah.”
Bystander: “What would you prefer in the place of linear algebra?”
Tim Lee: “Well, I would prefer...I think there’s too much focus on linear algebra. I think basic probability theory is more important in people's lives.”

−a brief conversation between a bystander and Tim Lee about his sign protesting linear algebra at Occupy Wall Street in lower Manhattan

uploaded 19 October 2011

“Thirst Trap: Any statement or picture used to intentionally create attention or ‘thirst’
Woman on Twitter: Who wants to come over and put me to sleep? (Thirst Trap)
Men on Twitter: Oh? Check Ur DMs”

−Mister GQ, in his only contribution to Urban Dictionary, naming and perhaps reifying the cultural contributions of d’Angelo, Marilyn Monroe, and Betty Boop (but not Bettie Page)

11 October 2011

“A pair of lower and upper cumulative distribution functions, also called probability box or p-box, is among the most popular models used in imprecise probability theory. They arise naturally in expert elicitation, for instance in cases where bounds are specified on the quantiles of a random variable, or when quantiles are specified only at a finite number of points. Many practical and formal results concerning p-boxes already exist in the literature.”

−Matthias Troffaes and Sebastien Destercke in their article in International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 52(6): 767–791

September 2011

“The Adriane 5 disaster was blamed on inadequately tested software. But what I want to know is where is the adequately tested software?”

−William Kahan, at the IFIP Working Conference on Uncertainty Quantification in Scientific Computing, at NIST in Boulder, Colorado

3 August 2011

“In the Airbus disaster, the computer's response to an ‘error’ event was to abandon control, which caused a stall from which the pilots never recovered. [...] Stopping on an execution error is a bad idea. It’s a bad policy. The alternative is a bad policy too. [...] We need to handle exceptions in a humane way.”

−William Kahan, at the IFIP Working Conference on Uncertainty Quantification in Scientific Computing, at NIST in Boulder, Colorado

3 August 2011

“I think we have to get to a time in which people are embarrassed to pretend to know things they don’t know. [...] I think the goal is to get to a time where people’s bullshit detectors are really finely calibrated, and where in public discourse, in journalism, at the level of newspaper editorials, and in every conversation that matters we are reluctant to give people a pass when they pretend to know things they don’t know.”

−Sam Harris, Ask Sam Harris Anything #1 (1:17−2:01)

uploaded 28 June 2011

“I did nothing.”

−Stanislav Petrov, the Russian officer (and hottie) who may have saved the world from nuclear war in 1983 by not reporting the apparent launch of five nuclear missiles targeting the Soviet Union from the United States to military decision makers in the hardline Andropov regime in the Kremlin on edge after being called an “evil empire” by U.S. President Ronald Reagan [context: “I was simply doing my job, and I was the right person at the right time, that’s all. My late wife for 10 years knew nothing about it. ‘So what did you do?’ she asked me. I did nothing.”], recorded in the documentary The Red Button

documentary released 2011

“Java is sort of the COBOL of the twenty-first century I think. It’s kind of heavy weight, verbose, and everyone loves to hate it.”

−Larry Wall, “5 Programming Languages Everyone Should Know”, Big Think

uploaded 13 June 2011

“Ohne Zweifel, die dramatischen Ereignisse in Japan sind ein Einschnitt für die Welt. Sie waren ein Einschnitt auch für mich ganz persönlich. Wer auch nur einmal die Schilderungen an sich heran lässt, wie in Fukushima verzweifelt versucht wurde, mit Meerwasser die Reaktoren zu kühlen, um inmitten des Schreckens noch Schrecklicheres zu verhindern, der erkennt: In Fukushima haben wir zur Kenntnis nehmen müssen, dass selbst in einem Hochtechnologieland wie Japan die Risiken der Kernenergie nicht sicher beherrscht werden können.

“Wer das erkennt, muss die notwendigen Konsequenzen ziehen. Wer das erkennt, muss eine neue Bewertung vornehmen. Deshalb sage ich für mich: Ich habe eine neue Bewertung vorgenommen; denn das Restrisiko der Kernenergie kann nur der akzeptieren, der überzeugt ist, dass es nach menschlichem Ermessen nicht eintritt. Wenn es aber eintritt, dann sind die Folgen sowohl in räumlicher als auch in zeitlicher Dimension so verheerend und so weitreichend, dass sie die Risiken aller anderen Energieträger bei weitem übertreffen. Das Restrisiko der Kernenergie habe ich vor Fukushima akzeptiert, weil ich überzeugt war, dass es in einem Hochtechnologieland mit hohen Sicherheitsstandards nach menschlichem Ermessen nicht eintritt. Jetzt ist es eingetreten.

“Genau darum geht es also - nicht darum, ob es in Deutschland jemals ein genauso verheerendes Erdbeben, einen solch katastrophalen Tsunami wie in Japan geben wird. Jeder weiß, dass das genau so nicht passieren wird. Nein, nach Fukushima geht es um etwas anderes. Es geht um die Verlässlichkeit von Risikoannahmen und um die Verlässlichkeit von Wahrscheinlichkeitsanalysen. Denn diese Analysen bilden die Grundlage, auf der die Politik Entscheidungen treffen muss, Entscheidungen für eine zuverlässige, bezahlbare, umweltverträgliche, also sichere Energieversorgung in Deutschland. Deshalb füge ich heute ausdrücklich hinzu: Sosehr ich mich im Herbst letzten Jahres im Rahmen unseres umfassenden Energiekonzepts auch für die Verlängerung der Laufzeiten der deutschen Kernkraftwerke eingesetzt habe, so unmissverständlich stelle ich heute vor diesem Haus fest: Fukushima hat meine Haltung zur Kernenergie verändert.”

−Angela Merkel, physical chemist-cum-politician who had previously strongly supported nuclear power defending her sudden closure of many German nuclear plants and plan for nuclear phaseout by 2022 in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in a government declaration “Der Weg zur Energie der Zukunft” on German energy policy before the Bundestag [reductively translated by Craig Morris and Arne Jungjohann in Energy Democracy: Germany's Energiewende to Renewables (2016, Palgrave Macmillan, page 338) as “You can only accept the residual risk of nuclear if you are convinced that it will not occur as far as it is humanly possible to determine…And that is exactly the point—it’s not about whether Germany can ever have such a disastrous earthquake, such a catastrophic tsunami as in Japan. Everyone knows it won’t happen exactly the same way. No, after Fukushima we’re talking about something else. We’re talking about the reliability of risk assessments and the reliability of probability analyses…Fukushima changed my stance on nuclear power.” and further reductively translated in The Atom: A Love Affair (1:15) as “After Fukushima, something else matters: the reliability of risk assessments and of probability analyses. Thus, the use of nuclear energy in Germany will be brought to an end by 2022”]

9 June 2011

“The ancient Greeks had already noticed this ‘fire’ gleaming in animals’ eyes (Pliny the Elder in his Natural History mentions light emitted by cats, wolves and wild goats). It must therefore have seemed natural to deduce that eyes must somehow contain or emit light. This erroneous conclusion [...] explained why many animals can see well in the dark [...] and why, as noticed by Alcmaeon of Croton in the fifth century BC, when the eye is tapped or pressed, you sometimes see light flashes [... I]t was natural for thinkers to deduce that there was some kind of light source in the eye, and to suppose that it was precisely this light that underlies vision [...].” [excluding some references]

−J. Kevin O'Regan, “Ancient Visions” supporting his book Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell which is available as a draft, which Todd Rundgren presaged (“I Saw The Light”, 1972)
Can't you see the light
In my eyes? (In my eyes)
In my eyes (in my eyes)
In my eyes (in my eyes)
In my eyes (in my eyes)
In my eyes (in my eyes)
and Peter Gabriel further expounded (“In Your Eyes”,1985)
I wanna touch the light, the heat, I see in your eyes
In your eyes
In your eyes
In your eyes
In your eyes (in your eyes)
(In your eyes)
In your eyes (in your eyes)
In your eyes (in your eyes)

2011

Captain Avery: “The ship is cursed!”
Doctor: “Yeah, right. ‘Cursed’ is big with humans. It means bad things are happening but you can’t be bothered to find an explanation.”

−Stephen Thompson, “The Curse of the Black Spot”, third episode of the sixth series of Doctor Who

7 May 2011

“The truth is science has always been in the values business. We simply cannot speak of facts without resorting to values. […] All we can do is appeal to scientific values, and if [someone] doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic? I think this split between facts and values should look really strange to you on its face. What are we really saying when we say that science can’t be applied to the most important questions in human life? We’re saying that when we get our biases out of the way, when we most fully rely on clear reasoning and honest observation, when intellectual honesty is at its zenith, well then those efforts have no application whatsoever to the most important questions in human life. That is precisely the mode you cannot be in to answer the most important questions in human life. It would be very strange if that were so.”

−Sam Harris, in a debate with William Lane Craig on the foundation of morality

April 2011

“I can’t prove it, but I can say it.”

−Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

19 April 2011

“Does rationality necessitate probability? ... The Bayesian paradigm ... holds that any source of uncertainty can and should be quantified probabilistically. [As Cyert and DeGroot (1974) write on p. 524 ‘To the Bayesian, all uncertainty can be represented by probability distributions.’] ... The standard line of reasoning of the Bayesian approach is that, in the absence of objective probabilities, the decision maker (DM, for short) should have her own, subjective probabilities, and that these probabilities should guide her decisions. Moreover, the remarkable axiomatic derivations of the Bayesian approach (culminating in Savage, 1954), show that axioms that appear very compelling necessitate that the DM behave as if she maximized expected utility relative to a certain probability measure, which is interpreted as her subjective probability. Thus, the axiomatic foundations basically say, ‘Even if you don’t know what the probabilities are, you should better adopt some probabilities and make decisions in accordance with them, as this is the only way to satisfy the axioms.’

There is a heated debate regarding the claim that rationality necessitates Bayesian beliefs. Knight (1921) and Keynes (1921, 1937) argued that not all sources of uncertainty can be probabilistically quantified. Knight suggested to distinguish between ‘risk’, referring to situations described by known or calculable probabilities, and ‘uncertainty’, where probabilities are neither given nor computable. Keynes (1937) wrote,

By ‘uncertain’ knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty ... The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence ... About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.

