Tuesday, October 30, 2012

In short, good directors occasionally make great movies, great directors usually make great movies, and then there is Christopher Nolan. He's currently the Usain Bolt of movie-making.

Source: http://qr.ae/8LPff
The reason we continually see more people peddling more fear is because it works. We cannot drink in enough of it. Fear is a flame and we are moths. This addiction to fear plays into the most primal instinct of all living creatures.

Source: http://bit.ly/SsErpo

Thursday, October 25, 2012


Bayesians are like snowflakes… each Bayesian is a unique assemblage of opinions about the proper methodology for statistics.” (p. 6)

Source: Ferson, S. (2005). Bayesian methods in risk assessment. Unpublished report prepared 
for the Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minieries (BRGM). (Quoted in this thesis)

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Inside the brain, an unpredictable race—like a political campaign—is being run. Multiple candidates, each with a network of supporters, have organized themselves into various left- and right-wing clusters—like grassroots political teams working feverishly to reinforce a vision that bands them together.

Source: http://bit.ly/XWp1dl

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Mythbusters is to science as CSI is to forensics.

Source: http://on.fb.me/Ulya0f

Multicollinearity increases the standard errors of the coefficients. Increased standard errors in turn means that coefficients for some independent variables may be found not to be significantly different from 0, whereas without multicollinearity and with lower standard errors, these same coefficients might have been found to be significant and the researcher may not have come to null findings in the first place. In other words, multicollinearity misleadingly inflates the standard errors. Thus, it makes some variables statistically insignificant while they should be otherwise significant.

It is like two or more people singing loudly at the same time. One cannot discern which is which. They offset each other.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

I liken the iPhone to the Porsche 911, which hasn't really had a revolutionary change over the last 30 years because the design was just that good to begin with. The iPhone is just that, a great phone and these latest increments will keep it at the top of the game.

Source: http://qr.ae/8B3tt


We are the biological equivalent of a recursive function, we start as a single cell, a single cell that 'calls itself' over and over until the human being exists. 

Before I came to Stanford, one MIT professor told me that his experience as a first year professor was of sitting down at his desk Monday morning and then suddenly it is late Friday night and you wonder where the week has gone and why you didn't get any of your to-do items accomplished. He said it's like being eaten by ants. Each request for time that comes in is relatively small but cumulatively they take all of your time away. 


Source: http://qr.ae/8B37J