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

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

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

6 November 2024

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

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

19 October 2024

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

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

 17 October 2024

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

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

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

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

17 September 2024

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

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

2 September 2024

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

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

26 August 2024

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

22 August 2024

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

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

21 August 2024

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

    −Pat Mercardante

24 July 2024

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

23 July 2024

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

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

22 July 2024

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

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

22 July 2024

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

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

19 July 2024

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

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

July 2024

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

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

12 July 2024

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

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

11 July 2024

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

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

8 July 2024

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

5 July 2024

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

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

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

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

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

decided 1 July 2024

“You cannot have economic mobility without physical mobility.” 

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

29 June 2024

“I don't know much but I know this is love” 

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

album released 25 June 2024

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

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

252 to 66 million years ago

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

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

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

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

rabbit hole dug 23 June 2024

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

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

13 June 2024

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

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

video posted 11 June 2024

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

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

25 May 2024

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

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

    aired 22 May 2024

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

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

16 May 2024

“You should get that looked at.”

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

19 April 2024

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

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

premiered on YouTube 26 March 2024

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

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

8 March 2024

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

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

8 March 2024

advertisement posted on LinkedIn February 2024

“Inaction is the worst decision.”

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

30 January 2024

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

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

released on Hulu 4 January 2024

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

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

22 December 2023

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

13 December 2023

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

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

12 December 2023

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

8 December 2023

“I feel that’s fair.”

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

posted on YouTube on 15 November 2023

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

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

6 November 2023

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

26 October 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24 October 2023

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

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

11 October 2023

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

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

online 5 October 2023

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

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

29 September 2023

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

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

28 September 2023

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

17 September 2023

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

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

8 September 2023

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

20 August 2023

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

7 August 2023

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

7 August 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 August 2023

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

4 August 2023

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

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

autogenerated 1 August 2023

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

July 2023

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

28 July 2023

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

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

film released 24 July 2023

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

    −Alexander Wimbush

21 July 2023

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

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

film released in the US and UK 21 July 2023

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

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

article published in The Guardian 16 July 2023

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

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

28 June 2023

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

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

23 June 2023

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

23 June 2023

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

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

15 June 2023

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

15 June 2023

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

    −Peter Hristov

15 June 2023

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

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

14 June 2023

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

4 June 2023

“Depends on how you say it.”

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

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

19 May 2023

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

18 May 2023

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

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

12 May 2023

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

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

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

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

10 May 2023

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

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

5 May 2023

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

before 29 April 2023

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

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

April 2023

“Teaching [undergraduates] is soul crushing.”

    −John Bridgeman

28 April 2023

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

24 April 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

22 April 2023

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

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

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

14 April 2023

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

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

11 April 2023

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

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

8 April 2023

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

5 April 2023

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

4 April 2023

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

    −Michael Balch

27 March 2023

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

    −underemployed engineering post doc

24 March 2023

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

    −Andrés Alonso-Rodriguez

19 March 2023

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

17 March 2023

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

10 March 2023

“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

“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

“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

“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 202

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

2 May 2020

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

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

~April 2020

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

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

29 April 2020

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

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

23 April 2020

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

17 April 2020

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

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

 17 April 2020

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

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

17 April 2020

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

    −Guy Incognito

10 April 2020

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

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

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

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

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

accepted for publication 9 April 2020

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

7 April 2020

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

6 April 2020

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

5 April 2020

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

4 April 2020

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

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

reported 28 March 2020

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

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

28 March 2020

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

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

24 March 2020

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

14 March 2020

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

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

12 March 2020

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

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

19 February 2020

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

   −Nancy LeTourneau, writing in Washington Monthly

18 February 2020

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

   −Simon D.A. Clark (@Sunkensie)

4 February 2020

“We have always been strangers to the night.”

