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Andrew Gelman just posted an interesting article on the philosophy of Bayesian statistics. Here’s my favorite passage.

This reminds me of a standard question that Don Rubin … asks in virtually any situation: “What would you do if you had all the data?” For me, that “what would you do” question is one of the universal solvents of statistics.

Emphasis added.

I had not heard Don Rubin’s question before, but I think I’ll be asking it often. It reminds me of Alice’s famous dialog with the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Related post: Irrelevant uncertainty

There are now over 100,000 followers across my various daily tip Twitter accounts. The three most popular are CompSciFact, AlgebraFact, and ProbFact. The newest account GrokEM has the least followers for now.

Thank you everyone for following and for providing feedback.

Related posts:

How to subscribe to a Twitter post via RSS
Daily tip accounts broader than their names imply

Universities are starting to give away their content online, while they still charge tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend. Just what are they selling? Credentials, accountability, and feedback.

Some people are asking why go to college when you can download a college education via iTunes U.

First, you would have no credentials when you’re done.

Second, you almost certainly would not put in the same amount of work as a college student without someone to pace you through the material and to provide external motivation. You’d be less likely to struggle through anything you found difficult or uninteresting.

Third, you’d have no feedback to know whether you’re really learning what you think you’re learning.

The people that I hear gush about online education opportunities are well-educated, successful, and ambitious. They may be less concerned about credentials either because they are intrinsically motivated or because they already have enough credentials. And because of their ambition, they need less accountability. They may need less feedback or are resourceful enough to seek out alternative channels for feedback, such as online forums. Resources such iTunes U and The Teaching Company are a godsend to such people. But that doesn’t mean that a typical teenager would make as much of the same opportunities.

I ran across the term “educational monoculture” this weekend. What a great phrase!

Rather than write a long post, I’ll restrain myself and simply say that I’d like to hear more people talk about “educational monoculture.”

Related post:

Don’t standardize education, personalize it

G. K. Chesterton on being funny and being serious:

Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. … Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German. Whether a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. … The truth is, as I have said, that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable than black and triangular.

Emphasis added. From Heretics. Text available online from Project Gutenberg.

In his book Heretics, G. K. Chesterton praises H. G. Wells for being able to change his mind.

He has abandoned the sensational theory with the same honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

Emphasis added.

Related post: Three reasons expert predictions are often wrong

I used to have an office in this building that was imploded on Sunday.

You can hear someone on the video say “Are we looking at the right building?” just before the building starts to collapse.

More on the implosion from the Houston Chronicle.

[If the video doesn't show up in your blog reader, go directly to my blog page or to the Houston Chronicle link.]

From A History of the English Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill:

In our own fevered, changing, and precarious age, where all is in flux and nothing is accepted, we must survey with respect a period when, with only three hundred thousand soldiers, widespread peace in the entire known world was maintained from generation to generation, and when the first pristine impulse of Christianity lifted men’s souls to the contemplation of new and larger harmonies beyond the ordered world around them.

From Neil Postman:

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. … One significant change generates a total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment … In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we do not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry.

C. S. Lewis’ description of George MacDonald from his introduction to Phantastes:

His resignation to poverty was at the opposite pole from that of the stoic. He appears to have been a sunny, playful man, deeply appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can buy, and no less deeply content to do without them.

This afternoon I ran across some leftover lorem ipsum placeholder text in a magazine.

Family Handyman, February 2011, page 76.

Here’s a similar instance of lorem ipsum text on a French wine bottle.

When Flannery O’Connor went to the University of Iowa for graduate school, her mentor Paul Engle could not understand her Georgian accent. Engle later recalled his reaction when she asked to attend his workshop.

Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad. …

Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself.

Source: Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories.

Here is a recording of O’Connor reading her story A Good Man is Hard to Find. I don’t find her at all hard to understand. The recording was made 13 years after her first encounter with Engle, and perhaps her accent had moderated. Or perhaps my ears are simply accustomed to Southern speech.

These were my most popular blog posts this year that were not about math or programming.

1. Coming full circle
2. Music in 5/4 time
3. Daylight savings time is a mess
4. Why did we do this?
5. Thomas Jefferson and preparing for meetings

The music post was from 2009, but it still gets a lot of hits.

If you’re interested in the non-technical posts here, check out the Facebook page for the blog. There I announce new posts of general interest and link to some previous posts.

Related:

Most popular math posts of 2011
Most popular programming posts of 2011

A few years ago Make Magazine posted The Maker’s Bill of Rights. I like the list, though I don’t like the name.

• Meaningful and specific parts lists shall be included.
• Cases shall be easy to open.
• Batteries should be replaceable.
• Special tools are allowed only for darn good reasons.
• Profiting by selling expensive special tools is wrong and not making special tools available is even worse.
• Torx is OK; tamperproof is rarely OK.
• Components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replaceable.
• Consumables, like fuses and filters, shall be easy to access.
• Circuit boards shall be commented.
• Power from USB is good; power from proprietary power adapters is bad.
• Standard connecters shall have pinouts defined.
• If it snaps shut, it shall snap open.
• Screws better than glues.
• Docs and drivers shall have permalinks and shall reside for all perpetuity at archive.org.
• Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought.
• Metric or standard, not both.
• Schematics shall be included.

I don’t like calling this a “bill of rights” because of the moral and legal overtones. The things in this list are not rights. They are generally desirable characteristics, and that’s what desiderata means.

Calling the list a maker’s bill of rights is a little curious. It’s a list of things that some consumers look for in suppliers, namely consumers who call themselves “makers.” But suppliers are literally makers: they make things that makers want to open and tinker with.