Early in the book Maphead, Ken Jennings describes his wife’s awful sense of direction: Her uncanny inaccuracy does have one useful application, though: if I’m lost while driving, I can always ask her which way she thinks we should go … Continue reading
He’s got a name now, and it’s Silas. As per our family tradition, he will also have a single-letter middle name – his siblings are Zoë B Enright and Solomon T Silbert – but we haven’t decided which one just … Continue reading
We have a new baby boy, though he doesn’t yet have a name. We had a nice agreed-on girl’s name, but hadn’t come to any conclusions with boys’ names. Anyway, here are some pictures. Click to see the full-sized images.
There is, as far as I can tell, no built in R function for calculating Bhattacharyya distance, so I wrote one: bhat.dist <- function(x,y){ mx <- as.vector(colMeans(x)) my <- as.vector(colMeans(y)) Sx <- as.matrix(cov(x)) Sy <- as.matrix(cov(y)) S <- (Sx + … Continue reading
I’m reading Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, by Gary Taubes (after listening to the recent econtalk interview with him), and I confused and amused myself by mis-parsing something that should have been obvious, given the … Continue reading
The AV Club has published their 2011 list of ridiculous band names, and it is, as usual, equal parts amusing and disturbing. My purpose here isn’t to comment on the band names, but, rather, to introduce a new category here … Continue reading
Via boingboing, I found an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on some (thus far failed) efforts to publish a failure to replicate the (in)famous findings “supporting” the existence of “psi” (i.e., ESP, or pre-cognition, or some such). I … Continue reading
In addition to pictures from Wyoming and Chile, I have pictures from Brazil. Here, without (much) commentary, are some pictures from Rio. More specifically, here are some pictures of, and from the foot of, the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer (Christo … Continue reading
Thanksgiving provides a perfectly reasonable excuse to not blog, so I’ll go ahead and say that’s why I didn’t blog the week after last. Last week didn’t have any holidays as far as I know, so I will just assert … Continue reading