Gilboa, Postlewaite, and Schmeidler (2008, 2009, 2010) argue that the axiomatic foundations of the Bayesian approach are not as compelling as they seem, and that it may be irrational to follow this approach. In a nutshell, their argument is that the Bayesian approach is limited because of its inability to express ignorance: it requires that the agent express beliefs whenever asked, without being allowed to say ‘I don’t know’. Such an agent may provide arbitrary answers, which are likely to violate the axioms, or adopt a single probability and provide answers based on it. But such a choice would be arbitrary, and therefore a poor candidate for a rational mode of behavior.

Axiomatic derivations such as Savage’s may convince the DM that she ought to have a probability, but they do not tell her which probability it makes sense to adopt. If there are no additional guiding principles, an agent who picks a probability measure arbitrarily should ask herself, is it so rational to make weighty decisions based on my arbitrarily-chosen beliefs? If there are good reasons to support my beliefs, others should agree with me, and then the probabilities would be objective. If, however, the probabilities are subjective, and others have different probabilities, what makes me so committed to mine? Wouldn’t it be more rational to admit that these beliefs were arbitrarily chosen, and that, in fact, I don’t know the probabilities in question?”

−Itzhak Gilboa and Massimo Marinacci, in “Ambiguity and the Bayesian Paradigm” which appeared in the 2013 Cambridge University Press book Advances in Economics and Econometrics

12 April 2011

“Typically, we think of education as informing students about things they are not aware of, like the French Revolution for example. But science presents a different challenge. It is not that students know nothing about it, but that they already have plenty of ideas, most of which are, unfortunately, wrong scientifically speaking. They don’t pay attention because they think they know it, and then asked what they saw they falsely remember their own ideas as what was presented. [...] We really have to tackle these misconceptions somehow. It seems if you just present the correct information five things happen. Number one, students think they know it. Two, they don't pay their utmost attention. Three, they don’t recognize that what was presented is different to what they’re already thinking. And four, they don’t learn a thing. And finally five, perhaps most troublingly, they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.”

−Derek Muller, "Khan Academy and the effectiveness of science videos", Veritasium

17 March 2011

“It’s over...Fukushima has forever changed the way we define risk in Germany.”

−Angela Merkel, reported by Christian Schwägerl in “Germany’s Unlikely Champion Of a Radical Green Energy Path” in YaleEnvironment360 (9 May 2011)

15 March 2011

“It’s very hard to find any kind of focus on these questions, at least in the areas of cognitive science that I’m particularly interested in like language for example. What you have is extreme efforts, which are sometimes extremely strange, to try to show that trivial problems, for which we basically know the answers and have for sixty years, can be somehow dealt with by massive data analysis.”

−Noam Chomsky, reddit.com Ask Me Anything (4:25−5:04)

11 March 2011

Lev: “The evolutionary psychologist Kurzban says that it might be advantageous for there not to be perfect communication between the different modules of the multicameral brain. It might be helpful for the speaking ‘you’ not to know the reason you’re doing something.”
Nick: “Wha...?” [furrows brow]
Scott: “You don’t think you can lie to yourself?”
Nick: “We never lie to ourselves.”
Jack: “Never have.”

January 2011

If you’d not took a chance on a little romance
When I wasn’t expecting that
Time doesn’t take long, three kids up and gone
And I wasn’t expecting that
And when the nurses they came, said it’s come back again
I wasn’t expecting that
Then you closed your eyes, took my heart by surprise
And I wasn’t expecting that!

−Jamie Lawson, “Wasn't Expecting That”, Gingerbread Man records

released 3 April 2015, originally released 11 March 2011 on Wasn't Expecting That, first available on Youtube on 3 January 2011

“Statistics is the ‘Science of Uncertainty’”

−Noel Cressie and Christopher K. Wikle, in their book Statistics for Spatio-temporal Data (page 4), misunderstanding that statistics is the science of data, while risk analysis is the science of uncertainty

2011

“It’s always a shock to the old that the young have their own ideas about things, isn’t it?”

−Scott Ferson in an email about a SAMSI workshop at Sandia on UQ

November 2010

“The only gut feeling I have about probability is not to trust my gut feelings, and so whenever someone throws a problem at me I need to excuse myself, sit quietly muttering to myself for a while, and finally return with what may or may not be the right answer.”

−David Spiegelhalter, "Why Do People Find Probability Unintuitive and Difficult?” in NRICH: Enriching Mathematics

November 2010

“What you’d really like to know is what you know, from the data.”

−Michael Balch in his job talk at AB

November 2010

“I don’t care how many degrees you may have, how many books you may have written. This was a set fire.”

−Corsicana, Texas, assistant fire chief Douglas Fogg, Frontline episode "Death by Fire”, on the case against Cameron Todd Willinghan

19 October 2010

Nelson Muntz: “She can do the kind of math that has letters. Watch. What’s X, Lisa?”

Lisa Simpson: “Well, that depends....”

Nelson Muntz: “Sorry. She did it yesterday.”

−Tim Long (creators Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, Sam Simon), “MoneyBart”, The Simpsons

10 October 2010

What the p-value? [video]

−Steve Grambow, an Xtranormal movie of a clinical researcher and a statistician talking about the meaning of a p-value, loosely based on Blume and Peipert’s 2003 paper “What your statistician never told you about P-values” that appeared in The Journal of the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists (10: 439-444).

19 September 2010

“In science, your most hostile critic is your best friend. I’m pleased to have so many friends here today. I also hope to make more friends in the future.”

−Roger Cooke, author of the chapter on uncertainty analysis of the EPA dioxin reassessment, at its panel review

July 2010

“I hope my anger gets through the phone.”

−Elizabeth Coker, Tennessee mother speaking telephonically during the public comment period at an EPA public meeting on dioxin reassessment

July 2010

“宁在宝马车里哭，也不在自行车上笑”

−Ma Nuo, contestant on the Chinese dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao, in response to an unemployed suitor’s proposal of a cycling date

2010

“If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. [… T]he skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

−David Dunning, in a New York Times article “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma” by Errol Morris

article published 20 June 2010

“WARNING: Please NEVER use just haha in a sentence without a comma. This is not only syntactically wrong, but morally wrong as well.”

−in the post “The implications of Comma Haha, Haha Comma, and Hahaha and where to use them” on the cleverly named blog [insert poetic, angsty site name here]

3 June 2010

“My seven word definition of statistics is ‘Statistics tells you what you actually know’. This is a condensation of what I tell my stat students, that the job of statistics is telling you what you deserve to conclude from the data you have.”

−Jim Dukelow, on the Riskanal list server

10 May 2010

“I have found a good bit of confusion and contradictory arguments on the topic by many who argue for the [second-order probability] interpretation. I believe the confusion often comes down to what a person precisely means by ‘epistemic uncertainty’. It is rare when an author carefully defines what they mean by epistemic uncertainty. Just saying ‘It is lack of knowledge uncertainty’ is actually quite vague and, I feel, inadequate in real decision making.”

−William Oberkampf

27 April 2010

Karen [played by Ramona Marquez]: “Hey, Ben, there’s a couple!”
Pete [Hugh Dennis]: “Hey, I told you to stop playing that chav spotting game.”
Karen: “We’re not. Now we’re spotting lesbians.”
Sue [Claire Skinner]: “What! You can’t do that.”
Karen: “There’s nothing wrong with it. Now you’re being lesbianist.”
Sue: “I’m not lesbi..., lesbianist.”
Karen: “Well, you shouldn’t be prejudiced against fat people, thin people, ...”
Sue: “I’m not.”
Karen: “...men who turned into women, women who turned into men, gay people, ginger people, ...”
Sue: “Karen!”
Karen: “...people who come from Liverpool.”
Sue: “I’m not. I’m just simply saying don’t shout...at them in the street.”
Karen: “Anyway, Steph’s mum’s a lesbian, and she’s really nice.”
Sue: “No, Karen, no. She’s Lebanese. She’s from Lebanon.”

−Outnumbered [S03:E01] , written by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin for BBC One, tripping over the throw-away Liverpool joke to get to the formulaic lesbian/Lebanese joke, which is even standard within the lesbian community of Cherry Grove, on New York’s Long Island, where for decades the Lithuanian flag was raised and flown in the wake of a similar real-life farcical confusion [see Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town by Esther Newton and Creating a Place For Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, edited by Brett Beemyn]

aired 8 April 2010

“Fucking magnets, how do they work? And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist. Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed.”

−Insane Clown Posse and Mike E. Clark, “Miracles”, Bang! Pow! Boom!, Psychopathic Records

6 April 2010

“The great irony of the popular conception of science as arrogant is that when you go to a scientific meeting, you don’t see arrogance. You are about as likely to see real arrogance as you are likely to see nudity at a scientific conference. People are constantly offering caveats and hedges toward what they say. Every statement is couched in ‘I’m sure there’s someone in the room who knows more about this than me, but…’ because everyone is desperate to avoid public embarrassment.”

−Sam Harris, in “Does God Have a Future” on ABC’s Nightline

broadcast 23 March 2010

“You see I’m married now, but I used to be really scared about marriage. I was like wow! Fifty percent of all marriages end up lasting forever.”

−Joe Wong, Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner

17 March 2010

“[The meanings of] ‘It’s gotta be’ and ‘it’s the only thing I could think of’ are different.”

−Scott Ferson

11 March 2010

Scott: “Who was it that had that famous dictum about change, Heraclitus? I wrote a paper about it in college. He said change never stops, or the only constancy was change.”
Nick: “You should have seen how many drafts of it Heraclitus had gone through.”

January 2010

“...separating fraud from optimism can be like trying to separate ice from snow.”

−Mark Powell

January 2010

“In most debates, people seem to be trying to convince one another; but all they can hope for is new arguments to convince themselves.”

−Nassim Taleb, correct that we can never convince our peers, but forgetting that we can sometimes convince their students

The Bed of Procrustes, published 2010

“Hearing this song [‘Miracles’ by Insane Clown Posse] makes you wish ICP would stick to serial killing.”

