Richard St. John gave a three-minute presentation at TED on the secrets of success, summarizing his interviews of 500 successful people. His outline: Passion Work Good Focus Push Serve Ideas Persist Related posts: Redbelt problem solving Don’t try to be…
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Glowing jellyfish aid cancer research
The latest episode of the Science and the Sea podcast explains how a protein that gives a certain species of jellyfish a faint glow is useful in research into cancer and other diseases. Related posts: Cartoon guide to cancer research…
Music recommendations
I’ve started a new page to list CDs for music mentioned here.
Four reasons to use Bayesian inference
The following is a direct quote from Anthony O’Hagan’s book Bayesian Inference. I’ve edited the quote only to enumerate the points. Why should one use Bayesian inference, as opposed to classical inference? There are various answers. Broadly speaking, some of…
Taking questions
The previous post was an answer to a reader question. I would like to write more posts answering questions you have. Please send me your questions or suggestions for blog posts. You might ask me something I don’t know or…
Posted in Uncategorized
Converting miles to degrees longitude or latitude
Someone sent me email regarding my online calculator for computing the distance between to locations given their longitude and latitude values. He wants to do sort of the opposite. Starting with the longitude and latitude of one location, he wants…
Best podcast intro music
Here are three of my favorite podcast intro themes. .NET Rocks by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell. Carl Franklin composed the intro theme, Toy Boy, and recorded the song with his brother Jay. The tune is catchy, the words are…
51st Carnival of Mathematics posted
The long-awaited 51st Carnival of Mathematics is up at squareCircleZ.
Cartoon about my job
Everybody thinks Dilbert is about their job. But this cartoon really is about my job. It does a remarkably good job of summarizing what it’s like to work in cancer research. Related posts on cancer research
Do you really want to be indispensable?
One strategy for increasing job security is to make yourself indispensable by never documenting anything. Deliberately following such a strategy is unethical. Passively falling into such a situation is more understandable, and more common, but it’s not very smart either.…
Why proof by pattern of examples doesn’t work
Draw a few points on a circle and then draw a straight line from every point to every other point. Count the number of regions created. 2 points, 2 regions. 3 points, 4 regions. 4 points, 8 regions. 5 points,…
Tim Bray’s high-tech monastic cell
Nicholas Carr has an interesting post entitled simply Clutter. The post begins by discussing Tim Bray’s vision of a sort of high-tech monastic cell and moves into an explanation of why electronic books are fundamentally different from paper books. Tim…
Dave Brubeck mass
Judging from the comments on previous posts, it seems a good number of Dave Brubeck fans read this blog. Everyone familiar with Dave Brubeck knows about Take Five from his album Time Out. But I wonder how many know about…
Status report questions
The latest .NET Rocks podcast interviews Pat Hynds on why projects fail. Toward the end of his interview he mentions a simple template for status reports. What did you work on? What did you get done? What did you do…
Bayesian statistics is misnamed
I’m teaching an introduction to Bayesian statistics. My first thought was to start with Bayes theorem, as many introductions do. But this isn’t the right starting point. Bayes’ theorem is an indispensable tool for Bayesian statistics, but it is not…
