Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Nerd Culture
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I have been reading Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, by Dimitra Fimi, in an attempt to get a broader insight into some of the background of Tolkien’s world-building and the ideas underlying it, and it has been presenting some interesting and I think new ideas about how Tolkien’s world developed, some…
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Today Maryam Mirzakhani, aged 37, became the first woman ever awarded the Fields prize for mathematics, a prize that is sometimes described as the “Nobel prize of maths.” She was awarded the prize for her work on “Riemann Surfaces and their moduli spaces,” which you can look up in wikipedia but good luck with that.…
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Last week I had the opportunity to play an extended session of D&D 5th Edition, using the pre-generated characters and adventure from the starter kit. We had three players so I played two PCs: an elven wizard called Althiel Moonwhisper (Chaotic Good, indeterminate gender, overly elegant in speech and manner but completely lacking in empathy…
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Every year I have to teach a basic statistics class to new Master’s students, but every year I find my students come from very diverse mathematical and science backgrounds without necessarily any understanding of the fundamentals necessary to grasp a classical statistics course. I have one year to polish these students up to a level…
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Cheerleaders from two US football teams – the Jets and the Bills – are suing their former bosses for unpaid wages, and as part of the case we get to see some fascinating insights into how the football teams tried to control the lives of their cheerleaders. These women paid incredibly poorly – something like …
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I know, I know, guaranteed flamewar title … but here goes. Recently I have read in quite a few locations (the BUGS Book, various papers) about Bayesian statistical models that use a non-informative prior. For example, a regression model with a prior on the slope that is N(0,10000) and a prior on the (log of)…
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Today’s Guardian has a classic piece of click-bait by the opinionated and ignorant AIDS-denialist Simon Jenkins, in which he claims that maths is a waste of time for school students, and government obssession with maths will make schools intolerable and authoritarian. His article is leavened in equal measure with sneering at any politician who tries…
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As some of my readers know, I have been having fun conquering the world as Japan in Hearts of Iron 2, and that I’m reporting it all cynically in the tone of a Japanese leader forced to war to defend Asia against colonialism. Before I played Japan I had a go as Germany and didn’t…
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… In fact I am one! The Collins dictionary has deemed “Geek” to be word of the year. Now I just have to sit back and wait for the cocaine and dancing girls …
Compromise and Conceit 