“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'
It
“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