Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: off-topic ranting
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The UK Census was released today, and the Guardian is “live-blogging” the details[1]. As a statistician I feel obliged to comment on the census, because it’s a fundamentally important part of modern cultural life. As an opinionated bastard, I also take great joy in the release of figures I can distort to suit my view…
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Last night I stumbled on this video of Bruce Dickinson, from Iron Maiden, singing William Blake’s Jerusalem with Ian Anderson (from Jethro Tull) accompanying him on flute. It was performed at a Christmas concert at Canterbury cathedral last year. He performed GK Chesterton’s Revelations, the inspiration for Iron Maiden’s song of the same name, at…
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Introduction In this post I will examine the data on beliefs about climate change, conspiracy theories and free market ideology collected by Stephan Lewandowsky. Lewandowsky conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) followed by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) on the assumption that established theories of conspiracy theory ideation obtained from prior research could be applied to…
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This week sees the simultaneous release of pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge’s breasts, and the release of a Counterpunch article on how a feminist Assistant Professor should be allowed to breastfeed in class. I think everyone is roughly aware of how the debate is proceeding vis a vis the Duchess’s breasts – they’re a…
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While I was travelling in Germany, being forced to eat huge piles of food at restaurants and cafes, I noticed that many of the staff shoveling the food into the trough[1] were middle-aged men, something I also noticed when I was in Paris a few years ago. In contrast, this phenomenon is rarer in Japan…
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… for questioning the science. Ironic, don’t you think? All this thinking about Flood got me contemplating global warming, so I wandered through some global warming-related sites and ended up at the infamous Watts Up With That, where I found two egregious examples of poor science, made particularly annoying by their patronizing tone and vicious…
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UPDATE 2 (31/7/2024): This post is getting hits again, which means the Olympics are on and people are again asking themselves “WTF?” about this sport. I just watched a few bouts and three bouts in a row were decided by the referee (two bouts by direct disqualification, one by the number of warnings). Boring! I…
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I don’t often think about being a “migrant” in Japan, or about racial politics much at all, though I suppose having been here five years and with at least another four years on the cards it’s time I started conceiving of myself as something more than a tourist. It’s not often discussed here amongst the…
Compromise and Conceit 