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Basu’s Bears (Fat Bear Week and survey calibration)
It is my favorite holiday, Fat Bear Week: Fat Bear Week – an annual celebration of success. All bears are winners but only one true champion will emerge. Held over the course of seven days and...
View ArticleWhy art is more forgiving than game design
The full interview is here. This is the relevant part: I’ve also been working with a friend on a multiplayer game called Buy That Guy that you play with a map and cards. Each player represents an...
View ArticleBenefit of Stanford: Are there connections between unethical behavior in...
In his article, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali,” George Orwell uses the example of the famous Surrealist painter to demonstrate that a person can be both a great artist and a terrible...
View ArticleKamala Harris gets coveted xkcd endorsement.
Here. No surprise, I guess, given that xkcd has in previous years given shoutouts to climate science and the covid vaccine (also here). I guess that most cartoonists are left of center, politically. On...
View ArticleWho wrote the music for In My Life? Three Bayesian analyses
A Beatles fan pointed me to this news item from a few years ago, “A Songwriting Mystery Solved: Math Proves John Lennon Wrote ‘In My Life.'” This surprised me, because in his memoir, Many Years from...
View ArticleListen to those residuals
This is Jessica. Speaking of data sonification (or sensification), Hyeok, Yea Seul Kim, and I write: Data sonification-mapping data variables to auditory variables, such as pitch or volume-is used for...
View ArticleGod is in every leaf of every tree—comic book movies edition.
Mark Evanier writes: Martin Scorsese has directed some of the best movies ever made and most of them convey some powerful message with skill and depth. So it’s odd that when he complains about “comic...
View ArticleArtificial intelligence and aesthetic judgment
This is Jessica. In a new essay reflecting on how we get tempted to aestheticize generative AI, Ari Holtzman, Andrew, and I write: Generative AIs are objects that produce creative outputs in the style...
View ArticleRecent book reviews
Colorado Train, by Inker: Grim. Stephen King’s The Body minus the nostalgia. Drawings and story complemented each other. Les Insulaires, by Garnier: First novel I’ve ever read in a foreign language. It...
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Tile wars! The hat vs. South America.
Yesterday we wrote about Smith et al.’s amazing set of 1.5 tiles that cover the plane aperiodically: And this reminds me of Munroe’s approximate map of the world’s land masses using a single tile:...
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“The hat”: A single shape that can tile the plane aperiodically but not...
Z in comments points to a new discovery by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, who write: An aperiodic monotile . . . is a shape that tiles the plane, but never...
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Our Bayesian predictions for the Oscars . . . using Stan!
Ahhhh, just kidding. Didn’t really do it. We did see Tar and The Fabelmans and liked them both. Actually liked The Fablemans better, so that would be my vote. Yeah, yeah, laugh at me all you want....
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“Several artists have torn, burned, ripped and cut their artwork over the...
I’m tinguely all over from having received this exclusive 5D invitation, and I just have to share it with all of you! It’s a combination of art museum and shredder that’s eerily reminiscent of the...
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Tom Lehrer puts himself in the public domain—and here, for a limited time,...
Paul Alper points to this site and writes: Most of the material is familiar but some are far more obscure. Lehrer will be 95 on April 9, 2023. And, draw whatever conclusions you feel like, his...
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The more I thought about them, the less they seemed to be negative things,...
This is Jessica. My sabbatical year, which most recently had me in Berkeley CA, is coming to an end. For the second time since August I was passing through Iowa. Here it is on the way out to...
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View ArticleOK, I know you were all waiting for this one: My review of the 1995 album,...
It all started last month when I was talking with my social media consultant about planning our next Greatest Seminar Speaker competition. We were going through a few possible categories—I’m actually...
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Some things, like cubes, tetrahedrons, and Venn diagrams, seem so simple and...
I know I’ve read somewhere about the challenge of Venn diagrams with 4 or more circles, but I can’t remember the place. It seems like a natural for John Cook but I couldn’t find it on his blog, so...
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What rule did Louis Menand use to select what went into book on U.S. “cold...
I’m a big fan of Louis Menand (see also here), so when his new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, came out, I immediately bought and read it. It had lots of interesting stories and...
View ArticleMy Das Boot story
My dad and I saw it when it came out. When it ended I said, That was intense. My dad replied, At least it had a happy ending. And he meant it!
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