Briggs

Tim Tebow’s Super Bowl Ad and the Washington Post Editorial

Very delicate ground, here. I want to be as precise as I know how in discussing the language used in today's Washington Post editorial about the upcoming Tim Tebow ad,…

Culture Statistics

Welcome-to-Saturday Links

My heart soared like a hawk this week after several readers sent in fascinating stories. Here are a few of them. Reader Sara C sent in a wonderful example of…

Statistics

R Lecture 4: Help & Plotting

This is the fourth in a series of lectures on R. 10 minutes is a shockingly short period of time! Today, we learn the R way to create comments: start…

Statistics

R Lecture 3: Our First Program!

This is the third in a series of lectures on R. (DAV, I kept the intro for one last time.) Open the myRcode.R file we saved in our myR folder.…

Culture

Two-and-a-Half Millennia Don’t Change Much

Herodotus begins his history by telling us that some Phoenician traders came to Argos, Greece and, on a whim, abducted the king's daughter Io and took her to Egypt. Later,…

Statistics

Create Tax Refunds That Must Be Donated To Political Parties?

In the State of the Union address, President Obama thought it would be pleasant to slam the Supreme Court, shaming them for their recent Citizens United v. FEC decision. Our…

Statistics

R Lecture 2: Prepping a Folder

Main page for R Lectures. This is the second in a series of lectures on R. R is command-line software. We need to type in commands. These commands should be…

Culture

State of the Union Snippets: Live Blog (update continuously)

Started by intimating: It's bad now, but when it was bad before, it got good. "Answer history's call." "These struggles are why I ran for President." Thought: It's tough to…

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.
Brian (bulaoren) on The Red-Blue Button Dilemma & Its Surprising AnswerApril 29, 2026
I think that pessimism morphs into cynicism when we perceive personal gain in our bleak expectations.
Nate on The Red-Blue Button Dilemma & Its Surprising AnswerApril 29, 2026
The best explanation I saw on twitter was this rephrasing: "There is a blender. Jumping into the blender will kill…
Nate on The Red-Blue Button Dilemma & Its Surprising AnswerApril 29, 2026
I rephrased the question to remove "red" and "blue" priming words and asked the wife: "Space aliens create two buttons,…