−Adam Graham, music critic for The Detroit News

1 September 2009

“A significant correlation between two variables implies causation, just not necessarily between those two variables.”

−Jack Siegrist

November 2009

“The American Restoration Movement aimed to restore the church and sought ‘the unification of all Christians in a single body patterned after the church of the New Testament.’…The Restoration Movement has seen several divisions, resulting in multiple separate groups.”

−Wikipedia article “Restorationism”

edited 3 October 2009

“It proves we can’t ever really know what’s going on!” [BELL RINGS] “But...you will be responsible for it on the mid-term!”

−Larry Gopnick (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), in his lecture about Heisenberg ’s Uncertainty Principle in A Serious Man, written by Joel and Ethan Coen

film released 2 October 2009

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission.”

−Harry Schoell, dispelling rumors that the flesh of fallen soldiers might be the biomass used by his company’s EATR biomass refueling capability that will now power autonomous robots, not noticing that the conversion from phytophagic to omophagic digestion would be pretty simple technologically

17 July 2009

formal dimensional analysis is performed using the Buckingham Π-theorem, which tells is how the degrees of freedom of a problem (the number of variables that define the problem of interest, n) is related to the number of base dimensions involved (m) in the phenomenon. And how the difference, n – m may be minimised to facilitate a solution.

“Even when there is no significant optimism—or significant parallelism to compound it—the most likely outcome of the project is rarely the scenario based on the most likely estimates. Using the most likely estimates in a plan usually gives a projected outcome that has a very low level of confidence.”

−The Benefits of Risk Assessment for Projects, Portfolios, and Businesses (page 3), Oracle White Paper

June 2009

“Modelers owe us this much: they have to take a Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, to not pretend they know things they don't know.”

−Steven Munch

April 2009

“Also, I’ve left The Trouble With Physics on your desk, passing the torch. Nice book. Would’ve been an even better pamphlet.”

−Nick Friedenberg

April 2009

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

−John Rogers, on his blog Kung Fu Monkey

19 March 2009

“[T]he best approach [to understanding human language] appears to be to embrace the complexity of the domain and address it by harnessing the power of data: if other humans engage in the tasks and generate large amounts of unlabeled, noisy data, new algorithms can be used to build high-quality models from the data. [...] [Since] the excitement of having access to the Brown Corpus, containing one million English words [...] our field has seen several notable corpora that are about 100 times larger, and in 2006, Google released a trillion-word corpus with frequency counts for all sequences up to five words long. In some ways this corpus is a step backwards from the Brown Corpus: it's taken from unfiltered Web pages and thus contains incomplete sentences, spelling errors, grammatical errors, and all sorts of other errors. It's not annotated with carefully hand-corrected part-of-speech tags. But the fact that it's a million times larger than the Brown Corpus outweighs these drawbacks. A trillion-word corpus—along with other Web-derived corpora of millions, billions, or trillions of links, videos, images, tables, and user interactions-captures even very rare aspects of human behavior. So, this corpus could serve as the basis of a complete model for certain tasks—if only we knew how to extract the model from the data.”

In 2009, in most language processing tasks, statistical language models dominated over symbolic language models because they can usefully ingest large datasets.

Halevy, Alon; Norvig, Peter; Pereira, Fernando (March 2009). "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data". IEEE Intelligent Systems. 24 (2): 8–12. doi:10.1109/MIS.2009.36. ISSN 1541-1672.

Scott: “Are we having lunch tomorrow?”
Steve: “Yes. What time / where would you like to have lunch? 12 or 1?”
Scott: “Shall we say 12:30? Ordinarily, the result of indecision about whether it should be 12 or 1 would induce me to offer the interval [12,1], but I’ve reverted to splitting the difference in the old-fashioned way for your sake.”
Steve: “I truly appreciate you sparing me having to wrap my head around another damn interval problem. See you at 12:30! Where? Your office or the restaurant?”
Scott: “Uh, I guess halfway between my office and the restaurant.”

February 2009

“To be ‘Orwellian’ is to speak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening…and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.”

−Frank Luntz, suggesting with a straight face that the term ‘Orwellian’ can be considered positive, in a conversation with Terry Gross, while the corpse of George Orwell experienced untold rotational acceleration, in “Frank Luntz Explains ‘Words That Work’”, on the NPR radio talk show Fresh Air

9 January 2007

“What makes it possible to learn advanced math fairly quickly is that the human brain is capable of learning to follow a given set of rules without understanding them, and apply them in an intelligent and useful fashion. Given sufficient practice, the brain eventually discovers (or creates) meaning in what began as a meaningless game, but it is in general not necessary to reach that stage in order to apply the rules effectively. An obvious example can be seen every year, when first-year university physics and engineering students learn and apply advanced methods of differential equations, say, without understanding them—a feat that takes the mathematics majors (where the goal very definitely is understanding) four years of struggle to achieve.”

−Keith Devlin, also explaining how religions and armies work, and perhaps how human cooperation on any scale is possible, in “Should children learn math by starting with counting?”

January 2009

Oven: “Scott, I want you to do something.”
Scott: “Not doing that again. That burned.”
Oven: “We both enjoyed that. Now I want you to introduce my greatest creation: the new Toasty Torpedo.”
Scott: “The new Toasty Torpedo?”
Oven: “Yes, Scott. You make one.”
Scott: “Me?”
Oven: “Put it in me, Scott. It's over a foot of Quizno's flavor on slim sleek ciabatta for only $4. Say it, Scott.”
Scott: “Only $4?”
Oven: “Say it sexy.”
Scott: “Only $4?”
Oven: “Sexier."
Scott: “Only $4.”

−television ad for Quizno's Subs

2009

“There is a large, confusing literature on the relationship and possible conflicts between Bayes’s theorem and Maximum Entropy. I don’t recommend reading it.”

−Brendan Brewer in his blogpost “Where do I stand on maximum entropy”

29 December 2008

“Some people use the phrase ‘approximately normal’ to describe a probability distribution in order to justify the use of normal theory or procedures that assume normality. I hate this phrase. Does one really need to point out that the notion is absurd? A normal distribution is an unbounded, stable distribution, without any outliers or lacunae, with a single well-defined and invariant peak, exactly zero skewness, neither heavy-tailed nor light-tailed but perfectly symmetrical tails that are neither platykurtic nor leptokurtic and approach zero at negative and positive infinity at just the right uniform rate to make the function integrable and forming an exponential family of distributions guaranteeing summarizability via sufficient statistics. Which of these properties are you willing to leave out when you approximate normality? Why not specify just what assumptions you think are reasonable to make about your distribution? Is it surely unimodal? What is its theoretical range? What is its practical range? Does it need to be symmetrical? Are you sure it is stable (will sums of its deviates have distributions of the same parametric shape)?”

−Scott Ferson

2008

“I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.”

−Hal Varian, Google economist, in Insights & Publications

October 2008

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”

−Alan Greenspan, whose philosophical ‘flaw’ (not realizing it is individuals within corporations rather than mythical corporation-persons who make self-interested decisions) precipitated the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession

23 October 2008

Scott (seeking more help with the same computer question he’d asked the day before): “Teach a man to fish...”
Nick (not understanding the allusion): “What? And he’ll drive a species to extinction?”

August 2008

“Over a half-century again, Borgnine won an Oscar for his poignant portrayal of a lonely Bronx butcher. Now, we finally have the answer to the film’s recurring question, ‘I dunno, Marty. Whadda you wanna do tonight?’”

−Marty Klein, in his post “Ernest Borgnine: 91 and Still Jackin’” in his sex therapy blog Dr. Marty Klein

17 August 2008

“I just shook his hand.”

−Steve Doocy, after learning the secret to longevity from Ernest Borgnine who’d whispered to him “I masturbate a lot.”

on or before 14 August 2008

“Words like ‘few’ are ambiguous. That’s why we invented numbers. As the old joke goes, a few dollars in your wallet are not many, but a few hairs in your soup are a lot. Not all cultures have numbers. Only those engaged in commerce.”

July 2008

“The dark discipline”

−Mark Burgman, in reference to statistics

July 2008

“Nothing instills confidence in a planetary defense project like a spelling error.”

−reading “Foresight: a small satellite radio tagging mission design to near Earth object Apophis” by A.C. Charania, John R. Olds, and Jesse Koenig, presented at the 26th International Symposium on Space Technology and Science (ISTS), in Hamamatsu City, Japan, describing the winning commercial competition organized by the Planetary Society to design an uncrewed space probe that would study the orbit of the near-Earth asteroid Apophis to “determine whether it will impact Earth, thus helping governments decide whether to mount a deflection mission to alter its orbit”

