The latest LHC webcam images show it’s a success.

Continue reading →

All this week I am at a workshop in a wet, flooded York. In a fit of enthusiasm I decided to blog the discussions and work, to give the outside world an idea about what we are actually doing.

Continue reading →

Continue reading →

This is just a quick update before I spend the day wandering the streets of London trying not to think of Ralf McTell. I’m alive, and so are those bloggers I’ve bumped into over the last couple of days. Some have even been having a good time.

Continue reading →

You know how it is, you read someone’s writings on the web, a few blog posts and comments, and then when you meet them in the flesh, they are totally different from how you imagine them. Well, meeting Prof. Steve Steve was exactly like that. I have read and admired his work, exposing the vacuousness of creationists, and supplying us with entertaining descriptions of the different parts of the world he has visited. But he is actually very different to the persona he portrays. In reality, he possesses all the decorum of a student in a room full of free food: Prof. Steve has been indulging in licentious behaviour. Not just like getting, but ending up laid nose first on the table. Or dragging innocent Grrlscientists into the toilets of distinguished societies, just so he can show off how high he can pee. To be honest, it’s a good job he’s a panda, otherwise we might have spent half our time looking for him in the red light district.

Continue reading →

Viktor Poor has written some strips specially for the science blogging conference. He has p-printed them ahead of the online publication. So, by the tradition of the internets, I had to scoop his online publication…

Continue reading →

This from The Guardian:

2,865 bikes recovered from world’s most prolific cycle thief

They found drugs at his house. I guess he was peddling them as well.

I was remiss in not posting about this last week, so, only a week late, I post now that the winners of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest were announced, with little fanfare and even less financial reward for the efforts of those writers who felt able to put pen to paper, finger to keyboard, and apply their minds to tortuous, lengthy, prose of only a single sentence, running for word after word, in a … oh sod it, you get the idea.

Continue reading →

OK, technology is getting silly. I’m sat in a bar on a ferry in the middle of the Gulf of Finland, between Tallinn and Helsinki, and I can get a wireless signal.

Continue reading →

Over the last week or so I have been asked a couple of statistical questions where the root cause of the problems has been the unthinking application of p-values. In both cases, the solution was to use confidence intervals instead; i.e. to look at the size of the effect, not whether it was different from zero. I decided it was time to take the battle to the host of p-values, armed only with a t-test. It is enough.
What is so bad about p-values? Let’s start with a question: what does a p-value tell you?

Continue reading →