On Distractions
Widower Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Edith Galt in 1915. The President’s doorkeeper summarized the situation tersely:
“She’s a looker; he’s a goner.”
Widower Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Edith Galt in 1915. The President’s doorkeeper summarized the situation tersely:
“She’s a looker; he’s a goner.”
I’m currently in the middle of reading Robert Caro’s first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. I’ll be blogging intermittently about this wonderful book over the next few weeks. Expect a few of those posts to be focused on drawing writing lessons from this wonderful author. But a relatively…
In The Theory That Would Not Die, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne brings to life many famous scientists and statisticians, the one of the moments that struck me most was when she described one of those people as he faced his death. That person was Jerome Cornfield, a prominent statistician at the NIH. Cornfield had been diagnosed…
The war of 1812 was sometimes called “Madison’s war” by those who opposed the President’s call for military action against Great Britain. A whole slew of grievances was building up between the two countries, especially with Britain’s bullying behavior in the seas. But it was also clear that Pres. Madison was itching for war, and…
Oscar Wilde is one of the most quotable people in history of the English language. He even had ideas about robots, many decades before people had any idea what robots could achieve. And in typical Wildean fashion, he provocatively tied it together with his attitudes on the advantages of slavery: “Unless there are slaves to…
I recently read Sharon Bertsch McGrayne’s The Theory That Would Not Die, which recounts the controversial history of Bayes theorem in the world of statistics. To oversimplify quite a bit, Bayes theorem requires those using it to make an initial guess about, say, the probability that one outcome is more likely than another, and then…
When people mention Bayes’ Theorem, the cornerstone of much of modern probability thinking, most do not realize that much of the thinking to develop this theorem was done by Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French astronomer and mathematician. As if his work on that theorem was not enough to make him one of my heroes, I recently…