I’m afraid of flying. I wouldn’t say I have a phobia of flying, because a phobia is supposed to impair your functioning, and while some people might say that taking a twelve hour greyhound bus down the eastern seaboard when you can afford to fly is dysfunctional, I prefer to think of it as character [...]
David Salsburg’s The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century is a book that doesn’t know its audience. Billed as a history of statistical theories, it is more like a biography of the various statisticians who proposed those theories. Salsburg describes his intentions fairly well in the second to last paragraph [...]
When Nate Silver correctly called the winner of all 50 states in this year’s presidential election (and 31 out of the 33 Senate races), how many people rushed out to buy his book, eager to learn how to make such spot-on predictions? How many were disappointed? “What should give us pause,” Silver writes, “is that [...]
(A discussion at last Tuesday’s Iron-Blogger meetup reminded me of this review I wrote a few years ago.) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill In War and Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman was written to explain a startling fact: throughout most of military history, up until the end of World War [...]
The other day at work, while I was hanging around the coffee machine, I saw a flyer for an IAP (read: Jan Term) course on “Serious Games”. It looked neat, so I emailed the instructor to get the syllabus, and I’ve started playing my way through. I figured I’d post my half-formed thoughts about how [...]
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