03 June 2008

(Evangelista explores the open panel alone. She goes down a short passage to what might be a reading room or lecture hall. Anyway, every flat surface has books piled on it. She steps into the darkness and screams. The Doctor leads the way to investigate. They find a skeleton in rags.)
Doctor Who [played by David Tennant]: Everybody, careful. Stay in the light.
Dave [played by Harry Peacock or possibly by O. T. Fagbenle]: You keep saying that. I don't see the point.
Doctor: Who screamed?
Dave: Miss Evangelista.
Doctor: Where is she?
River Song [played by Alex Kingston]: Miss Evangelista, please state your current
(River's voice echoes from very nearby.)
River: Please state your current position.
(River takes a lit comm unit from the remains of the skeleton's collar.)
River: It's her. It's Miss Evangelista.
Anita [played by Jessika Williams]: We heard her scream a few seconds ago. What could do that to a person in a few seconds?
Doctor: It took a lot less than a few seconds.
Anita: What did?
Miss Evangelista [played by Talulah Riley]: Hello?
River: Er, I'm sorry, everyone. Er, this isn't going to be pleasant. She's ghosting.
Donna Noble [played by Catherine Tate]: She's what?
Evangelista: Hello? Excuse me. I'm sorry. Hello? Excuse me.
Donna: That's, that's her, that's Miss Evangelista.
Dave: I don't want to sound horrible, but couldn't we just, you know?
River: This is her last moment. No, we can't. A little respect, thank you.
Evangelista: Sorry, where am I? Excuse me?
Donna: But that's Miss Evangelista.
River: It's a data ghost. She'll be gone in a moment. Miss Evangelista, you're fine. Just relax. We'll be with you presently.
Donna: What's a data ghost?
Doctor: There's a neural relay in the communicator. Lets you send thought mail. That's it there. Those green lights. Sometimes it can hold an impression of a living consciousness for a short time after death. Like an afterimage.
Anita: My grandfather lasted a day. Kept talking about his shoelaces.
Donna: She's in there.
Evangelista: I can't see. I can't. Where am I?
Dave: She's just brain waves now. The pattern won't hold for long.
Donna: But, she's conscious. She's thinking.
Evangelista: I can't see, I can't. I don't know what I'm thinking.
Doctor: She's a footprint on the beach. And the tide's coming in.
Evangelista: Where's that woman? The nice woman. Is she there?
Strackman Lux [played by Steve Pemberton]: What woman?
Donna: She means...I think she means me.
Evangelista: Is she there? The nice woman.
River: Yes, she's here. Hang on. Go ahead. She can hear you.
Evangelista: Hello? Are you there?
Doctor: Help her.
Donna: She's dead.
Doctor: Yeah. Help her.
Evangelista: Hello? Is that the nice woman?
Donna: Yeah. Hello. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm here. You okay?
Evangelista: What I said before, about being stupid. Don't tell the others, they'll only laugh.
Donna: Course I won't. Course I won't tell them.
Evangelista: Don't tell the others, they'll only laugh.
Donna: I won't tell them. I said I won't.
Evangelista: Don't tell the others, they'll only laugh.
Donna: I'm not going to tell them.
(The green light starts blinking.)
Evangelista: Don't tell the others, they'll only laugh.
River: She's looping now. The pattern's degrading.
Evangelista: I can't think. I don't know, I, I, I, I scream. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream.
River: Does anybody mind if I?
Evangelista: Ice cream. Ice cream.
(River turns off the comm. unit.)

−“Silence in the Library” [story number 195a, eighth episode of the fourth series of the revived British science fiction television series] Doctor Who, written by Steven Moffat

first broadcast 31 May 2008

“All models are wrong, but some are stupid.”

−Scott Ferson, channeling a grumpier George Box

May 2008

“It’s the wet field of dreams in Everglades modeling.”

−Lance Gunderson, at an Army Corps of Engineers panel meeting, on Florida ecosystem modeling

May 2008

“Will arm-wave for food.”

−Troy Tucker

2008

“On the positive side, Larry did have the benefit of going through life knowing what it was all about.”

−Greg Paoli, in response to the email joke: “Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote ‘Hokey Pokey’ died peacefully at the age of 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin. They put his left leg in, and then the trouble started.”

23 March 2008

“There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good.”

−Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

10 March 2008

“A Supreme Court justice once said the Constitution is not a suicide pact. I likewise think that we should not let American anti-intellectualism―as fun as it is―be the death of us all.”

−Scott Ferson

20 February 2008

“The biologists I taught—and I don’t think they were atypical—could work out what to do with a ‘45’ but rarely what to do with an ‘x’” .

−Helmut van Emden, in the preface to his book Statistics for Terrified Biologists (Blackwell Publishing)

published 2008

“You know, in today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules. This is something the public really doesn’t understand. But it’s impossible for a violation to go undetected, certainly not for a considerable period of time.”

−Bernard Madoff, speaking extemporaneously at the Philoctetes Center

20 October 2007

“We brought in good health, very important, youth, optimism. That’s why these eighteen-year olds could pursue war at all. They were kids. They were optimistic. And they really thought that, if you did well, you’d be rewarded. I mean, they were that innocent. They had no idea about life’s accidents.”

−Paul Fussell, at 1:28 in episode 5, “Fubar”, in Ken Burns’ film The War

broadcast 30 September 2007

“I can finally say, ‘Hu is on first base.’”

−Vin Scully, Los Angeles Dodgers announcer, when Dodgers shortstop Chin-Lung Hu, a late-season callup, got a single against the Arizona Diamondbacks

September 2007

“I think this affirms something that’s long been known by diplomats, namely that the vagueness of language, far from being a bug or an imperfection, actually might be a feature of language, one that we use to our advantage in social interactions.”

−Steven Pinker, "What our language habits reveal", TED Talks

11 September 2007

“I was elected to lead, not to read. Number 3!”

−President Schwarzenegger [voiced by Harry Shearer], The Simpsons Movie, screenplay by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, et al.

US release 27 July 2007

“Your DNA is more similar to a male chimpanzee’s than to that of a human female.”

−Sharon Pochron, speaking to a male graduate student

July 2007

“We as a nation have to ask ourselves, what the hell is going on...?”

−Dboots, surprised by “rainbow’s [sic] near the ground” in the spray from a lawn sprinker in https://youtu.be/w3qFdbUEq5s

6 July 2007

“According to microbiologists at Plymouth University in England, most of the world’s coral reefs are riddled with herpes! Now, you’re probably asking yourself, ‘How did the coral catch herpes?’ Scientists blame humans for putting too much carbon into the oceans. But that doesn’t answer the basic question: Who’s been fucking the coral reefs?”

−Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

25 June 2007

“It’s one thing to know that there’s maybe one chance in 45,000 that it’s gonna hit the Earth. But what you’d like to know: is there one chance in a hundred? Is there one chance in ten? Is the probability one that it’s gonna hit the Earth?”

−Apollo IX astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweickart on the next and subsequent close approaches of 99942 Apophis on “The End of the Earth: Deep Space Threats to Our Planet”, at 12:55-16:00 during episode 3 of season 1 of The Universe, demonstrating that deep knowledge of astrodynamics does not guarantee a traditional perspective about probability

aired on The History Channel on 12 June 2007

“It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct and their wish or perhaps their need to be credulous and to be fooled. This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence and may be innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters and is thus one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities.”

−Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, chapter “‘Lowly Stamp of Their Origin’: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings”

1 May 2007

“The reality is, most academics don’t know how to talk to normal human beings.”

−Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus

25 April 2007

“The secret to happiness is low expectations.”

−Barry Schwartz, explaining why freedom of choice creates more regret and less satisfaction, “The paradox of choice”, TEDTalks

uploaded 16 January 2007

“It turns out the death rates on Death Row from all causes, including execution, [is] two percent a year.”

−Steven Levitt, “The freakonomics of McDonalds vs. drugs”, 14:38

uploaded 16 January 2007

“Newspeak. The construction of a new simplistic language based on the principles of Newspeak to ‘provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible’ (Orwell, 1949). This includes the formal conversion of contraries into contradictories (i.e. ungood becoming the opposite of good), as well regulating ‘crimethink’, with everyday language becoming a naturalized ‘duckspeak,’ to speak without thinking. The quintessential figure in this neo-Orwellianism is Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who publishes an annual book for the GOP about the words and phrases to be used in their talking points to frame all debates and discussions.”

−Eduardo Barrera Herrera, discussing one of the four steps of reduction and resemantization of political discourse in his 2007 article “The poetics of Mexican elections: the affective turn in the year of the P.I.G.” which appeared in Nóesis. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 16(31): 14−48

January−June 2007

“The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.”

−Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

2007

“This [latest microcomputer chip] is so fast you can cure cancer.”

−Ed Davis, Chief Architect at Intel Corporation, apparently actually believing that the barrier to curing cancer has been insufficient computational power

16 December 2006

“Parallel programming is an iterative process.”

−Ed Davis, Chief Architect at Intel Corporation, http://bt.pa.msu.edu/TM/BocaRaton2006/talks/davis.pdf

16 December 2006

And truth is such a funny thing
With all these people keep on telling me
They know what's best and what to be frightened of
And all the rest are wrong
They know nothing about us
They know nothing about us
And though they say it's possible
To me, I don't see how it's probable
I see the course we're on spinning farther from what I know
I'll hold on
Tell me that you won't let go
Tell me that you won't let go

−Terra Naomi, “Say It’s Possible”, Youtube, and her album Under the Influence

single released 11 June 2007, available on Youtube on 16 June 2006

“My model is so complicated that it cannot be run at all on modern supercomputers.”

−attendee at the Sandia Validation Challenge Workshop after previous commenters had claimed their models were so complex they required increasing long computation times

workshop held over 21-23 May 2006

“…[T]he Committee reaffirms…Churchill had a protected right to publish his views. … The aggressive pursuit of knowledge cannot proceed unless…researchers are permitted—and indeed encouraged—to present alternative and sometimes heretical positions and to seek to defend them in the court of academic opinion. …

“The Committee notes that this investigation was only commenced after, and perhaps in response to, the public attack on Professor Churchill for his controversial publications. … [One] claim was brought to the attention of responsible University officials a decade ago, but the University, after preliminary investigation, decided to take no further action. Thus, the Committee is troubled by the origins of, and skeptical concerning the motives for, the current investigation. The…Laws of the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado [hold] that faculty members’ ‘efforts should not be subjected to direct or indirect pressures or interference from within the university, and the university will resist to the utmost such pressures or interference when exerted from without.’

“Nevertheless, serious claims of academic misconduct have been lodged and they require full investigation…. To use an analogy, a motorist who is stopped and ticketed for speeding because the police officer was offended by the contents of her bumper sticker, and who otherwise would have been sent away with a warning, is still guilty of speeding, even if the officer’s motive for punishing the speeder was the offense taken to the speeder’s exercise of her right to free speech. No court would consider the improper motive of the police officer to constitute a defense to speeding, however protected by legal free speech guarantees the contents of the bumper sticker might be.” [some footnotes omitted]

−Wesson et al., whose treatment of Ward Churchill (however much of a dick he may be) brings shame to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and gives voice to little Eichmanns everywhere (who hate it when you call them that) while simultaneously signalling their chilling insensitivity to the grave danger of selective law enforcement more widely

9 May 2006

“You talk to God, you’re religious. God talks to you, you’re psychotic.”

−Dr. House (played by Hugh Laurie) in “House vs. God”, House MD, screenwriter Doris Egan

originally aired 25 April 2006

“Equations are the devil’s sentences.”

−Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, in a segment “Nerd Patrol”

7 February 2006

The list of examples of engineering hubris includes, from most egregious to most obnoxious,
• Crimes against Occam, such as analyses with more parameters than data points or models that run slower than real time,
• Neglecting model uncertainty, or designing without accounting for uncertainty,
• Wishful thinking, such as by using convenient models or models you hope are true,
• Inadequately exploring the ‘so what’ questions,
• Not bothering to make the information on the slide legible,
• Decorating presentations with gratuitous images,
• Technology readiness levels,
• Quad charts,
• Gantt charts.

October 2005

“In 1939, he resumed his studies at the University of California at Berkeley, studying statistics under mathematician Jerzy Neyman. An incident during his first year at Berkeley became a math-world legend.

“As Dr. Dantzig recalled years later, he arrived late for class one day and saw two problems on the blackboard that he assumed were homework assignments. He copied them down, took them home and solved them after a few days. "The problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual," he said.

“On a Sunday morning six weeks later, an excited Neyman banged on his student's front door, eager to tell him that the homework problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.

“‘That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them,’ Dr. Dantzig recalled.”

−Joe Holley, in the obituary “Vanguard Mathematician George Dantzig Dies” in the Washington Post

−19 May 2005

“History also prescribes a sobering antidote for the arrogance that tracks life in medicine like an occupational hazard.”

−Jacalyn Duffin, from the book description of her edited volume Clio in the Clinic: History in Medical Practice

12 May 2005

“[No] statistic can overcome the probabilistic nature of the relationship between evidence and inference. There is no surety, but only the relative safety of numbers, good experimental design, and empirical replication.”

−Peter R. Killeen, in his 2005 paper “Replicability, confidence, and priors” which appeared in Psychological Science 16(2):1009−1012.

2005

Whenever I encounter Christians who profess deeply held beliefs, I always try to convey my condolences that they weren’t among those taken up to heaven during the Rapture. Sometimes they object and say the Rapture hasn’t happened yet, but I laugh heartily and ask them if they really think this isn’t the Tribulation we’re in now. As if the sudden disappearance of the small assortment of people who deserve to be raptured would even be noticed on the evening news.

2005

“So I think the first thing that the blogosphere tells us is that we need to expand our idea of what counts as rational, and we need to expand our simple equation of value equals money, or, you have to pay for it to be good.”

−James Surowiecki, in his TED Talk “The power and danger of online crowds” (at 8:53) discussing unpaid contributions by bloggers, Wikipedians, etc.

February 2005

Wardell Pomeroy: How old were you when you first engaged in sexual activity with a partner?
Research Subject: 14.
Wardell Pomeroy: How?
Research Subject: With horse.
Wardell Pomeroy: How often were you having intercourse with animals at age 14?
Research Subject: [stunned] It’s true. I fucked a pony. You are genius. How did you know?
Wardell Pomeroy: You just said you had... “sex with horse.”
Research Subject: Nooo... Whores, not horse, whores.

−Bill Condon, screenwriter and director of the film Kinsey

released 12 November 2004

“Utility functions are today’s epicycles...matching anything, explaining nothing.”

−Scott Ferson

2004

Daisy [played by Laura Harris]: “These are all at the Farmer's Market in exactly 27 minutes. I smell a disaster.”
Mason [Callum Blue]: “No, five deaths is not a disaster.”
George [Ellen Muth]: “How many deaths is a disaster?”
Mason : “More than five. Five’s bullshit.”
George : “How many?”
Mason : “Sixteen to twenty is a disaster. Twenty-one and up: catastrophe. Eight to fifteen is a calamity.”
Rube Sofer [Mandy Patinkin] : “Seven and under?”
Mason : “That’s a crying shame.”

−Bryan Fuller, John Masius, Stephen Godchaux [writers], “Send in the Clown”, Dead Like Me, about a team of grim reapers discussing their day ahead)

episode aired 25 July 2004

“The concern about invasive species is a little concerning when it’s wrapped up in nationalistic language and the perspectives of war.”

−Lawrence B. Slobodkin, driving on Old Field Road

summer 2004

“Pepper needs new shorts.”

−Pepper Brooks [played by Jason Bateman] at the prospect of sudden-death elimination in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, written by Rawson Marshall Thurber

film released 18 June 2004

“If Fisher and Neyman–Pearson agreed on anything, it was that statistics should never be used mechanically.”

−Gerd Gigerenzer, in his paper “Mindless statistics” which appeared in The Journal of Socio-Economics (33: 587–606)

2004

“[I]t would be capricious and improper to profess a respect for the engineers’ knowledge but deny their assertions about their ignorance.”

−Scott Ferson and Janos G. Hajagos, in their paper “Arithmetic with uncertain numbers: rigorous and (often) best-possible answers” in Reliability and Engineering and System Safety 85: 135-152

2004

“[Architect of the United States Pacific bombing strategy during World War II, General Curtis] LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He...and I’d say I...were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

−Robert McNamara, in Errol Morris’s film The Fog of War

film released 19 December 2003

“Do you know how hard it is to explain things by analogy? It’s like.... It’s almost like.... Well, it’s really hard!”

−Matthew Butcher, who might also allow the variant “You know how hard it is to write without analogies? Writing without analogies is like…, it’s almost like…, well, it’s really hard.”

2003

Commander Robert ‘Bob’ Iverson [Bruce Greenwood] : “People! Doctors Zimsky and Keyes? You guys are our resident geophysicists, so what do you make of this?”
Dr. Conrad Zimsky [Stanley Tucci] : “The mantle is a chemical hodgepodge of, a, variety of elements...”
Dr. Ed ‘Braz’ Brazzelton [Delroy Lindo]: “Say it with me: "I don’t know."”
...
Iverson : “Forgive me, but, you know I’m not the expert here, but what if the core is thicker or thinner? I mean, what if it’s not what you think it is? Isn’t that going to affect the way the explosions are...”
Zimsky : “Yes, yes, yes, yes, and what if the core is made of cheese? This is all best guess, commander. That’s all science is, is best guess.”
Iverson : “So my best guess is you don’t know.”

−Cooper Layne and John Rogers, screenwriters for the delightful film The Core, widely regarded as the worst science-fiction film, but only by critics who missed Disney’s 1979 monstrosity The Black Hole]

release date 28 March 2003

“Intervals are the future of mathematics, and always will be.”

−Jim Demmel [attributed], possibly parodying Berthold Schweizer (1985) who said “Distributions are the numbers of the future.”

2002

“I have nothing against expert elicitation. Some of my best friends are experts.”

−Reşit Akçakaya

2002

“Uncertainty is just about the only certainty in PVA.”

−Steven Beissinger, channeling Heraclitus in Population Viability Analysis, edited by Beissinger and McCullough, University of Chicago Press

2002

“The scientific debate is closing [against us] [...] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science. [...] Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field. [...] A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.”

−Frank Luntz in his memo “The environment: a cleaner, safer, healthier America” to George W. Bush, as reported by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian 4 March 2003

memo written in 2002

There is a theory about poetry that says that the deep meanings we perceive in poems are essentially the layers of ambiguity that the text has, and that if you dissociate the words from any ambiguity and any possibility of confusion, doing so would rob the language of its poetic force. It is, after all, ambiguity that allows statements to be true in any interesting sense. That ‘fire burns’ is only true because it is ambiguous.

−[unknown, paraphrase]

2002

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

−Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defence

12 February 2002

“Why are you leaving the church of probability theory?”

−<<Rockewaitz>>, chastising Michael Beer for introducing imprecise probability into an analysis

2001

“The phrase ‘au jus’ is French for with salmonella.”

−Michael P. Doyle, chair of the National Academy of Sciences committee reviewing a risk assessment about E. coli O157:H7

2001

“Certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right....”

−Anthony Lewis, New York Times

2001

“The drug war has no interest in its own results.”

−Charles F. Manski

31 August 2001

“On June 12, 1994, a deck of cards was shuffled for 12 hours by Las Vegas Pit Boss Larry Mafia. It was shuffled to such an extreme state of randomness that it has not been sorted to this day.”

−ChimpGod, Registered Sinner, in an internet posting

12 June 2001

“If you want industry buy-in for an idea, you have to convince them it’s what they do in government. If you want government buy-in, you have to show them it’s all the rage in academia. If you want academics to be excited about an idea, you have to demonstrate that it’s important in industry.”

−Lev Ginzburg [paraphrase], explaining his Law of Circular Appeals

10 May 2001

“Simpson’s Paradox [means that] facts about probabilistic dependency can be reversed in moving from populations to subpopulations. For example, factor X may be positively dependent or negatively dependent or independent of Y in a population but still be any of these three in all partitions of the population along the values of a third factor Z if Z is itself probabilistically dependent on X and Y. Z may for instance be a preventative of Y; because of its correlation with X, the presence of X does not after all increase the frequency of Y’s in the population[...].”

−Nancy Cartwright, “What is wrong with Bayes nets?”, which appeared in The Monist 84(2) 242–264

1 April 2001

“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program.”

−Larry Niven, quoted by Arthur C. Clarke in “Meeting of the Minds : Buzz Aldrin Visits Arthur C. Clarke” by Andrew Chaikin in Space Illustrated

27 February 2001

[In a workshop on characterizing uncertainty in a model]
Mark Burgman: “It’s always possible to put interval bounds around something.”
Reşit Akçakaya: “So what are the absolute bounds on the exchange rate for Turkish lira in dollars?”
Mark: “Well, I have no idea, so I’m gonna say somewhere between 1/100 and, say, 1 million.”
Reşit: “It’s actually 1.6 million.”

2001

“Are there two dimensions of probability, one giving the total probability and the other the firmness or weight with which that probability can be held?”

−James Franklin, page 78 in The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal

2001

Lt. Ted Santen [played by Benjamin Bratt]: “Based on our last uncorrupted nav state, I’d say we’re somewhere in this 60x120-kilometer ellipse.”
Dr. Quinn Burchenal [played by Tom Sizemore]: “All the mission data is here. We've just got to close in on the downrange variables. It’s about the math.”
Robby Gallagher [played by Val Kilmer]: “This is it. That moment they told us about in high school where one day algebra would save our lives.”

−Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin, writers of the film Red Planet

release date 10 November 2000

Dam safety engineer: “A terrorist couldn’t take out a dam.”
Scott (naively dubious): “Really? Could you take out a dam?”
Dam safety engineer: “Oh, yeah. Sure. I could.”

