In a CNN interview in September 2024, Hillary Clinton said that, without moderation and monitoring of social media content, we would “lose total control”. I thought to go back to the original interview, to see what she meant. As one might predict, the quote is not quite as it seems …| Asterisk
From Rob Henderson’s Nov 2024 interview at Wellesley College, transcribed in Henderson’s substack post: A lot of graduates and students of elite universities will attempt to co-opt the suffering of marginalized people. They’ll identify whatever commonalities they share with historically marginalized groups and then essentially co-opt the …| Asterisk
This is John Kerry, no less, in a World Economic Forum discussion, no less, saying that: “It’s really hard to govern today” because of the “problem … of building consensus”. This because people “self-select where they go for their news”. There is “a lot of discussion now about how you …| Asterisk
Nietzsche’s publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner, expressed his frustrations at Wagner and his circle at Bayreuth: Wagner is not even reading Nietzsche’s book … He said to me that people only read Nietzsche in so far as they cling to him [Wagner] … He got off some really nasty remarks about Nietzsche …| Asterisk
[The United Nations] owns the science, and we think the world should know it. This is a quote from the World Economic Forum 2022 Special Agenda Dialog on “Tackling Misinformation”, starting at 41:58. The person speaking is Melissa Fleming, the Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, United Nations. She is a …| Asterisk
John Gage was at Berkeley during the student protests in the sixties. He later went on to be vice-president of Sun Microcomputers. Interviewed in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties (at 40 minutes), he talks about the effect of watching the response of the authorities: I’d never realized that …| Asterisk
Trinh Nhoc is 90 years old. He rather sweetly describes himself (in French) as a “un bon cordonnier vietnamien” — a good shoemaker from Vietnam. In 1970, the coup happened in Cambodia. That first night, I remember Cambodian soldiers knocking on the door of my shop. They knocked for five minutes …| Asterisk
Christopher Lasch wrote a book called The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy (1996). The first essay in the book — “The revolt of the elites”, describes the fall of the aristocratic elites, and the rise of a new meritocratic elite — “the best and brightest”. These new elites …| Asterisk
Warning : this page refers in a general way to a legal case involving sex with children. Though the facts are ugly, I believed it important to document some reactions to the case, as insight into the world-view of some influential thinkers in 1970s France. The Versailles Affair was a French …| Asterisk
Following links from a New York Times article on cars and privacy, I confirmed the surprising fact that Nissan’s December 20th 2023 USA privacy policy contains the following under the heading “Categories of information we collect and disclose”: Types of Personal Data collected Sensitive personal information, including driver’s …| Asterisk
From “National Defense” (1981) by James Fallows, pages 110-111. In an attempt to define more precisely the qualities a leader must display to produce trust and cohesion among his troops, a team from the Army War College interviewed majors who had led rifle platoons in Vietnam several years earlier, asking …| Asterisk
The AI impacts survey records responses from researchers in artificial intelligence and machine learning. When asked, 50% of the researchers who responded thought there was a 5% or higher chance of “future AI advances causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species”. 50% gave a …| Asterisk
As I walked home from my job as a lecturer in Birmingham University, I often noticed this banner on the fences of the all-surface sports pitches: Discover. Develop. Achieve. I remember recoiling each time I saw it, and thinking, consciously: “That’s a bit fascist”. A little later, I watched …| Asterisk
A friend of mine was interested in the way that the Google Bard AI would reply when asked about masking in Covid-19. This is an interesting topic because someone’s attitude to masks has such strong political valence in the United States. In my friend’s conversation with Bard, it …| Asterisk
Benny Goodman and his band were struggling to break out with their new music. From the link above: The next night, August 21, 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, Goodman and his band began a three-week engagement. … Goodman started the evening with stock arrangements, but after an indifferent …| Asterisk
Pierre Sprey was a major contributor to the design of two of the most successful aircraft in US military history — the F-16 and the A-10. He was very critical of the current F-35 fighter design as dangerous, buggy, and ineffective, and blamed the procurement process for the poor design and …| Asterisk
This is Rob Montz in an interview with Glenn Loury. Montz describes his experience of his undergraduate education in Brown University: … if you can get that injection of humility — I mean for me it was […] you being forced to confront a mind that is inarguably much greater than yours that …| Asterisk
Milan Kundera, in the essay “The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh”, published in “Testaments Betrayed” (1993): These are the passages wherein Rabelais’s [The Fourth Book] becomes fully and radically a novel: that is, a realm where moral judgment is suspended. Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality …| Asterisk
