The Endeavour — The blog of John D. Cook

Methods that get used

I have a conjecture regarding statistical methods: The probability of a method being used drops by at least a factor of 2 for every parameter that has to be determined by trial-and-error. A method could have a dozen inputs, and if they’re all intuitively meaningful, it might be adopted. But if there is even one parameter that [...]

Relearning to type

I’m starting to feel some strain in my hands, so I’m going to take Vivek Haldar’s advice: Act like you do have RSI, and change your set up right now to avoid it. For one thing, I bought an ergonomic keyboard this weekend. It lets me hold my hands in a more relaxed position. When I learned to [...]

Institutional mediocrity

Here are a couple quotes I’ve run across lately. Both say that attempts to filter out the low end of human thought inevitably filter out some of the high end too. First, from Doug Gwyn: Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things. Second, [...]