17 October 2000

“If it’s true and you can prove it, you publish it in a math journal. If it’s true but you can't prove it, put it in an physics journal. If it’s not true, engineering journal.”

−engineer who knew all the standard jokes, like “Q: How do you tell an extroverted engineer? A: He's looking at your shoes.”

16 October 2000

“Statisticians do not have a monopoly of studies of uncertainty.”

−Dennis V. Lindley in “The philosophy of statistics”, The Statistician 49 (part 3): 293–337

2000

“A fine critique is Walley (1991), who went on to construct a system that uses a pair of numbers, called upper and lower probabilities, in place of the single probability. The result is a more complicated system. My position is that the complication seems unnecessary. I have yet to meet a situation in which the probability approach appears to be inadequate and where the inadequacy can be fixed by employing upper and lower values. The pair is supposed to deal with the precision of probability assertions; yet probability alone contains a measure of its own precision. I believe in simplicity; provided that it works, the simpler is to be preferred over the complicated, essentially Occam’s razor.”

−Dennis V. Lindley in “The philosophy of statistics”, The Statistician 49 (part 3): 293–337

2000

“Gentlemen, I put my pants on like you: one leg at a time. Except, once my pants are on, I make gold records.”

−The Bruce Dickinson [played by Christopher Walken], “More Cowbell”, Saturday Night Live, written by Will Ferrell and Donnell Campbell, co-opting the meme I first heard from the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, that everyone puts on pants one leg at a time (perhaps in reference to getting back to normalcy after the Apollo moon landing), which created in me a seedling mistrust of authority because as a kid I’d always put mine on both legs at once

aired 8 April 2000

Organizer: “Welcome to Washington, and welcome to the Society for Risk Analysis Forum ‘Uncertainty: Its Nature, Analytical Treatment and Interpretation’. I guess we can start by going around the room to introduce ourselves.”
Ronald Yager: “Hi, I’m Ron Yager, Iona College. I work in machine intelligence.”
Organizer: “I should explain that Ron doesn’t own a college. He is a professor at the institution called Iona College, in upstate New York.”

February 2000

“In addition to its use in arithmetic and science, the Hindu–Arabic number system is the only genuinely universal language on Earth—apart, perhaps, from the Windows operating system, which has achieved the near universal adoption of a conceptually and technologically poor product by the sheer force of market dominance. By contrast, the Hindi–Arabic number system gained worldwide acceptance because it is far better designed and more more efficient for human usage than any other number system.”

−Keith Devlin, in The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years (page 102)

2000

“If HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive.”

−Lew Platt, Hewlett-Packard CEO [1992-1999], but see also the 1998 book If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice by Carla O'Dell and C. Jackson Grayson

before 1999

“I have to get home and destroy evidence.”

−Scott Ferson, after watching The Talented Mr. Ripley

film released 25 December 1999

“If a girl has a pierced tongue, she’ll probably suck your dick. If a guy has a pierced tongue, he’ll probably suck your dick.”

−Chris Rock, “No Sex (In the Champagne Room)”, HBO special and album Bigger & Blacker

10 July 1999

“I am the future. I am the future of this great nation.”

−Stevo Levy [played by Matthew Lillard], in the film SLC Punk! written by James Merendino who may or may not have been right about punk life being gradual dissolution but surely nailed the boredom of engulfing conformism and the universality of hypocrisy, because, you know, he didn’t sell out...he bought in

United States film release 16 April 1999

“We conducted an extinction risk assessment for the northern spotted owl based on 8 years of data and projected the risk of decline out to 100 years. Our uncertainty analysis showed that, after 100 years, the risk of extinction is somewhere between zero and one. But we have a very high degree of confidence about that interval. We’re really sure it’s in that range.”

−Scott Ferson, getting a joke through simultaneous translation at a meeting in Japan

29 January 1999

“...two Bayesians cannot meet without smiling at each other’s priors.”

−Cosma R. Shalizi, [Review of] Error and Growth of Experimental Knowledge, The Bactra Review

September 1998

“It’s always been easy to get wrong answers.”

−Jim Dukelow, commenting on the criticism of a new methodology’s computational complexity

December 1998

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

−Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

book published 1998

“In recent years there has been a major trend in uncertainty (more specifically, partial belief) modelling emphasizing the idea that the degree of confidence in an event is not totally determined by the confidence in the opposite event, as assumed in probability theory.”

−Didier Dubois and Henri Prade, in their chapter “Possibility theory: qualitative and quantitative aspects”, pages 169–226 in Quantified Representation of Uncertainty and Imprecision

book published 1998

Edwards [Will Smith]: “Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.”
Kay [Tommy Lee Jones]: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

−Ed Solomon, writer of Men in Black

film released 2 July 1997

“If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.”

−Tom Lehrer, Songs and More Songs by Tom Lehrer, Rhino Records

released 6 May 1997

“They missed it, and they not only missed it, they blew it big.”

−Lynn Stauss, mayor of East Grand Forks, Minnesota, on the National Weather Service’s amazingly accurate but horribly communicated forecast of record-breaking flooding on the Red River

23 April 1997

“(The traditional view of risk defines it as a situation in which an outcome is subject to an uncontrollable random event stemming from a known probability distribution. Uncertainty is normally thought of in traditional terms as an outcome subject to an uncontrollable random event stemming from an unknown probability distribution. While these definitions have their place in statistics, they are of limited value in program or project risk management.) Although risk and uncertainty are often used interchangeably, they are not the same.”

−Harold Schott, in Risk Management: Concepts and Guidance (page 3-1)

1997

“Thus, selecting a probability distribution function for a variable is not a trivial matter.”

−Fritz A. Seiler and Joseph L. Alvarez, page 6 of ‘On the selection of distributions for stochastic variables’, Risk Analysis 16: 5−18.

1996

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. [...] If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.”

−Carl Sagan, interviewed by Charlie Rose

27 May 1996

“Well, I’m not calling you a liar but...but I can’t think of a way to finish that sentence.”

−Bart Simpson (writer John Swartzwelder), “The Day the Violence Died”, S7, E18, The Simpsons

aired 17 March 1996

“We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do.”

−Steve Jobs, interviewed on Fresh Air

22 February 1996

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

−Steve Jobs, quoted by Gary Wolf in an interview published in Wired

February 1996

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.... ¶ The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

−Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (pp 25f)

1995

“An article about computational results is advertising, not scholarship. The actual scholarship is the full software environment, code and data, that produced the result.”

−Jonathan B. Buckheit and David L. Donoho, paraphrasing Jon Claerbout in their chapter “Wavelab and reproducible research” in Wavelets and Statistics, edited by A. Antoniadis

1995

“The ability to think conditional thoughts is a basic part of our mental equipment. A view of the world would be an idle, ineffectual affair without them. There’s not much point in recognising that there’s a predator in your path unless you also realise that if you don’t change direction pretty quickly you will be eaten.”

−Dorothy Edgington, in “On conditionals”, Mind 104:414, a scholarly paper squeezed out of the old joke “Imagine a world without hypotheticals....”

April 1995

“I had a dog once….”

−Kindal Ferson, interrupting a story that was not about dogs but that was obviously not going to be interesting

December 1995

“Have style and wit ever been written about with less style and wit?”

−L.S. Klepp, in his review of Genius & Lust: The Creative and Sexual Lives of Cole Porter and Noel Coward by Joseph Morella and George Mazzei, however, to be fair, there is a lot more brother from another mother going on in letters and the performing arts than one might reasonably expect given the sheer number of authors, playwrights, composers and lyricists involved. Aldous Huxley, who wrote the dystopian Brave New World (1932) and the the trippy The Doors of Perception (1954), should not be confused with George Orwell who wrote the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) the allegory with talking pigs. Neither should be confused with Sinclair Lewis, the author of It Can't Happen Here, to whom is attributed the line “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross", although he never actually said that. And he should not to be confused with Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle about the meatpacking industry and said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Of course, the gay Brit Noël Coward is not the gay Hoosier Cole Porter, and neither wrote “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”. That was Rodgers and Hart. And that other writer whose name you keep forgetting is Ernest Hemmingway, who also isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald. For another perspective, see The New York Times review.

1 December 1995

“I’ve been writing code in C++ for over a month now. If C++ is so flexible how come they left out the goto statement, or am I missing something?”

−Jeff Millstein

1995

“I have retained the word ‘Axiom’ (a statement that needs no proof because its truth is obvious) but have rewritten the axioms.”

−Alan Berryman, in commentary on the fourth draft of a collaborative work

1994

“The death of Karl Popper is not perhaps a scientific truth but it is a conjecture which is open to refutation, since experiments could easily be designed to falsify it, so it may be described as a scientific theory.”

−Nicolas Walter, in Popper’s obituary in the London Times; others place the quote as a response to the obituary in The Guardian

September 1994

“If Newton had known about the Weierstrass function that’s continuous but nowhere differentiable, he would never have invented calculus. If Newton had a computer, he would have never needed calculus. You can do everything you want with discrete models. (Leibniz would still have invented calculus of course; that guy was a machine! I don’t care what Arouet says. But, without Newton's preternatural self-aggrandizement, we’d have never heard of calculus.)”

August 1994

“The truth is that any software program will probably contain one error for every 500 lines of code. The Therac-25’s software program, relatively crude by today’s standards, probably contained 101000 lines of code. At one error for every 500 lines, that works out to the possibility of twenty errors.”

−Barbara Wade Rose, showing numerical errors don't require bad software, in “Death through Software” in Fatal Dose about the Therac 25 deaths

June 1994

“Education is the process of telling smaller and smaller lies.”

−J. R. Deller, Jr., “Tom, Dick, and Mary discover the DFT”, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine [Deller is not the origin of the quotation]

April 1994

“I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

−Jean Lyotard, in “The postmodern condition” in The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory (edited by S. Seidman)

1994

“A generic software system for developing stochastic matrix models has been developed by Ferson et al. (1987). Special software isn’t really needed anyway!”

−Glenn Suter, in his book Ecological Risk Assessment

1993

“It’s a straight port.”

