Briggs

This Partly Explains Why Education Is Such A Mess

I am away from the computer today. Alternate title, A Few Moments With The Teacher's College (Columbia) Record. Many educators are told what to think at this institution before they…

Statistics

How Good Is That Model? Scoring Rules For Forecasts: Part II: Update

Read Part I Part II What we're after is a score that calculates how close a prediction is to its eventual observation when the prediction is a probability. Now there…

Statistics

Pascal’s Pensées, A Tour: V

Since our walk through Summa Contra Gentiles is going so well, why not let's do the same with Pascal's sketchbook on what we can now call Thinking Thursdays. We'll use…

Culture

What Might Pope Francis’s Upcoming Encyclical Look Like?

For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. So…

Statistics

How Good Is That Model? Scoring Rules For Forecasts: Part I

Part I of III All probability (which is to say, statistical) models have a predictive sense; indeed, they are only really useful in that sense. We don't need models to…

Statistics

Temperature Grids, Interpolation, And Over-Certainty

A reader writes: I am a fairly new reader of your blog, coming from WattsUpWithThat and reading with delight and frustration your thoughts on statistics and climate. I have a…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: The Goodness Of God

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT. Previous post. We've had…

Fun

First Computers, Radios & The Death Of Radio Shack

There it is. The TRS-80 Model I---with cassette storage! Z-80 microprocessor; over 4000 bytes of user memory, a.k.a. RAM, which---I shudder to write it---is well over 30,000 bits! I can't…

John Pate on The Red-Blue Button Dilemma & Its Surprising AnswerApril 30, 2026
I would press the red button because it's the red button. The bigger the red button the harder you hit…
Polybius II on The Red-Blue Button Dilemma & Its Surprising AnswerApril 29, 2026
"their Other Lives’ Value premise is something vague about man, but not men" I am reminded of a british comedian…
Johnno on The Red-Blue Button Dilemma & Its Surprising AnswerApril 29, 2026
But do we get time to explain to everyone and have them all sit down and have a discussion before…
gareth on Class 87: Calibration & Conformal Prediction: ExamplesApril 29, 2026
Timestamp 21:35: A "correction" from 0.8 to 1.0 is a "correction factor" of 1.25, not 0.2 (akshully wot you mean…
Cato on The Red-Blue Button Dilemma & Its Surprising AnswerApril 29, 2026
There’s no point to a world without me; of course I press Red.