Stumbled on this awesome diagram of the history of time travel in the movies. I just wish they had used a logarithmic scale for travel so that everything before 1850 didn’t get lumped together. They also left out my very favourite time travel movie, Primer, but that’s okay, somebody else made a diagram of the…
science
happy pi day!
Is it really Pi Day again already? Happy 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971. Happy 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971, everyone. I considered watching the movie Pi (which I love, even though it doesn’t have much to do with the number), but I couldn’t find my DVD. So instead, I watched Vanishing Point, which has fast cars and a naked hippie chick on a…
“statistics is unnatural and subversive”
Andrew Gellman posts a link on his blog to a great talk by Dick De Veaux about teaching Statistics, making the point that unlike math and music, but like literature, doing stats requires life experience. Like a lot of math/science geeks, I went through a phase of my undergrad where I was caught up in…
another day, another paper
also known as "NIPS", originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird. Paper writing is pretty stressful. Code crashes, mistakes are found in equations, and you never have quite the experimental results you want. As deadlines approach, the pressure builds and sleep is abandoned. But I kind of welcome them. And not just for the rare flash…
Erdős Number
Paul Erdös was a mathematician probably most famous for being nothing but a mathematician. He published hundreds of papers during his life, while for years he lived without any permanent address.