This is an extended version of a fairly well-known quote from the essay “Paths in the Fog”, by Milan Kundera, published in his essay collection “Testaments Betrayed” (1993). Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their …| Asterisk
What would happen if it became easy to remove anyone you choose by using ad-hominem attacks with weak and subjective evidence? I imagine most of us could think of some compelling examples from history, that we would not want to emulate. The previous post was about a group trying to …| Asterisk
A group of “public health practitioners, educators, students, advocates, and allies” has written an open letter demanding that the American Public Health Association (APHA) cancel an eminent speaker on public health, Dr Leanna Wen. As they explain: Currently, Dr. Wen is slated to be a speaker presenting on “Backlash,” [!] and …| Asterisk
From Dominic Cummings’ blog: On the referendum #20 — the campaign, physics and data science: PPS. If you are young, smart, and interested in politics, think very hard before studying politics / ‘political science’ / PPE at university. You will be far better off if you study maths or physics. It will be …| Asterisk
Dominic Cummings, writing on the failures of UK government, reminded me of my career as a junior doctor: I made many mistakes and was saved from the consequences of them usually by quiet calm capable women aged 23-35 paid a fraction of the senior management, and without whom the entire …| Asterisk
Tara Henley, quoting William Deresiewicz’s forthcoming book “The End of Solitude”: To be an individual, the years have taught me, takes a constant effort. These essays are an offering to those who wish to be one, too.| Asterisk
Karl Popper argues that two-party first-past-the-post democratic systems are superior to other forms of government, in that they make the representatives and their parties more responsive to rejection by the voters. His view of desirable government is “thoroughly practical, almost technical” — it is a system designed to best answer the …| Asterisk
Dominic Cummings on the irrationality of the well-educated: Why is almost all political analysis and discussion so depressing and fruitless? I think much has to do with the delusions of better educated people. … Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse …| Asterisk
Charles Marlow is the narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For those of us who remember the film Apocalypse Now, Marlow corresponds to Martin Sheen’s character, Captain Willard. In this quote from the book, he is talking about soldiers and sailors from Roman expeditions to Africa around …| Asterisk
Dr Wyatt Tee Walker was a pastor, civil rights leader and anti-apartheid campaigner. Among many other roles, he served as chief of staff to Martin Luther King. Walker and Steve Klinsky founded the Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem. They talk about the principles and importance of the school in the …| Asterisk
These are from the standard work “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction”, Third Edition, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2017). As you can see, I’ve tried to be true the intent of the text, by using long quotes in continuous sections, with their own headings. Page 3: A. What …| Asterisk
Here is a quote about American intellectual liberals from “No name in the street” by James Baldwin, pages 29-31. I returned to New York in 1952, after four years away [in Paris], at the height of the national convulsion called McCarthyism. … it was a foul, ignoble time, and my contempt …| Asterisk
A while ago, a friend pointed me to the reasoned discussion at Google of their decision to switch development of their TensorFlow machine-learning library from Python (with C++ and CUDA) to Swift. The justification has date “April 2018”. I remember thinking at the time that an important part of the …| Asterisk
Julia isn't growing fast enough to compete with Python| Asterisk
Here is another quote from “Fumbling the future: how Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer”, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (1988). It is just another example of how important it is to talk to the people who are doing the work. The Xerox Computer Science …| Asterisk
This is another notable quote from “Fumbling the future: how Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer”, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (1988). One of the villains of that story is a Xerox executive called Bob Sparacino. He had come to Xerox from General Motors, and …| Asterisk
I recently bought and read “Fumbling the future: how Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer”, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (1988). Its a story so tragic that I was almost in tears in various points. To summarize, Xerox became extremely successful by identifying the nascent …| Asterisk
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! Upton Sinclair, 1934| Asterisk
Here is C. Northcote Parkinson’s terrifying and utterly convincing explanation of uncontrolled expansion in bureaucracy: We may distinguish at the outset two motive forces. They can be represented for the present purpose by two almost axiomatic statements, thus: (1) “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals” and (2 …| Asterisk
Professional A person or state characterized by a lack of charm, imagination, and independence. Also see Not Professional.| Asterisk
Kit Smart was a religious poet who died in debtor’s prison, aged 49, in 1771. Most controversially, in 1757, his father-in-law took Smart against his will to be committed to a lunatic asylum. There he wrote his now-famous poem Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”), although the poem was …| Asterisk
