Nov 6, 2015
Decision and Relative Risk
Cracked has a bit listicle on things Hollywood thinks are more dangerous than they are and the list starts with scorpions, which are mostly harmless. It gets into the relative risk, a…
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Archive page 45 of 73
Nov 5, 2015
Mobile Farmers Markets for Food Deserts
As part of my public finance course course for public administrators, we have been looking at the problem of food deserts in Baltimore. There was an interesting story on Marketplace on Tuesday…
Nov 2, 2015
My Candidacy for UMUC's Academic Advisory Board
I nominated myself, this evening, for the new Academic Advisory Board at the University of Maryland University College. See my statement, here: I am James Howard and I am running for UMUC's…
Oct 30, 2015
Hardware and Software
Slashdot has a link to a story on how it has become substantially more difficult to write software and how this is discouraging children from taking on programming. Even at the "Hello…
Oct 28, 2015
Richard Henry Lee was not Dr. Strangelove
Following last week's discussion of John Adams and 1776 , we made the kids listen to the soundtrack on a car trip over weekend. Also, we used the 1997 revival with Brent…
Oct 27, 2015
Probability at Scale and KIC 8462852
In all of the discussion around KIC 8462852, there's a bit of a statistically-flawed argument. Obviously, as I noted last week, a natural origin explanation is deemed far more likely than an…
Oct 26, 2015
Det är dags att fira
I had an unusually long train ride this evening, and I finished the last eleven lessons in the Swedish tree on Duolingo. Regular readers may recall I completed the Danish tree about…
Oct 25, 2015
Insuring against disaster
Howard Kunreuther of the Wharton School has a new whitepaper on insuring against natural disaster risk. One of the things he points out, though it's not new, is the how risk is…
Oct 21, 2015
I need matching ties
There's an image macro from Back to the Future Part II showing Griff's gang in the future. There's an odd helmet, some creepy face tattoos, and what looks like a necklace made…
Oct 20, 2015
One useless man posts on Facebook, two respond to it, and three or more become a flamewar
Facebook arguments are a great source of blogging material, so here we go. This weekend, someone posted the picture above showing a quote attributed to John Adams: In my many years I…
Oct 18, 2015
Interstate Love Song...of Confusion
Going northbound on U.S. Route 29, there are two three exits for Interstate 70. The first right-exit goes to eastbound I-70. The second right-exit goes through a cloverleaf to westbound I-70. Immediately…