CapitalistImperialistPig

Mr. Spock, of the original Star Trek, was pretty much the perfect straight man. He never got the joke, and he never got the girl. Which is why, I suppose, that Jim kept him on despite his limitations as a first officer. I am thinking here of his complete incompetence at elementary probability calculations. Whenever some dangerous mission was contemplated, Spock would portentiously announce some six or eight digit probability of failure, with success being somewhere out there in tens or hundred thousanths of a percent. Undeterred, Kirk would set out, usually taking with him the pilot, the ship's doctor, and the only key to the officers' bathroom. Naturally Spock was always wrong, but nobody ever complained or sent him back to remedial statistics. I'm sure he must have somehow become confused about Bayesian inference. Using Bayes theorem to compute probabilities is of course perfectly legitemate and absolutely necessary for most statistical reasoning, but the Bayesian...

said Albus Dumbledore as he bit into what he had thought was a nice toffee Barty Bots Every Flavor Bean. Rowling doesn't mention whether it was the wet or dry type. According to this NYT article by Nicolas Wade: Earwax may not play a prominent part in human history but at least a small role for it has now been found by a team of Japanese researchers. Earwax comes in two types, wet and dry. The wet form predominates in Africa and Europe, where 97 percent or more of the people have it, and the dry form among East Asians, while populations of Southern and Central Asia are roughly half and half. By comparing the DNA of Japanese with each type, the researchers were able to identify the gene that controls which type a person has, they report in the Monday issue of Nature Genetics. It seems that earwax type might be an important genetic marker of human population movements over the ages. The dry form, the researchers say, presumably arose later somewhere in northern Asia, because they ...

At least if your goal is for them to get rich. Clifford Johnson over at Cosmic Variance has a post up on scientists salaries with emphasis on physicists. While physicists are the best paid of the lot, they are still pretty far from getting rich - which probably won't surprise anyone here. Of course the work itself can be pretty enjoyable, and opportunities for travel abound. On the other, if you have daughters, go ahead and encourage them. Sean Carroll has convinced me that they will likely encounter enough prejudice to convince them to go into something more profitable, like neurosurgery or investment banking. Unless they are crazy enough to insist despite the obstacles. I, however, did encourage my kids to become scientists. They turned out to have other plans, even the one who graduated in physics from one of our most noted physics factories. So - nevermind.

James Annan has a post up about Bayesian inference and Bayesian vs. Frequentists interpretations of probability. He has a very cute example: An analogy with number theory may be helpful. It has been shown that the number of primes less than x is approximately given by x/ln(x), where ln is the natural logarithm. Using this formula, we find there are about 390,000,000 primes between 10^9 and 10^10 (ie 10-digit numbers, of which there are 9x10^9). In other words, if we pick a 10-digit number uniformly at random, there's a 4.3% probability that it is prime. That's a perfectly good frequentist statement. If we exclude those numbers which are divisible by 2, 3 or 5 (for which there are trivial tests) the probability rises to 16.1%. But what about 1,234,567,897? Does it make sense to talk about this number being prime with probability 16.1%? I suspect that some, perhaps most, number theorists would be uneasy about subscribing to that statement. Any particular number is either prime,...

Juan Cole blames Bush for the triumph of Hamas. ... the president's attempt to dismiss the old ruling Fatah Party as corrupt and inefficient, however true, is also a way of taking the spotlight off his own responsibility for the stagnation in Palestine. Bush allowed then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to sideline the ruling Fatah Party of Yasser Arafat, to fire missiles at its police stations, and to reduce its leader to a besieged nonentity. Sharon arrogantly ordered the murder of civilian Hamas leaders in Gaza, making them martyrs. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements continued to grow, the fatally flawed Oslo agreements delivered nothing to the Palestinians, and Bush and Sharon ignored new peace plans -- whether the so-called Geneva accord put forward by Palestinian and Israeli moderates or the Saudi peace plan -- that could have resolved the underlying issues. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which should have been a big step forward for peace, was marred by the refusal of th...

Just caught astrophysicist (and author) Mario Livio talking about Mozart on NPR's All Things Considered. His major theme was Mozart's fascination with and extensive use of symmetry in his music. He also mentioned the WAM was crazy for numbers as a kid. So what kind of music do we like, asked the NPR correspondent? Turns out, says Livio, that we like symmetry but not too much - symmetry, but some kind of symmetry breaking. In the epilog to Chandrasekar's Mathematical Theory of Black Holes he has quotes from Heisenberg and Francis Bacon on beauty. What they said (approximately - my copy is at the office) was: Heisenberg: Beauty consists in the proper proportion of the parts to the whole, and to each other. Bacon: There is no thing of excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

OK, so maybe you are a bit too dead to enjoy it, but a lot of the rest of us will. 250 would be really impressive if you were still around, but at least your music is, and remains one of the greatest achievements of Western Civilization. Kevin Drum has some Friday Cat Blogging Mozart links including a quiz, an essay, and a movie link, not to mention cat and music pictures.