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  1. Practical Engineering, , more info

    The Hidden Engineering Behind Texas's Top Tourist Attraction
    [Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]I am on location in downtown San Antonio, Texas, where crews have just finished setting up this massive 650-ton crane. The counterweights are on. The outriggers are down. And the jib, an extension for the crane's telescoping boom, is being rigged up. This is the famous San Antonio River Walk, a city park below street level that winds around …
    By Wesley Crump, 3,085 words
  2. Biased and Inefficient, , more info

    The piranha and the polypill
    The piranha problem is both a metaphor and a set of theorems coming out of Andrew Gelman’s research group. The metaphor is of large intervention effects as piranhas that can’t be kept together in the same tank since they’d eat each other. The theorems show that a large set of intervention effects that must add up to a large total of explained variability unless they are highly correlated with each …
    76 words
  3. Practical Engineering — Blog, , more info

    The Hidden Engineering Behind Texas's Top Tourist Attraction
    [Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]I am on location in downtown San Antonio, Texas, where crews have just finished setting up this massive 650-ton crane. The counterweights are on. The outriggers are down. And the jib, an extension for the crane's telescoping boom, is being rigged up. This is the famous San Antonio River Walk, a city park below street level that winds around …
    By Wesley Crump, 3,085 words
  4. Error Statistics Philosophy, , more info

    Leisurely Cruise January 2025: Excursion 4 Tour I: The Myth of “The Myth of Objectivity” (Mayo 2018, CUP)
    2024-2025 Cruise Our first stop in 2025 on the leisurely tour of SIST is Excursion 4 Tour I which you can read here. I hope that this will give you the chutzpah to push back in 2025, if you hear that objectivity in science is just a myth. This leisurely tour may be a bit more leisurely than I intended, but this is philosophy, so slow blogging is best. (Plus, …
    By Mayo, 985 words
  5. The Research Whisperer, , more info

    Could the word for our year be ‘buoyant’?
    Photo by Eva Rinaldi | https://flickr.com/photos/evarinaldiphotography 2024 was a notable year for the Research Whisperers, in good ways for a change! As a result, we are looking forward to 2025. Jonathan completed and passed his PhD so that’s Dr O’Donnell to you now. We both started new roles at the same university. While we’ve worked together on Research Whisperer for over 13 years and were in similar roles at one …
    By Research Whisperer, 793 words
  6. All Things Linguistic, , more info

    saving this for my files on emoji as gesture linguistics
    kata4a:mumblesplash:scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon saving this for my files on emoji as gesture linguistics
    68 words
  7. a sibilant intake of breath, , more info

    Ord on the precipice that faces us
    If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity is about two hundred thousand years old. But the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions more—enough time for millions of future generations; enough to end disease, poverty and injustice forever; enough to create heights of flourishing unimaginable today. And if we could learn to reach out further into the cosmos, we could find more time yet: trillions of …
    By Milan, 299 words
  8. Evergreen Data Visualization Blog, , more info

    Launch a Data Viz Revolution
    When you know strong data visualization is crucial to your team's success but you have a boss stuck in Windows 95, you need to manage up. You need sneaky ways to launch a data viz revolution at work. The post Launch a Data Viz Revolution appeared first on Evergreen Data.
    By Stephanie Evergreen, 55 words
  9. Classics of Science Fiction, , more info

    The Disciples of Science Fiction
    I’m reading Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. I’m a big fan of Walter Isaacson, but I was going to skip this new book because I’m not a fan of Elon Musk. Then I saw the 92NY YouTube interview, between Michael Lewis and Walter Isaacson, and decided I should read it after all. Even though Musk has a repellant personality, and expresses political ideas I dislike, he is achieving many ambitions …
    By jameswharris, 784 words
  10. The Lithole, , more info

    And the Case
    I I’ve mentioned before that I take a few walks a day; I have two dogs, one of which is a fairly high energy beast. Normally, we head up to the river in the morning, crossing the French Quarter. At the start of the year, some asshole plowed into a crowd and killed people, and as a result, parts of the French Quarter were blocked off. It was largely re-opened …
    By toddbert, 923 words
  11. Hush-Kit, , more info

    Book reviews: Vought F7U-3 Cutlass & Kawanishi H6K ‘Mavis’ and H8K ‘Emily’ Units
    Aviation Book Reviews Vought F7U-3 Cutlass Hardcover –2024, Crecy Tommy H Thomason and Alfred C Casby FIVE STARS When this popped up on a Facebook page (I think it was The Aviation Enthusiast Book Club), the aviation writer Bill Sweetman wryly replied that 384 pages devoted to the Cutlass were rather too generous a treatment and […]
    By Hush Kit, 69 words
  12. the cassandra pages, , more info

    Prophets in their Own Land...are seldom believed
    Last night we spontaneously decided to go see A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic, and ended up at a cinema-plex in the Montreal suburb of Cote-St-Luc. The parking lot was empty, the shops in the dimly lit mall already shuttered; fake plants, vibrating recliners and plastic carnival horses on springs had been pushed into the center of the atrium to accommodate the brooms and mops of the late …
    By Beth, 922 words
  13. Reading 1900-1950, , more info

    Death at the Opera (1934) by Gladys Mitchell
    Book review by George S: Death at the Opera is Gladys Mitchell’s fifth novel featuring Mrs Bradley, her ferocious reptilian detective. It was first published by Grayson in 1934, and appeared as Penguin number 217 in 1939 (price 6d.) Cover of the first edition, 1934 The title might seem misleading, since the setting is not an opera house but a school, and the key event is the murder of an …
    By George Simmers, 744 words
  14. Messy Nessy Chic, , more info

    The Lost Art of Hollywood’s Kaleidoscopic Fever Dreams
    Gather ‘round, cinema enthusiasts, because it’s time to tip our top hats to one of vintage Hollywood’s most dazzling visionaries: Busby Berkeley. A man whose name conjures up images of synchronised swimmers, overhead shots of geometric dancers, and the kind of glitzy, glittery choreography that could put a magpie into cardiac arrest. Berkeley didn’t just direct; he orchestrated, and in doing so, he transformed the way we experience musicals on …
    By MessyNessy, 81 words
  15. The Movie Crash Course, , more info

    Performance (1970)
    This film was completed in the late 60’s, a few short years after the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night. Mick Jagger’s casting here lead the studio to believe they would be getting a similarly light-hearted romp through Bohemian London – but Performance‘s much seedier tone caused the studio to panic and shelve the film for a full two years. Jagger’s role is more of a slight supporting role anyway. …
    By KWadsworth, 769 words