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

original release 29 January 2020

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

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

19 January 2020

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

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

2020

23 September 2019

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

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

uploaded to YouTube on 19 September 2019

“Their evil is still not gone”

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

13 September 2019

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

   −Robert J. Frey

12 September 2019

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

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

uploaded to YouTube 10 September 2019

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

Scott:   “It is a jungle out there:

• Risk Analysis

• Reliability Engineering & System Safety

• Journal of Risk and Uncertainty

• International Journal for Uncertainty Quantification

• International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems

• Journal of Risk Research

• ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering

• ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part B: Mechanical Engineering

• SIAM / ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification

• Journal of Verification, Validation and Uncertainty Quantification

• Journal of Uncertain Systems

• Human and Ecological Risk Assessment

• Journal of Risk and Reliability

• International Journal of Approximate Reasoning

• Reliable Computing

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

6 September 2019

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

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

Episode aired 21 September 2019

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

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

29 August 2019

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

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

21 August 2019

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

20 August 2019

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

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

20 August 2019

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

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

20 August 2019

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

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

16 August 2019

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

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

11 August 2019

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

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

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

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

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

12 July 2019

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

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

10 July 2019

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

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

album released on 14 June 2019

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

9 June 2019

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

   −Ian Stewart, Do Dice Play God, page 266

publication date 6 Jun 2019

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

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

31 May 2019 

“We humans are lousy at detecting deception.”

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

21 May 2019

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

   −John Dick (@jdcivicscience), on Twitter

11 May 2019

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

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

release date 6 May 2019

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

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

3 May 2019

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

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

released on Arte 24 April 2019

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

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

22 April 2019

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

   −Francis Baumont de Oliveira

18 April 2019

“I am so blissfully unaware of everything”

   −Sam Fender, “Hypersonic Missiles”

March 2019

“Karl sounds like another Jack to be honest.”

3 March 2019

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

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

release date 14 February 2019

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

11 February 2019

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

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

25 January 2019

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

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

16 January 2019

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

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

2018

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

   −Francis Baumont de Oliveira

28 September 2018

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

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

book released 1989; film released 21 September 2018

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

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

album released 21 September 2018

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

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

21 August 2018

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

   −Adam Crowe

10 August 2018

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

   −Robert J. Frey

30 July 2018

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

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

8 July 2018

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

   −David Spiegelhalter

June 2018

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

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

May 2018

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

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

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

film release in the UK, 20 April 2018

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

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

2 April 2018

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

  −Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica CEO

secretly recorded 16 January 2018, broadcast 19 March 2018

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

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

17 March 2018

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

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

9 March 2018

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

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

27 February 2018

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

  −Willem Roelofs

19 February 2018

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

  −ErnestMc

17 February 2018

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

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

13 February 2018

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

  −Michael Balch

 February 2018

“Truth is a gateway drug to science.”

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

30 January 2018

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

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

January 2018

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

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

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

Carolyn:   “But what if it comes true?”

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

16 January 2018

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

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

published 16 January 2018

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

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

published 16 January 2018

“Florida is the peninsula of the lotus eaters.”

15 January 2018

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

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

9 January 2018

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

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

14 December 2017

“It’s very good to study probability”

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

December 2017

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

  −Nicholas A. Friedenberg

4 December 2017

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

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

published on 28 November 2017

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

17 November 2017

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

  −Simon Maskell

16 November 2017

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

11 November 2017

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

  −Francis Baumont de Oliveira

10 November 2017

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

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

10 October 2017

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

23 September 2017

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

  −Brendan McCabe

23 September 2017

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

  −Ullrika Sahlin 

23 September 2017

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

22 September 2017

“Classification is a branch of machine learning.”

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

22 September 2017

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

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

18 September 2017

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

“Most of what we believe is not based on what’s in our heads, and there’s a good reason for that.  There’s not much in our heads.”

“Thinking is a social process. Rather than happening inside your head, it emerges from your interactions with those around you.”

“Everything great we do as human beings depends on this ability to share knowledge and to collaborate.”

“The sense of understanding is contagious.”

“We can build cathedrals but we can also build houses of cards.”

“Knowledge is not in my head, and it’s not in your head. Knowledge is shared [...].”

“Ignorance is a feature of the human mind, not a bug.”

