survival tip

A recent paper * turns the modern spotlight of statistics onto that pressing issue of how best to survive a big cat attack. The authors anal...

the story behind the election

Andrew Gelman and John Sides have an article in the Boston Review analyzing Obama's victory, here .

radical thought

Probably the most noble thing a publisher can possibly do is provide cheap paperback editions of important texts. All the first editions and...

that clinking clanking sound again

Greg Butler has drawn my attention to an article in the NYT on Kickstarter, a new method for raising funds for the arts, here .

Why didn't they ask Gelman?

Reformers like Cerf, Klein, Weisberg, and even Secretary Duncan often use the term “value-added scores” to refer to how they would quantify ...

disparition

He tried to show what it was like to read a book and what the thinking mind looked like in the act of writing. He wrote compellingly about e...

codes of the underworld

The signaling problems faced by criminals are unusual in the following regard. On one hand they wish to signal a certain untrustworthiness,...

proportioned like an egge

In the river of Panuco there is a fish like a calfe, the Spanyards call it a Mallatin, hee hath a stone in his head, which the Indians use f...

virtuosi and musicians

Via Marginal Revolution , Glenn Gould on Sviatoslav Richter.

mind the gap

American conservatives have, I gather, been attacking the NHS. ( Guardian ) There's something they somehow miss. If you live in America ...

eliminative naturalism

K-Punk on Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint. Some of Dick's most powerful passages are those in which there is an ontological inte...

Advantage Goliath

Tesco maintains that it will buy local produce "wherever possible". But when its representatives were challenged on this point, th...

robogod

I vividly remember playing in Mayflower Park, the windswept public space that divides the city's dead and 'alive' docks, on my b...

fourth seeks three

I may have to retract my dismissal of bridge as a game with relevance to the world of finance. Warren Buffett apparently thinks otherwise. ...

less unprintable than previously supposed

Languagehat has buried a terrific offer in the Comments section. As I mentioned in a previous post, the US publishers of Uglier than a Monk...

life, the universe and everything

A friend of mine once put it succinctly: “Physics is all about finding out which variables you know and which variable you want, and then se...

babies

Infinite Thought is off-message. Here , here . Do I need to have a kid to understand Antichrist properly? I'm not sure. But I don'...

how to build a better blog

Maira Kalman at the NYT on Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Uncle Cobbley and all, why is here no match for there? anyway, over there .