A link from a Washington Post article led me to George Orwell’s essay on Politics and the English Language. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. … [Watching a political speech] one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being …| Asterisk
Take my money if I use these phrases There are certain phrases that upset me. I’m sure they upset other people too, but the temptation to use them can be strong. To help me resist, I offer the following hostage. If you find me using any of the following …| Asterisk
The Julia programming language probably isn't growing fast enough| Asterisk
Here are two quotes about giving solutions when you don’t understand the problem: … there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. Book of Prejudices, Second Series, by H. L. Mencken, 1921. … advice, tinged with the reckless courage of the non-combatant. Chronicles of Clovis …| Asterisk
There is a very enjoyable Korean comedy drama called The Fiery Priest. As for many Korean dramas, the characters struggle against deeply entrenched corruption and cynicism. In Episode 16, our heroes have just found evidence of some of this corruption. Many times they have been close to exposing the officials …| Asterisk
I just came across this album. In case you didn’t click on the link above, here is the cover design: To clarify, the picture shows the frau of the album title, but without her fagott, which, as you may know, is the German word for bassoon.| Asterisk
From a chapter on “Gnosticism” by Henry Chadwick. Chadwick was an eminent historian of the early church. The pagan world was quite accustomed to myths of great heroes, such as Heracles and Asclepius, who were elevated to divine rank as a reward for their merits. The Christians amazed the world …| Asterisk
Here are some parts of a charming letter (X:96) by Pliny the Younger. At the time of writing, around 112 CE, Pliny was the governor of a Roman province in a region of modern-day Turkey. He is asking for advice from the Roman Emperor Trajan about how strict he …| Asterisk
What we did on Jan. 6 in many ways was an evolution in consciousness, because as we marched down the street along these ley lines, shouting ‘USA’ or shouting things like ‘freedom’ . . . we were actually affecting the quantum realm” Jacob Anthony Chansley — also known as Jake Angeli. He is best …| Asterisk
It is shocking to read Max Weber’s talk on Science as a vocation. You can find an English translation of the resulting paper at this link. Wikisource has the original German text. The writing is clear-eyed and direct. He describes so many problems in academia that, until now, I …| Asterisk
Nietzsche, predicting the age of social media: But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful! Nietzsche Thus spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common. Chapter 29. The Tarantulas.| Asterisk
Hide! Hide! Witch! The good folk come to burn thee! Their keen enjoyment hid beneath The gothic mask of duty. This are the opening lines in the story “Hide! Hide! Witch!” By Mark Clifton And Alex Apostolides, in Astounding Science Fiction, December 1953.| Asterisk
Among many interesting bits of advice on the BBCs CEO secrets: Too often business is about suits, weird talk, I’m amazing, “professional, professional, professional.” I think in business, you have to remember not to be professional. Business is about our life, it’s about inspiring people, it’s about …| Asterisk
From an interview about Domain Driven Design, with Vaughn Vernon. Nothing is easy in the software industry other than failure. Later: Software development is creative. Creating is rewarding. Creating releases some kind of chemicals in my brain that deliver incredibly positive intellectual and emotional satisfaction. It’s not hard for …| Asterisk
Andrew Grove gives a vivid description of the way that Intel finally summoned the courage to give up their core business of making computer memory to concentrate on central processing units. The decision was very difficult, and took a relatively long time, because many in the company had a strong …| Asterisk
A discussion about the direction of JupyterLab led me to some research on the increasing dominance of Visual Studio Code as a development environment. Here are some results from the “Development Environment and Tools” section of the StackOverflow developer survey of 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. I ordered the development …| Asterisk
David Shor is a 28-year-old political data analyst who worked for the 2012 Obama campaign. He tweeted about a paper with data analysis suggesting that race riots contributed to Nixon’s victory in 1968: Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to …| Asterisk
“The world,” [Dwight Morrow] once wrote to his son, “is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There’s far less competition.” Quote Investigator tracked this quote down to a 1935 biography of Dwight Morrow …| Asterisk
Donald Knuth on the central idea of Literate Programming: Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to …| Asterisk
While chasing down a reference, I came across this paper: David S. Moore (1993) “A Generation of Statistics Education: An Interview with Frederick Mosteller,” Journal of Statistics Education, 1:1, DOI: 10.1080/10691898.1993.11910453 It is an interview with Frederick Mosteller from the end of 1992. The contents …| Asterisk
This is a teaching suggestion I found in this paper: David S. Moore (1993) “A Generation of Statistics Education: An Interview with Frederick Mosteller,” Journal of Statistics Education, 1:1, DOI: 10.1080/10691898.1993.11910453 I quoted from the paper in my previous post. The suggestion is - ask the …| Asterisk