  −Philip Fernbach, les meilleurs bons mots in “Why do we believe things that aren't true?”, TEDxMileHigh, Youtube

13 September 2017

“Most of what we believe is not based on what’s in our heads, and there’s a good reason for that.  There’s not much in our heads. [...] As human beings, we are just not made to store a lot of detailed information. [...] We do not have to know a lot because we’re not made to think on our own. It’s natural to think about thinking as what happens between your ears, but that’s not where the magic really happens. [...] Thinking is a social process. Rather than happening inside your head, it emerges from your interactions with those around you. [...] On our own, none of us knows all that much. We don’t have to. We each have our own little slice of expertise, and our minds are built to collaborate and to share knowledge, which allows us to pursue incredibly complex goals, when none of us has anything approaching the knowledge to understand it all. This is the Milan Cathedral. It’s one of humanity's great  works. Construction began in 1386 [...and it] was completed when they consecrated the final gate in the 1960s. Six hundred years! In that time, there were 75 chief engineers responsible for the project and thousands upon thousands of people involved. None of those people had anything remotely approaching the knowledge to understand it all, not even close. Everything great we do as human beings depends on this ability to share knowledge and to collaborate. So that’s the positive side of the knowledge-sharing story. When we put our minds together we can do incredible things. 

“But there’s also a dark side. Because we are built to so seamlessly draw on knowledge outside of our heads, we often fail to realize the limits of our own understanding. [...] The sense of understanding is contagious. And when contagious understanding is paired with individual ignorance, it can be a toxic recipe. The danger is that I may express a strong belief because I feel like I understand. But my sense of understanding is false. It comes from those around me expressing strong beliefs because they feel like they understand. But their sense of understanding comes from those around them and so on. Individually, none of us knows enough to tell what’s true and what’s false. And, yet, because we feel like we’re on firm ground, we don’t do enough to verify, and that is how entire groups of people can come to believe things that aren’t true. We can build cathedrals but we can also build houses of cards. 

“Now, the real tragedy occurs in how we relate to people who have different beliefs than us. We live in the illusion that we have arrived at our own positions via a serious analysis, and that we can support and justify what we believe based on what we know. Therefore, when someone doesn’t believe what we believe, it’s obvious what the problem is: they’re too stupid to see the truth! And there’s actually a sense in which you’re right when you think that. It’s true! They did not arrive at their position via a rational process of evidence evaluation, and they don’t understand the issue in depth. But neither do you! [...] When we express our beliefs, we are all just channeling our communities of knowledge. That’s what we do. Knowledge is not in my head, and it’s not in your head. Knowledge is shared. [...] Now, the point is decidedly not that people are stupid. It’s true; we are all ignorant, but that’s not something we should hide from. The world is far too complex for any one of us to understand much of it. What makes us special is the ability to thrive amidst that complexity by sharing knowledge. From our individual ignorance can arise collective genius. Ignorance is a feature of the human mind, not a bug. But we don’t have to be so darn sure about things we don’t understand.”

  −Philip Fernbach, “Why do we believe things that aren’t true?”, TEDxMileHigh, Youtube

13 September 2017

“Number 10, Twinkies. In 2012 this parent company of Hostess filed for bankruptcy, and the public went mad. How would we satisfy our sugar cravings now? Luckily, one eBay seller thought it was best to cash in and placed a box of the tasty treats up for sale. The box of delicious treats ended up selling for around $60. That’s over 95% more than the grocery stores were charging. If only the buyer would have held out a little longer. In March of the following year Twinkies returned to American shelves.”

  −“Strangest things ever sold on eBay”, Talltanic, self-described as “where we push the boundaries with unbelievable facts that will blow your mind”, like the fact that a price doubled

2 September 2017

“So the Republicans don’t even believe in weather?”

  −Name, on the news that Trump’s budget has an unprecedented 6% funding cut for the National Weather Service, a 26% cut for NOAA’s oceanic and atmospheric research, and a 22% cut in its weather satellite information program, as well as other cuts in computer modeling of storms and tsunami research

25 August 2017