Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Reviews

  • Why do Marvel and DC Comics have Annoying Bold Text?

    In a recent discussion with my regular role-playing group one player was complaining about the plethora of super-hero movies being released recently, and her increasing exhaustion with this genre. Another defended it partially on the basis that he has always really enjoyed superhero comics so seeing good movies of them is fun, but yeah maybe…

  • OpenBUGS Illegal Memory Write Problem: More RAM Will Not Help You

    I ran into more problems trying to run OpenBUGS on a Bayesian spatial regression model today. The problems are laid out pretty simply in the picture above: I ran into an illegal memory write. I know this is not the fault of my model, as it runs smoothly for 50, 500 or 1000 iterations. This…

  • Churchill’s Scientists: Missed Opportunities at the Science Museum

    I am in London for a week doing some research with small area analysis, and on the weekend had a brief opportunity to actually see the city. As is traditional by now on my annual trips to London, I visited the World Wildlife Photography Exhibition (which was a bit weak this year, I thought), and…

  • Exhibition Review: Sophie Calle’s “The Unsold”

    Today a friend took me, without explanation, to see Sophie Calle’s The Unsold (売り残し) at Koyanagi Gallery in Ginza. I don’t often attend art shows – let alone modern art installations – and I almost never visit Ginza, so this was a real novelty for me, but despite my initial misgivings it was definitely worth…

  • Some Hard-won Lessons on Modeling in WinBUGS and OpenBUGS

    I’ve recently been building a fairly complex series of Bayesian spatial regression models in BUGS, and thought I’d share some tips based on hard won experience with the models. The various BUGS packages have the most cryptic and incoherent error messages of any stats software I have ever worked with, and although various Bayesian boosters…

  • The Battle of Five Armies: The Final Hobbit is Great Fun, but Too Gorgeous

    One of the English loan-words that Japanese people misuse slightly in a really cute way is gorgeous (ゴージャス). In Japanese gorgeous refers not to something really nice, but to something that is overdone or just a bit too much – not necessarily unappealing or unattractive, but just a bit too much. I’ve heard the word…

  • Getting GLLAMM to Converge for Tough Datasets: An Example and a Proposed Method

    I have a dataset of about 40 million records covering rare events over a 30 year period, with about 600,000 events in total. The data are clustered in about 50 regions, and in the latter years of the file there are only about 4000 events a year (they increase in frequency in the early years).…

  • Our World of Darkness Campaign Ends Gloriously

    Our World of Darkness campaign, that we began by accidentally exterminating a native American tribe from history, ended today when we accidentally reset history to a parallel world ruled by a Thousand Year Reich built on justice and honour. In the process we went from a group of ordinary mortals struggling to understand why we…

  • Tolkien the Flat-earther!

    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…

  • Sunless Sea: a Brief Review, and Some Tips

    I have recently been exploring the shadowy and terrifying world of the Neath, in a fascinating and quite engaging game called Sunless Sea. This game is set in a location called Fallen London, an scattering of island archipelagos on a vast underground sea, which was formed at the conclusion of a previous game from the…