I have just finished reading The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again by Richard Horton. Despite the title, I still don’t know what went wrong. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the UK response has been among the least competent …| Asterisk
As I was reading the book How to take smart notes, I came across a reference to the educational principles of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Unfortunately it gave me a sick feeling in my stomach, as if unexpectedly remembering a close friend who had died: The relationship between teacher and student …| Asterisk
UK universities can be tiring and joyless places to work. This is an interview with David Lodge. Despite huge book sales, he prudently chose to remain as professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham University, only retiring in 1987 when he became eligible for a pension. By then, of course …| Asterisk
Guido van Rossum gave something like a TED talk on the history of Python. He explains why it is so important that code is easy to read and understand: Typically when you ask a programmer to explain to a lay person what a programming language is, they will say that …| Asterisk
Surgisphere is the company that provided the data to two major COVID-19 papers, that were later retracted. The most shocking of the two retractions was of a paper that appeared to show that patients taking chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 were at a greater risk of death. On the basis …| Asterisk
In the article Police suspect, Kate Levine discusses agreements that exist to protect many US police forces against the same interrogation methods they use on the rest of us. … police have dealt themselves special protections from police questioning based on their knowledge of what protections a suspect needs most when …| Asterisk
Like the last post, this quote is from “Not can but will college teaching be improved.” by K. Patricia Cross (1977) New Directions for Higher Education 17 pp 1-15. It describes data from a questionnaire to the faculty of the University of Nebraska. See the previous post for more detail …| Asterisk
Patricia Cross found that 94 percent of a sample of faculty at the University of Nebraska rated themselves as above-average teachers. 68 percent rated themselves as being in the top 25 percent. The following is from “Not can but will college teaching be improved.” by K. Patricia Cross (1977) New …| Asterisk
This page tracks the changes in popularity of the Matlab and Python programming languages. One difficulty in comparing these languages is that Python is versatile, and has many uses outside science and data analysis. For example, it is widely used in web programming. However, it seems that recent growth in …| Asterisk
The Julia programming language probably isn't growing fast enough| Asterisk
It looks as though Python is starting to dominate as the data science language of choice. I started small research on this after a friend pointed me to this blog post about trends in data science languages. The blog post is from March 2018; here is some more recent data …| Asterisk
This quote starts on page 117 of the Kennedy report on the “rogue surgeon” Ian Paterson: And, there is a deeper point. The pursuit of data might be seen, at some point, as some sort of displacement activity. Wrestling with the very human problem of the patient can be postponed …| Asterisk
From the always-inspiring Despair.com demotivators: Virtue You must tweet the change you want to see in the world. It won’t affect anything, but at least people will know exactly where you stood during the fight. Doing nothing. Like the poser you are. See the Virtue demotivator.| Asterisk
As of 2014 Python Is Now the Most Popular Introductory Teaching Language at Top U.S. Universities. At the time of writing (July 2014), Python is currently the most popular language for teaching introductory computer science courses at top-ranked U.S. departments. Specifically, eight of the top 10 CS departments …| Asterisk
The Raspberry Pi is a small cheap computer designed to get children interested in programming. At the moment, I’m looking at the fourth edition of the Official Raspberry Pi user guide by Eben Upton. Upton is one of the founders of the Raspberry Pi foundation. He describes what he …| Asterisk
Every now and again, when I’m listening to Chomsky, I burst out laughing. He is always dry and careful, his delivery rarely changes, and this makes his more devastating put-downs all the more outrageous. Here Chomsky and Foucault are discussing the idea of justice in civil disobedience: Foucault: I …| Asterisk
Ukraine embassy official David Holmes on a conversation with Gordon Sondland, one of the “three amigos” coordinating the Trump / Giuliani policy on Ukraine. Holmes is having lunch with Sondland. Sondland has just got off the phone with Trump, during which Trump was speaking so loudly that Holmes could hear much …| Asterisk
My brother pointed me to a painful, well-written article on the collapse of the UK degree: The great university con: how the British degree lost its value. Among many other pieces of this slow, agonizing, and entirely predictable collapse, is the Jarratt report. Quoting from the Wikipedia article: The report …| Asterisk
There follows a quote from Henry Ford in 1929: There is no denying the fact that life seems to be getting more complicated. But is it really? Isn’t it rather that we are asked to make decisions more rapidly than before? With our new forms of transportation and communication …| Asterisk
Serious reading of mathematics is best done sitting bolt upright in a hard chair at a desk. Pencil and paper are nearly indispensable; for there are always figures to be sketched and steps in the argument to be verified by calculation. (Savage 1972) (preface to first edition) Savage, Leonard J …| Asterisk