−Jeff Millstein

1993

“Account No.: CFERS002/CH, Date: 31-12-92, Page No.: 1, Your royalty contact is: Carol O'Leary. Transaction date: 31-03-93, Reference: 26542, Transaction: Sales earnings, Amounts due: 0.54, Balance: 0.54. [stamped in red] HELD TO THE CREDIT OF YOUR ACCOUNT”

−Chapman & Hall Publishers, in a computer-generated summary royalty statement

1992

“Now a warning?!”

−Madeline Ashton [played by Meryl Streep], after she’d already drunk the potion, in the film Death Becomes Her, written by Martin Donovan and David Koepp

film released 31 July 1992

“There is an old Vulcan proverb: only Nixon could go to China.”

−Spock [played by Leonard Nimoy] in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, screenplay by Nicholas Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn

film released 6 December 1991

Chekov [Walter Koenig]: “We do believe all planets have a sovereign claim to inalienable human rights.”
Azetbur [Rosan[n]a DeSoto]: “Inalien? If you could only hear yourselves. Human rights. Why, the very name is racist. The Federation is no more than a ‘Homo sapiens only’ club.”

−Nicholas Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn, screenwriters for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

film released 6 December 1991

“Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.”

−Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, page 254

1991

“We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax: for(;P("\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);”

−jokester explaining that the arcane programming language C is actually a parody of the beautifully designed language Pascal (see slightly different versions of the genius April Fools’ press announcement archived by CMU and GNU)

(?) 4 June 1991

“We have to build the best models we possibly can and then not trust them.”

−Robert Costanza, quoted in Science

1990

“We start our proof of the Law of the Excluded Middle with the tautology ‘Either the Law of the Excluded Middle is true or it is not true.’”

−[unknown] writing in the Village Voice

[late 1980s or early 1990s]

“Oh, she’s out today. She came down with Dutch elm disease.”

−Anthony Bouvier [character played by Meshach Taylor], explaining the absence of Suzanne Sugarbaker [played by Delta Burke] on the television series Designing Women (only much later in show mentioning “It’s primarily a disease of trees.”)

[probably the fourth or fifth year of the series, which ran between September 1986 and May 1993]

Oh, you make me feel
Mighty real
You make me feel
Mighty real
You make me feel
Mighty real
You make me feel
Mighty real

−Jimmy Somerville, covering “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”, Read My Lips, London Records

November 1989

“[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong [because its rotation causes it to deviate from a perfect sphere to an oblate spheroid by about 1 part in 300]. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

−Isaac Asimov, The relativity of wrong. The Skeptical Inquirer 14: 35-44

1989

Mark Boyce: “I only use continuous demography models.”
Scott Ferson: “For simulating biological populations? Isn't that inefficient?”
Mark: “Not at all. Only continuous models are scientifically legitimate.”
Scott: “That's crazy. Discrete population models work beautifully. How do you even do it? How do you represent discrete events such as death?”
Mark: “Well, before they die they get sick!”

1989

“But you can’t always trust your mother”

−Lou Reed, “Last Great American Whale”, on his album New York, Sire Records

album released 10 January 1989

“All generalizations are wrong.”

−Matthew Liebman, reincarnated from Alexandre Dumas Père

1988

“Telling drug addicts to ‘just say no’, is like telling the homeless to just get a house.”

−Reno, a New York City comedienne, commenting on Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign, giving a modern articulation of the wisdom in the parable of belling the cat

1987

“Million to one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”

−Terry Pratchett, in the novel Mort

1987

[In the voice of Glenda the Good Witch] “Are you a good pesticide or a bad pesticide?”

−Paul C. Novelli

1986

“It’s like the fall of Western Civilization. You know...fast enough to be unnerving, but too slow to be really exciting.”

−Thomas F. Long

1986

“There’s no sleight of hand here; it’s just algebra. [pause] Oh, no. Don’t tell me this is one of those departments where algebra is sleight of hand.”

−Monty Slatkin

1986

“What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?”

−F. Sherwood Rowland, quoted by Paul Brodeur in his article “In the face of doubt” (The New Yorker, 9 June 1986 issue), about the research by Rowland and Molina on the damage to the Earth’s ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbons, a quote which has apparently become another victim of its own success

1 June 1986

“The Challenger’s going to blow up. Everyone’s going to die.”

−Bob Ebeling, before the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, after failing to convince his superiors at Morton Thiokol and NASA to delay the launch

28 January 1986

I wondered, I guessed and I tried
You just knew

−Mike Scott, “The Whole of the Moon”, This Is the Sea, Ensign Records

released 14 October 1985

“Distributions are the numbers of the future.”

−Berthold Schweizer

1985

“[W]hen different reasonable priors yield substantially different answers, can it be right to state that there is a single answer? Would it not be better to admit that there is scientific uncertainty, with the conclusion depending on prior beliefs?”

−James O. Berger, page 125 in his book Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis (2nd ed., Springer)

1985

“I read from Sam-I-Am, according to the latter-day saint Seuss. You do not like green eggs and ham? I do not like them, Sam-I-am. I could not, would not, on a boat. I will not, will not, with a goat. I will not eat them in the rain. I will not eat them on a train. Not in the dark, not on a tree, not in a car. You let me be! I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I will not eat them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham.”

−The Reverend Jesse Jackson, who should have been elected president, in a solemn reading of the 1960 book Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss [Theodor Seuss Geisel] on Saturday Night Live

20 October 1984

“So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance, and the possibilities therein for ruining a good story.”

−Thomas Pynchon, in Slow Learner: Early Stories, quoted by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in “Books of The Times”

quoted 29 March 1984

Scott: “Geoff, could you attenuate the vertical scale on the plot a bit?”
Geoff: “Sure.”

−discussing the reasonable scaling of a “landscape”, “skyline”, “cityscape” or “ridgeline” plot (later called a “joy plot” after the band Joy Division who used a similar plot of the signal from pulsar CP1919 as the cover image for their 1979 album Unknown Pleasures), which was wholly unable to verify any assertions that the Shroud of Turin contains three-dimensional information about a human face in its brightness levels

circa 1984

Come back and stay for good this time
(Ego, envy, lust)
Everything we had together
(Ego, envy, lust)

−Paul Young, “Come Back and Stay”, from his album No Parlez, produced by Laurie Latham, based on an original version by songwriter Jack Lee

released 2 September 1983

“[Nuclear war is] a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

−military supercomputer WOPR, or Joshua, [voiced by John Wood], after completing many horrific simulations, in the film WarGames, written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes

film released 3 June 1983

Appearance never held you back
Must be when you’re number one
You don’t have to try so hard

−Split Enz, “Hello Sandy Allen”, Time and Tide, Mushroom Records, about Sandy Allen whom the lyrics describe as “towering over our heads in more ways than one”

album released April 1982

David Letterman: “Are you thought of by the gay community [...] now as a pioneer or a barrier breaker or a champion of the cause?”
Quentin Crisp: “No, I’m considered to be rather a nuisance.”
David Letterman: “Oh, really? Why is that?”
Quentin Crisp: “Well, they [...] want to pass themselves off as members of the community. They want to take their place in society. Never do that. Stay right where you are, and wait for society to form itself around you.”

3 March 1982

David Letterman: “You’re not much for house cleaning.”
Quentin Crisp: “No. It’s a great mistake.”
David Letterman: “To clean a house?”
Quentin Crisp: “Yes. In fact this is a message of hope. After the first four years, the dirt doesn’t get any worse. It’s just a question of not losing your nerve.”

3 March 1982

“Statistics is the science of handling data. On the other hand, probability is the science of handling the lack of data.”

−Stan Kaplan and B. John Garrick, in “On the quantitative definition of risk” which appeared in Risk Analysis (1: 11–27)

1981

Doug: “I’m sorry, we might have come out [to the Huyck Preserve] too early [in the season] to see a lot of insects.”
Scott: “Maybe it’s okay if we miss the mosquitoes.”
Doug: “You damn the entire class Insecta because of one or two biting dipterans?”

1981

“We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”

−Stephen Jay Gould, in his book The Mismeasure of Man (page 28 f)

1981

“I don’t want to be happy. I want to be miserable with you.”

−Gregory [John Gordon Sinclair], Gregory's Girl

film released 23 April 1981

“There is more than one way to skin a cat, but some ways make a mess.”

−Rob Armstrong, in a lecture on population demography

1980

“classic case of incomplete instructions”

−graffito responding to “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” on the glass door of a cabinet containing three canistered fire extinguishers, a fifty-foot fire hose wrapped around a big spool with a hand crank, two small and one large red manual actuators of three valves, some nozzle connectors, and a large axe

observed (but possibly written before) August 1980

“Sometimes I think your head is so big because it is so full of ideas.”

−Thomas F. Long, in a high-pitched and halting voice, making fun of my plans for graduate research, the day after we saw The Elephant Man in Chicago

1980

“Nobody listens to mathematicians.”

−Carl Sagan, Cosmos, page 262

1980

Well, as a biologist and an environmentalist, I had been a big proponent of nuclear power for a long time. Coal is dirty and dangerous, and oil and gas also have some pretty bad effects on human health and the atmosphere, and they all are in limited supply. Nuclear power can potentially solve a lot of those problems. The only really good deal is geothermal energy, but that doesn’t scale up very well. ¶ So I was excited last year to spend a semester at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I met a lot of very interesting people. I saw Cherenkov glow with my own eyes. It was under 90 feet of water, but it was this brilliant and indescribable color of blue. Maybe the most beautiful physical thing I've ever seen. It’s when particles travel faster than the speed of light in water. Really beautiful and the physics is amazing. ¶ But I also met the guys that run the place. Don’t get me wrong. They’re perfectly nice, and I’m sure they’re fine and well trained people, but they are just guys, guys that make mistakes and sometimes take short cuts, and once in a while miss something they probably shouldn’t miss. I make mistakes all the time, and I’m sure they do too. But nuclear energy is a pretty unforgiving technology. I have to say that I am not confidant we can count on those guys to operate the nuclear industry with the level of safety we hope they’ll have. No, I have to say, not really a proponent anymore.”

