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Posts by David Firth
I have a new favorite editor/IDE: Zed. Open-source, blazing fast, built-in AI operability, easy to use. Heard that lots of developers are dropping Visual Studio Code for Zed. Has R and Quarto extensions. zed.dev
Very cool job….
Very clear analysis here. And interesting results.
I (age 12) played Cawdor in a school production. Don't remember much about it, other than not knowing what a thane is. Maybe it's the Scottish word for an ancestor of a dickhead.
Caricature de Coco. Le dessin représente Trump en pleine crise d'insultes devant un parterre de médecins qui jugent incurable ce cas de syndrome de Gilles de la Trumpette..
La crise en #Iran aura montré que #Trump déraille sur le fond ET sur la forme 😉😊😁
The Home Office' anti-immigration agenda is strangling growth across the economy. It prevents a closer relationship with Europe, deprives us of the workers we need and undermines universities.
getting-out-of-the-hole.uk/labours-red-...
👇👇
Damn. Iran just dropped an A+ level troll on Trump in this new LEGO movie.
I’m no fan of Iran at all… but this one actually nails him. 😂😂
Britain is good at absorbing immigrants and allowing them to thrive. A government determined to harass them is not only likely to fail to hit its unrealistic targets. It will damage one of the country’s greatest strengths
This week, Brexit finally killed our family business. We cleared out our warehouse, handed back the keys, paid the final bills and said goodbye to our last employee.
What was once a thriving firm died a slow, sad death, all thanks to Farage, Johnson and the gullible idiots they conned. 1/18
The ultimate mug for frequentists 😂
smbc-store.myshopify.com/products/goo...
tinyplot boxplot with jittered points
1. `tinyplot` v0.6.1 is out on CRAN. This release contains mostly bug fixes and internal optimizations. grantmcdermott.com/tinyplot/NEW...
Who knew that base #rstats plotting could be this easy and feature-rich?
P.S. Check out @zeileis.org's nice slides here: www.zeileis.org/papers/Psych...
Text from the linked document We, the Foreign Ministers of Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, express our deep concern about a bill that would significantly expand the possibilities to impose the death penalty in Israel and that could be voted into law next week. We are particularly worried about the de facto discriminatory character of the bill. The adoption of this bill would risk undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles. The death penalty is an inhumane and degrading form of punishment without any deterring effect. This is why we oppose the death penalty, whatever the circumstances around the world. The rejection of the death penalty is a fundamental value that unites us. We urge the Israeli decision makers in Knesset and Government to abandon these plans.
Joint statement on Israel's Death Penalty Bill: 29 March 2026
www.gov.uk/government/n...
#R4Today
One of Booth's large scale map showing levels of poverty in London by color shading. See the legend image for color assignment
Zoomed in detail of one of Booth's poverty maps
Legend showing color coding in Booth's map, ranging from yellow (wealthy) through red (well-to-do), down to dark blue & black (very poor & criminal)
B/W photo of Charles Booth
#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂 Mar 30, 1840 Charles Booth born in Liverpool, England 🇬🇧
1889: Booth constructed street maps of London, showing poverty and wealth by color coding, transforming existing methods of social survey and poverty mapping
👀Interactive map: booth.lse.ac.uk/map
Your annual reminder that there would be no Rothamsted or DOE without Jethro Tull baptized #OTD 1674 (d 21 Feb 1741). He was heavily criticised in his lifetime for his revolutionary rejection of the poetry of Virgil as scientific authority for agricultural methods in favour of actual experiments
cc @jackru.bsky.social in case it's of interest
An alternative view of the tetrahedron, for 4-party voting data, is the "top-3 tetraplot". bsky.app/profile/firt...
Gives a link to the full PDF poster, and associated R package for drawing these things. Eventually I'll get around to writing a proper paper :)
Lovely stuff!
Along the way, we see the solution formula for a quadratic equation, which "may be familiar to GCSE-age students (normally aged 15 to 16 years old) across the world". Now familiar to all Premier League footy fans too, for its prominent place in the Match of the Day title sequence!
Spare a thought for Millwall fans this morning. Their club is no longer the most despised in The Championship.
Just had this flagged with me. This is disgusting.
If Kemi Badenoch had one ounce of leadership in her, she would condemn this.
I don’t want any faux sadness from her or Nick Timothy when one of us is hurt or worse.
This is how low the Conservative Party have sunk.
Reform’s loud opposition to net zero is driven by “the success of populist messages around Brexit plus significant financial backing from the fossil fuel industry and climate sceptics”
Not science. Not national interest. Not public opinion. Just personal greed.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Might depend on the purpose? Coef set to 1 will typically reduce variance at the cost of some bias. Which might be useful in some contexts?
‘I spent 20 mins writing an article on my personal website titled "The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs". Every word is a lie… Less than 24 hours later, the world's leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills’
www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic... (HT @sambrook.bsky.social)
Yes, both co-authors of mine, so <=4.
@ikosmidis.com @crisvarin.bsky.social --- possibly of interest?
Thanks for all this. I had heard of Erdős number but never thought to calculate mine. (and I am not plugged in to mathscinet etc)
Apparently my Erdős number is 3. I never knew this!