I thought it was excellent, and not at all too ivory tower, although he moved through more inferential steps than in the average TED talk.

This didn't work out well at my household as supervising them took more time than it was worth.

My wireless mouse is driving me fucking nuts with it's stuttering randomly across the screen.

I'm surprised posts like this are not more commonly discussed around here.

Arguing against god(s) circa 9 years of age or so.

Wikipedia says:

Aleatoric uncertainty, aka statistical uncertainty, which is unknowns that differ each time we run the same experiment. For an example of simulating the take-off of an airplane, even if we could exactly control the wind speeds along the run way, if we let 10 planes of the same make start their trajectories would still differ due to fabrication differences. Similarly, if all we knew is that the average wind speed is the same, letting the same plane start 10 times would still yield different trajectories because we do not know the exact wind speed at every point of the runway, only its average. Aleatoric uncertainties are therefore something an experimenter cannot do anything about: they exist, and they cannot be suppressed by more accurate measurements.
Epistemic uncertainty, aka systematic uncertainty, which is due to things we could in principle know but don't in practice. This may be because we have not measured a quantity sufficiently accurately, or because our model neglects certain effects, or because particular data are deliberately hidden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_quantification

I often tried plays that looked recklessly daring, maybe even silly. But I never tried anything foolish when a game was at stake, only when we were far ahead or far behind. I did it to study how the other team reacted, filing away in my mind any observations for future use.

— Ty Cobb

That's on my list of things I didn't expect to see today.

I am one month away from the official deadline for completing my PhD thesis. It is about Natural Language Processing, more concretely about building a set of tools for morphological disambiguation, shallow parsing, named entity recognition, sentence alignment and such. The topic is a bit parochial, engineering rather than science, as much of it is just applying well-known techniques to Hungarian. Some of our tools are used by the broader language technology community, though.

I would really appreciate feedback. Send me a PM if you'd like to have a look. (You can decide whether you'd like to give feedback after you have looked into it.)

Why is Will Newsome doing this? My model of him just broke.