Deep thoughts and silliness

A few years ago some American scientists became Concerned. So concerned about political interference were they that formed a union. And called it the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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Over at Scienceblogs, there has been a discussion about the relationship between science (and mathematics in particular) and the arts and humanities. This was started by Chad Orzel, and continued elsewhere. John Wilkins has a fairly up to date set of links, as well as some well thought out musings. He’s also the firs to point out that C.P. Snow talked about the same issues in the first part of his 1959 Rede lecture (the whole essay is worth reading: many of his lesser-known points are still relevant today).
This got me thinking about why I, as a scientist, should know about the arts and humanities. After all, they’re on a different campus from us.

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Thomas Mailund got upset about the hoops he had to go through to get a manuscript from a company. The company, being Corporate and Evil, bought him off with a logo, which some here might appreciate:

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Yep, I’m finally back from my wanders. A week in St. Andrews, followed by a week celebrating the 100th anniversary of the t-distribution. Recall that the inventor, “Student” worked for Guinness. You can work out the rest.
Of course, I now have 13 neat ideas I want to try out, and there is lots of new work to read up on. The biggest news is that Håvard Rue thinks we don’t need to use MCMC to fit most Bayesian hierarchical models. Yep, really obscure stuff. It’s why statisticians are worth having around: we keep you from needing to know about Gaussian Markov Random Fields.

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…in case you were wondering what the smell was.

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Oh poor me. I’m going to a couple of meetings over the next couple of weeks (the ISEC in St. Andrews followed by the IBC, to celebrate the invention of the t-distribution). Of course, I can’t take The Beast with me, so and can’t leave him here on his own, so I’ve sent him off to the countryside for a holiday.

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This is all very surprising – nobody from nature network seems to be an elitist bastard.
They even have a special badge for Henry:

My excuse for not joining in is I’m just a pleb with pretensions. The Beast, on the other hand…

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David Basanta pointed out a provocative article in Wired, in which the author claimed that we won’t need to think about it any more, we can just throw it into a big computer along with an SVM¹ or a NN². His reasoning is that we are getting so much data that any patterns in the data will leap out at us, if we just prod it in the right way. And of course the computer scientists have all the right prods. This will then totally change the way science is done – we won’t have to worry about thinking up hypotheses and experiments to test them, we just mine the computer for results; in a manner reminiscent of The Library of Babel. Or perhaps it is closer to Dave Langford’s The Net of Babel.

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Just a few things, as it’s Friday and I have The Beast sat on me.

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Yesterday I found a long tube in my departmental pigeonhole. This was something of a surprise. Luckily it all became clear.
The tube contained a poster, and this certificate:

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