Oh, damn. I’ve been wondering what that crying was I’ve been hearing down the intertubes these last couple of months. It was my poor Blog Monster complaining that it needed feeding with posts.
A six spot burnet, Zygaena filipendula, last week. Well, I think it is.
Just by luck, an email was sent around the UK statisticians about the Met. Office’s new game. They want to find out how best to present uncertainty to the general public (the ones who aren’t banned from the web for instigating non-riots, anyway) and have come up with this game, where you can help sell virtual ice creams by interpreting the weather report. When you play the game, you get the information presented in one of a couple of ways, so they’re testing how well people do at understanding these. And you can enter a draw to win a met. office t-shirt! Ooooo!
By the way, the photo doesn’t have anything to do with the weather game, I just like it.
Oh, FFS. Start blogging again, and the first comment I get is spam.
And, for some reason, I can’t even find it in the system to delete it. Bum.
Oh good, now it’s gone. I’m just left with my own spam.
Hey Bob- oh the MET game sounds fun and the t-shirts even better!!
Sorry about the spam, i removed it for you! Looking forward to your next post!
Spooky – Just as I write my first blog entry for months I discover that Bob has suffered the same pangs of guilt. However the concept of a virtual ice cream reminded me of the famous monkey and sailors coconut problem that can be solved using the concept of the "negative coconut":http://www.experimentgarden.com/2009/07/monkey-and-coconuts.html, allegedly proposed by Dirac (who also proposed the anti (or negative) electron, the positron, which seemed as perverse as negative coconuts too). Or for a better mathematical description and where Dirac said he got the idea see "this":http://rutherglen.science.mq.edu.au/math106s206/ex/coconut.pdf.
Laura – thanks for sorting out the spam. My next post was going to be about ABC and indirect inference. But I think I might change plans and write about something more interesting.
Brian – I hadn’t heard about the negative coconuts – that’s too good. If only we could have negative rainfall.
I’m not sure.
But how not sure are you, Mike?
Frequentist = Uncertain.
Bayesian = I used to be uncertain, but that might change.
The poor frequentists have to be a thousand times uncertain before they know how uncertain they are.