“Exploratory data analysis” (EDA) (Tukey 1977) is the term that John W. Tukey gave to the practice of exploring the data with visualizations and summaries. The careful data analyst should do EDA before going on to the more familiar mode of making statistical models, and testing them. I remember coming …| Asterisk
I came across this passage in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews from a reference in Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE-66 CE by E. P. Sanders. https://archive.org has the full text of the Antiquities. Sanders cites the passage below as Antiquities 20:199-203;1 it is chapter 9 …| Asterisk
From Towards computational reproducibility: researcher perspectives on the use and sharing of software: … we conducted a survey to better understand the characteristics of research software as well as how it is created, used, and shared by researchers. … Differences between researchers from computer science and other disciplines related to the knowledge …| Asterisk
Exploring some links, I came across this course site which led me to The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science, by Kieran Healy. He recommends Emacs, RMarkdown and Git, but is careful in comparing these tools to the more common workflow centered on Microsoft Word.| Asterisk
Hadley Wickham gave a talk with the title You can’t do data science in a GUI. He summarizes his argument as: “What I believe in, is code as the primary artifact from a data analysis.” Programming languages allow you to express your analysis concisely in words, that can be …| Asterisk
The fourth sign of an inexperienced engineer is that they usually have a lot of pride, a lot of ego, a lot of arrogance. And this is something that you see in a lot of computer science students coming out of college for instance, their arrogance is just incredible. Top …| Asterisk
A colleague pointed me to a job advert to teach at a new university in London: the London Interdisciplinary School. I was excited to see this was happening, because a new university may well be the best way to make the change we need in science and education. The fundamental …| Asterisk
See: this analysis of data science job listings: Python is the most in-demand language. The popularity of this open-source language has been widely observed. It’s beginner friendly, with many support resources. The vast majority of new data science tools are compatible with it. Python is the primary language for …| Asterisk
This post links to some evidence that data science in industry may be over the peak of the hype cycle. Here is the hype cycle:1 We may be somewhere mid-way between the peak of inflated expectations and the trough of disillusionment. Where is data science on the hype cycle …| Asterisk
This post follows from Who is building the foundations?. Despite the title, that last post was about where the foundations get built. Here I am interested the process by which developers start working on these foundation projects. Software expert build or practitioner build? I can think of two simple models …| Asterisk
I tried to estimate the extent to which different countries contribute to the foundations of scientific Python. To do this I analyzed commits and Github data for the following set of libraries: Numpy Scipy Matplotlib Scikit-learn Scikit-image Statsmodels Pandas h5py Cython Sympy I chose these libraries because they are common …| Asterisk
“We have to create a healthy contribution to the network and a healthy conversation. On Twitter right now you don’t necessarily walk away feeling you learned something.” From an interview with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.| Asterisk
A blog post on Perl 6 led me to the description of Worse is better philosophy. I get the impression this idea is relatively famous, but I had not come across it before. A summary might be, that successful systems often pass rough edges of the design to the user …| Asterisk
Is the Julia programming language growing fast enough?| Asterisk
The results just came out from the 2019 Stackoverflow Developer Survey. I summarized some results of the 2018 survey in Python, Matlab, R, Julia. Here are the equivalent results for the 2019 survey. See the previous post for definitions, and other background. In summary: “Python, the fastest-growing major programming language …| Asterisk
A colleague, Scott White, pointed me to this article in the Guardian: What do you get if you don’t teach stats properly? Farage and Trump. The author, Robert de Vries, is a lecturer in Quantitative Sociology. He argues that we are not teaching our students to think carefully about …| Asterisk
The Stackoverflow Developer Survey has a section on programming languages called Most loved, dreaded and wanted. I’ve written about the contrast between Python and Matlab for teaching in Python, Matlab, teaching, but I am also interested in R and Julia. See the detail below. In summary: Many developers like …| Asterisk
Brexit and modern art| Asterisk
The gulf between her new account and the breathless reaction to the 2015 image points to the difficulty of recalibrating expectations of acceptable decorum in the #MeToo era, when virality is easily mistaken for certainty. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/01/biden-grasped-cabinet-officials-wife-photo-went-viral-now-she-says-everyone-had-it-wrong That's odd, I am more likely …| Asterisk
This is a question about debate in science. I’m not asking about what we disagree on, but if we do disagree, where should we disagree? Let’s imagine that the scientific authorities have a strong policy that lacks good evidence, and might be harmful. For example, what if the …| Asterisk