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Humans make carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is (edit: sometimes claimed to be) bad for cognition. But plants turn carbon dioxide back into oxygen. And plants are the one true home decoration strategy. So maybe if you get a lot of plants, you can you can keep carbon dioxide in check...
Here's a conjecture: If you put any significant amount of text on the internet under different names, those identities can be linked using only the text itself. This is possible (I conject) because of the statistical "fingerprint" you leave in everything you write. Imagine a website where you can paste...
For a while there, many people thought vitamin D was magical—that it could improve bones, the heart, infections, cancer, heart disease, longevity, even mental health. But among people I respect, opinion is now overwhelmingly that taking vitamin D does nothing unless you're severely deficient. The central argument is that while...
1. > It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle...
They say you’re supposed to choose your prior in advance. That’s why it’s called a “prior”. First, you’re supposed to say say how plausible different things are, and then you update your beliefs based on what you see in the world. For example, currently you are—I assume—trying to decide if...
In 1963, Mosteller and Wallace published Inference in an Authorship Problem, which used Bayesian statistics to try to infer who wrote some of the disputed Federalist Papers. (Answer: Madison) Anyway, at the end they have a list of "Remarks on Bayesian studies" which is astonishing to read 62 years later:...