−college senior fielding the question “What do you think about nuclear power?” during his comprehensive oral examination before a polarized panel of one liberal and two very conservative professors, in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident the previous year and in the middle of the growing anti-nuclear movement

January 1980

“The unease of ecologists vis-à-vis physics and the zeal with which they seek deterministic physical science models are misplaced. What physicists view as noise is music to the ecologist; the individuality of populations and communities is their most striking, intrinsic, and inspiring characteristic, and the apparent indeterminacy of ecological systems does not make their study a less valid.”

−Daniel Simberloff in his paper “A succession of paradigms in ecology: essentialism to materialism and probabilism” which appeared in Synthese 43 (1), Conceptual Issues in Ecology (page 25)

January 1980

“[A] few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington...to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.”

−Edward Teller, victim, in a two-page advertisement in The Washington Post titled “I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island”

31 July 1979

“Be quiet!”

−stick-in-the-mud moviegoers at The Rocky Horror Picture Show when it played at Wabash College who successfully shouted down costumed midnight-movie revelers but learned how incredibly boring the film is without its audience co-performance

1979

Undergraduate presenter: “I’ll be talking about a stochastic model of forest growth that represents species, location, trunk diameter at breast height and canopy geometry for each tree in the stand.”
[...twenty minutes later...]
Undergraduate presenter: “Thanks for listening. Are there any questions?”
Sigma Xi reviewing judge: “What does the word stochastic mean?”
Undergraduate presenter: “Oh, sorry. It just means there are random elements and inputs into the model that buffet the parameters and state variables in various ways.”
Sigma Xi reviewing judge: “So why didn’t you just say random then?”

−exchange at a meeting at Wabash College of the local chapter of Sigma Xi, the national honorary science and engineering society founded in 1886 [although the Wabash College chapter of Sigma Xi was founded sometime between 1890 and 1892, by 1944 it was subsumed by the Depauw-Wabash chapter...pretty sure the judge was a Dannie]

1979

Creativity is what happens in the struggle back from confusion.

1978

“What do you think I’m gonna do? Blow my brains out?”

−Terry Kath, singer and guitarist from the American rock band Chicago, whom Jimi Hendrix considered “the best guitarist in the universe”, as he shot himself in the head playing with a pistol with an empty clip but a bullet in the chamber, as reported by Corbin Reiff in his 11 May 2013 article “Forgotten Heroes: Terry Kath” in Premier Guitar citing fellow bandmember James Pankow's summary of the account of the sole witness, band keyboard technician Don Johnson

last words uttered 23 January 1978

“And New York looked so exciting, didn’t it?”

−Andy Warhol

3 January 1978

You make me feel mighty real
You make me feel mighty real
Oh you make me feel mighty real
You make me feel mighty real

−Sylvester, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”, Step II, Fantasy (songwriters James Wirrick and Sylvester James who was the First Lady of the Castro and Queen of Disco)

album released December 1977

“[Bertrand] Russell tells a story of the female philosopher [Christine Ladd-Franklin] who complained that, although she believed in solipsism, she had been frustrated that she couldn't convince her colleagues.”

−Eric Dean, philosophy and religion professor at the all-male Wabash College

winter 1977

“If I’d known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself.”

−David Bowie, on the occasion of his 30th birthday

8 January 1977

“Trust your instincts, unless you’re a Republican.”

−Boyd McDonald

probably sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s

“You cannot have reverse discrimination until we catch up. Until black people have lynched as many white people as white people have lynched black people. Until women have raped as many men as men have raped women. Until women and black people and homosexuals and farm workers and domestic workers and handicapped people and old people and kids have been able to be in charge of discrimination to the same degree as the people who keep them out.”

−Flo Kennedy, on 60 Minutes using glibness (that correspondent Morley Safer calls “outrageous”) for rhetorical effect to highlight the facile and profound lie that fairness is a calculation that has to start now and shouldn’t consider context or history

1976

−Paul McKinney [thanks to Wabash College archivist Beth Swift]

autumn 1976

1.2 Definition. A group is a set X equipped with a binary operation d: X × X → X (division) subject to the single incredible equation
xxxdydzdxxdxdzddd = y
for all x, y, z in X.

−Ernest G. Manes, using reverse Polish [Łukasiewicz] notation without parentheses in his 1976 book Algebraic Theories (Springer-Verlag), for which in-fix notation is y = (x/((((x/x)/y)/z)/((((x/x)/x)/z))))

published in 1976

“No single theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.”

−Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, page 33

published in 1975

“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.”

−David L. Goodstein, in the opening passages of his States of Matter

published in 1975

Janet [Susan Sarandon]: “They sure do take their lives in their hands, what with the weather and all.”
Brad [Barry Bostwick]: “Yes, Janet. Life’s pretty cheap to that type.”

−The Rocky Horror Picture Show, screenplay by Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman

UK film released 14 August 1975

“Because if I wasn’t the tallest woman, I’d be just another ugly girl from Shelbyville.”

−Sandy Allen, on getting a lot of attention (and free stuff) after her recognition by Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest woman

3 February 1975

“I was about to say ‘it makes you believe in God’, but then I remembered this was built by the Army Corps of Engineers.”

−Scott Ferson, having an oceanic experience on Lake Monroe

August 1974

“I am not a crook.”

−Richard Nixon

17 November 1973

“[I]f it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it. An application of this principle would be as follows: if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. ... [N]either our distance from a preventable evil nor the number of other people who, in respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens our obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil. ... [I]f it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it. ... The traditional distinction between duty and charity cannot be drawn, or at least, not in the place we normally draw it. Giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund is regarded as an act of charity in our society. The bodies which collect money are known as ‘charities.’ These organizations see themselves in this way—if you send them a check, you will be thanked for your ‘generosity.’ Because giving money is regarded as an act of charity, it is not thought that there is anything wrong with not giving. The charitable man may be praised, but the man who is not charitable is not condemned. People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. ... I am not maintaining that there are no acts which are charitable, or that there are no acts which it would be good to do but not wrong not to do. It may be possible to redraw the distinction between duty and charity in some other place. All I am arguing here is that the present way of drawing the distinction, which makes it an act of charity for a man living at the level of affluence which most people in the ‘developed nations’ enjoy to give money to save someone else from starvation, cannot be supported. ... What is the point of relating philosophy to public (and personal) affairs if we do not take our conclusions seriously? In this instance, taking our conclusion seriously means acting upon it.”

−Peter Singer, plainly stating what is self-evident to any five-year old, in his paper “Famine, affluence, and morality” which appeared in Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(3):229-243 psychological distance and uncertainty about the true gravity of the bad thing, or about the efficiency or rectitude of the relief agency

spring 1972

“They had never struggled, and only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.”

−E.M. Forster, in Maurice

published posthumously January 1971

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

−Andy Warhol [arguably a misattribution]

1968

Samuel T. Cogley, Esq. [played by Elisha Cook, Jr.]: “Now that I’ve got something human to talk about. Rights, sir, human rights! The Bible. The Code of Hammurabi, and of Justinian. The Magna Carta. The Constitution of the United States. The Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies. The Statutes of Alpha III. Gentlemen, these documents all speak of rights. Rights of the accused to a trial by his peers, to be represented by counsel. The rights of cross-examination. But most importantly, the right to be confronted by the witnesses against him, a right to which my client has been denied.”
Lt. Areel Shaw [played by Joan Marshall]: “Your Honor, that is ridiculous. We’ve produced the witnesses in court. My learned opponent had the opportunity to see them, cross-examine them...”
Cogley: “All but one. The most devastating witness against my client is not a human being. It’s a machine, an information system, the computer log of the Enterprise. And I ask this court adjourn and reconvene aboard that vessel.”
Shaw: “I protest, Your Honor.”
Cogley: “And I repeat! I speak of rights! A machine has none. A man must! My client has the right to face his accuser. And if you do not grant him that right, you have brought us down to the level of the machine. Indeed, you have elevated that machine above us. I ask that my motion be granted. And more than that, gentlemen, in the name of a humanity fading in the shadow of the machine, I demand it. I demand it!”

−“Court Martial” [season 1, episode 20], Star Trek, written by Don M. Mankiewicz and Steven W. Carabatsos. Neither the Bible nor the Code of Hammurabi speaks of the right to confront one’s accusers, although it may have been presumed as they certainly hated the bearing of false witness, which is addressed by the first four of the nearly three hundred laws in the Code of Hammurabi, the first holding “If a man brings an accusation against another man, charging him with murder, but cannot prove it, the accuser shall be put to death.” For a discussion of the antiquity of the right, see Herrmann, F.R., and B.M. Speer. (1994). Facing the accuser: ancient and medieval precursors of the confrontation clause. Virginia Journal of International Law 34: 481-552.

originally aired 2 February 1967

“Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, as befits a peaceful and powerful nation, which leads a world-wide alliance. We have been determined not to be diverted from our central concerns by mere irritants and fanatics. But now further action is required—and it is underway; and these actions may only be the beginning. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”

−John F. Kennedy (possibly written by Ted Sorensen)

22 October 1962

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations. ¶ This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. ¶ In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. ¶ We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

−Dwight D. Eisenhower

17 January 1961

“Yeah, yeah.”

−Sidney Morgenbesser, heckling from the back of the room in a lecture at Columbia University by British philosopher of language J. L. Austin who was noting that, although in some languages a double negative makes a negative, and in some languages a double negative makes a positive, there is no language where a double positive makes a negative

before 1961

“America is a lunatic asylum.”

−Ezra Pound, upon his release (“incurably insane, but not dangerous to others”) from St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital

1958

“Actually, neither Dick nor I reacted very strongly . There was some slight feeling of relief, but relief from the tension of uncertainty rather than from any particular dread of the extreme penalty. As to sober thought of the future, there was none. I had no conception of what prison would be like, nor did I make any effort to think about it.”

−Nathan Leopold, in his book Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years, about the sentencing he and Richard Loeb received for their kidnapping and murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks

1958

“There is a saying quoted by a seventeenth-century bibliographer that the index of a book should be made by the author, even if the book itself be written by someone else.”

−G.V. Carey in his pamphlet Making an Index

1951

“The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.”

― Eugene O’Neill, in his play Long Day’s Journey into Night

published posthumously in 1956, but written between 1939–1941

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