Collaborate Disseminate
Computers are difficult enough to reason about when there’s just a single thread doing one task. There are dozens of cores in today’s modern processor world, and your program might …read more Continue reading Reflecting on a Queueing Prism Leads To Unexpected Results
Large-scale existential threats exist everywhere and can annihilate us with only trivial effort. Should we all throw everything we can at them? Continue reading How to Model Risk in an Apex Predator Cyber-World
Today is March 14th, or Pi Day because 3.14 is March 14th rendered in month.day date format. A very slightly better way to celebrate the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is July 22nd, or 22/7 written in day/month order, a fractional approximation of pi that’s been used for thousands of years and is a better fit than 3.14. Celebrating Pi Day on July 22nd also has the advantage of eschewing middle-endian date formatting.
But Pi Day is completely wrong. We should be celebrating Tau Day, to celebrate the ratio of the circumference to the radius instead of …read more
Continue reading Archimedes Would Have Known Better If He Could Count To A Million
In the early 20th century, Guinness breweries in Dublin had a policy of hiring the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to improve their industrial processes. At the time, it was considered a trade secret that they were using statistical methods to improve their process and product.
One problem they were having was that the z-test (a commonly used test at the time) required large sample sizes, and sufficient data was often unavailable. By studying the properties of small sample sizes, William Sealy Gosset developed a statistical test that required fewer samples to produce a reasonable result. As the …read more
Continue reading Statistics and Hacking: An Introduction to Hypothesis Testing
In the early 20th century, Guinness breweries in Dublin had a policy of hiring the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to improve their industrial processes. At the time, it was considered a trade secret that they were using statistical methods to improve their process and product.
One problem they were having was that the z-test (a commonly used test at the time) required large sample sizes, and sufficient data was often unavailable. By studying the properties of small sample sizes, William Sealy Gosset developed a statistical test that required fewer samples to produce a reasonable result. As the …read more
Continue reading Statistics and Hacking: An Introduction to Hypothesis Testing