The tail end of the spear

A lovely story of how some clever statisticians saved the lives of American P-40 Warhawk pilots in WWII. No math required at all. Brilliant.

Posted on August 18th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: science | 1 Comment »

In the beginning…

When I started this blog I intended to talk about religion and philosophy. Somehow I wandered into the cesspool of politics. Truth be told, better political bloggers than me are a dime a dozen. That’s not to say I won’t continue to comment on politics, I will. But I want to spend some time on [...]

Posted on July 23rd, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: religion, science | 5 Comments »

Infant mortality

The QandO Blog:
This irritates me every time I see it. Breathless accounts of a high infant mortality rate in the US have again hit the front pages of morning newspapers:
An estimated 2 million babies die within their first 24 hours each year worldwide and the United States has the second worst newborn mortality rate in [...]

Posted on May 10th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: science | Comments Off

ET phone home

Why haven’t the aliens contacted (or enslaved) us? A new answer to a pressing question:
… we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling [...]

Posted on May 1st, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: science | Comments Off

Non-Uniform Random Variate Generation

Luc Devroye, the author of Non-Uniform Random Variate Generation, is giving away copies of the book in pdf format. If you need to code up some random number generators with specified distributions, this is a good book to have.

Posted on April 25th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: science | 2 Comments »

Billions will die!!

Climate change is gonna get you:
Oh, and here’s my favorite — Dr. Sue Blackmore looking on the bright side in Britain’s Guardian:
“In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet cannot take much more. . . . If we decide to put the planet first, [...]

Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: eco-catastrophe, religion, science | Comments Off

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