And, with error bars, no less

”What is best in life?”

When I started legal blogging I thought it would be a little bit of contract law or libel law, and the occasional judicial review with constitutional implications.

Now: a constant stream of constitutional crises, fundamental human rights abuses, and war crimes and other crimes against humanity.

Good spot! If you generate a Cauchy random variable as tan(pi*U) for U ~ uniform(0,1) then this reduces to Box-Muller.

Higher multipoles of the cow Editor's Note: The spherical cow is a useful approximation familiar to physicists. But what does it leave out? How can you systematically improve on this approx

Going beyond the spherical cow approximation. The paper we all needed. 🎢 ⚛️ 🧪 ♾️ 🐄

Generative AI has raised difficult questions about the relationship between language and meaning, and between language and consciousnesses itself. You can now have a "conversation" with something that is not conscious. People have fallen in love, or been driven into psychosis. It's very troubling.

It's been a long time since I read Dennett's book, but I remember finding it very frustrating. If I recall he "explains" consciousness as a post hoc editorial construct built on competing asynchronous processes in the brain. But if consciousness is just an illusion then *who* is experiencing it?

Me, when I call a credible interval a confidence interval

See also Guy Debord.

#rstats RIP, John Fox
@yihui.org just published this lovely tribute to John Fox and his work

yihui.org/en/2026/02/j...

I think there is not enough appreciation to how good this FT visualization is

the original is like this 👇

We’re living in a constant loop of this cartoon:

1-panel SMBC comic update. Three men are startled and afraid, standing around an opened Egyptian sarcophagus, with a mummy sitting up in it. The mummy says "for that you have disturbed my tomb, you shall die at a typical actuarial rate, but perceive it as unusually high!" The caption below the panel reads "my favorite genre it Stats Horror."

Anything that deviates from normal is a conspiracy, including when things are precisely normal.

COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/curse-2
PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm...
STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Effective Altruists only needed to speak to one economist who could explain why future utilities must be discounted. This could have prevented their descent into the madness of only caring about people who don’t exist (yet).

A tribute to David MacKay “I didn’t know David personally but was a great admirer of his work.” “David seemed to have infinite patience.” “He treated the audience with respect, trusted them with complexity, and showed that r...

Next month the Cambridge Philosophical Society is hosting an event to celebrate David MacKay and his work on the tenth anniversary of his passing. The organizers are soliciting notes sharing how his work has impacted people -- you can submit at docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F....

Offering you everything cheaper, or for nothing, costs you SO MUCH.

It’s a really expensive deal. You don’t win. Not in the end.

“We don’t have trustworthy news sources or socially responsible media at all any more. But on the plus side, a machine that lies and makes us all more ignorant and furious saves me up to £3 a week. Bargain.”

A sad day.

bsky.app/profile/ones...

This has been a long time coming. The first withdrawal, announced in July 2020, was halted by Joe Biden on his first day in office on 20 January 2021. Donald Trump signed an executive order reaffirming the withdrawal on his return to office on 20 January 2025. One year later here we are.

*Environmental Modelling meets Infectious Diseases: from Mathematics to Applications* Upcoming workshop in Warwick Stats, supported CRiSM, LMS and RSS. We aim to promote the transfer of ideas between the environmental modelling and infectious disease modelling communities.
http://go.warwick.ac

Added to my Christmas list . Thanks.

About half way though Person of Interest in case you are wondering if I listen to your recommendations.

I live in Coventry South and can confirm. Sultana scraped in with a 401 majority in 2019. Her majority increased to 10000 in 2024 mainly because the Conservative vote plummeted. It was not a personal endorsement of her politics.

This is very sad news. John had an enormous influence over applied statistics through his books and software. It was always a pleasure to interact with him.

Tim Capello in The Lost Boys (1987) was peak sax. It was all downhill from there.

Graph illustrating Fechner's Law, S = k log I. It plots I= intensity of a stimulus on the horizontal axis vs. perceived Stimulus sensation on the vertical.

Photo of Gustav Fechner, sitting, holding a book

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊
💀Nov 18, 1887 Gustav Theodor Fechner died in Leipzig, Germany 🇩🇪

1850: Fechner's Law: the subjective sensation is proportional to the log of stimulus intensity. This is a core idea behind accuracy of visual encoding of data -- eg, length > angle > area > color

[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.] JANET: Ugh... LIZ: What's up? JANET: I am so bored of cooking peas! LIZ: Have you tried... AI peas? JANET: AI peas? LIZ: They're peas with AI! [Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI]. LIZ: Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas JANET: What LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines] Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas? [Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it] LIZ: Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine [Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas] LIZ: With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas! JANET: What LIZ: Shut up LIZ: Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow From opening the bag of peas to boiling the peas to eating the peas To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means. JANET: Is it really necessary to- LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]: THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET [Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan: AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas. [Ends]

Every ad now

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor Isn’t a Prince Anymore, but He Could Still Become King King Charles’s brother remains eighth in the line of succession even though he no longer has his royal titles and honors.

This remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets is a bit dark.

www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

student used some AI-assisted code to compute ROC stats with weights and the AI hallucinated pROC::roc(…, weights = weights). (the function doesn’t have a weights argument.) and because the function has a … argument, the fake weights argument was ignored without any warning

The No Kings protests in the UK today have been helpfully renamed “No Tyrants”, just to clarify that they don’t want to get rid of the actual king.

I think it’s plausible that, under the right conditions, life is common, but intelligent life is rare (it took billions of years on Earth). Without fossil fuels a sustainable industrial revolution might be next to impossible so industrial civilisations are even more rare.