NIMBYs and economic theories: Sorry / Not Sorry
This post is not by Andrew. This post is by Phil. A few days ago I posted What’s the deal with the YIMBYs? In the rest of this post, I assume you have read that one. I plan to post a follow-up in a...
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An obvious fact about constrained systems.
This post is not by Andrew. This post is by Phil. This post is prompted by Andrew’s recent post about the book “Everything is obvious once you know the answer,” together with a recent discussion I’ve...
View ArticleLessons learned in Hell
This post is by Phil. It is not by Andrew. I’m halfway through my third year as a consultant, after 25 years at a government research lab, and I just had a miserable five weeks finishing a project. The...
View ArticleExercise and weight loss: long-term follow-up
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. Waaaay back in 2010, I wrote a blog entry entitled “Exercise and Weight Loss.” I had added high-intensity interval training back into my exercise regime, and had...
View ArticleHow dumb do you have to be…
I (Phil) just read an article about Apple. Here’s the last sentence: “Apple has beaten earnings expectations in every quarter but one since March 2013.” [Note added a week later: on July 31 Apple...
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Why, oh why, do so many people embrace the Pacific Garbage Cleanup nonsense?...
This post is by Phil, not Andrew. Over the couple of months I have seen quite a few people celebrating the long-awaited launch of a big device that will remove plastic garbage from the Pacific ocean. I...
View ArticleBook Review: Good to Go, by Christie Aschwanden
This is a book review. It is by Phil Price. It is not by Andrew. The book is Good To Go: What the athlete in all of us can learn from the strange science of recovery. By Christie Aschwanden, published...
View Article“There is no way to prove that [an extreme weather event] either was, or was...
This post is by Phil, not Andrew. It’s hurricane season, which means it’s time to see the routine disclaimer that no single weather event can be attributed to global warming. There’s a sense in which...
View ArticleLet’s try this again: It is nonsense to say that we don’t know whether a...
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. If you write something and a substantial number of well-intentioned readers misses your point, the problem is yours. Too many people misunderstood what I was...
View ArticleThe Map Is Not The Territory
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. My wife and I are building a new house, or, rather, paying trained professionals to build one for us. We are trying to make the house as environmentally benign...
View ArticleThe best is the enemy of the good. It is also the enemy of the not so good.
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. The Ocean Cleanup Project’s device to clean up plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is back in the news because it is back at work and is successfully...
View ArticleThe devil’s in the details…and also in the broad strokes. Is this study...
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. Something caught my eye in a recent MIT Technology Review: an article in Nature Communications entitled ‘The greenhouse gas impacts of converting food production...
View ArticleWhen did “by” become “after”?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. I just did a Google News search for “injured after”, and these are some of the headlines that came up: 16-year-old bicyclist seriously injured after being hit by...
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Amazing coincidence! What are the odds?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew Several days ago I wore my cheapo Belarussian one-hand watch. This watch only has an hour hand, but the hand stretches all the way out to the edge of the watch,...
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Considerate Swedes only die during the week.
Reported Coronavirus deaths in Sweden, by date. This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. A lot of people are paying attention to Sweden, to see how their non-restrictive coronavirus policies play out....
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Coronavirus in Sweden, what’s the story?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. I’m going to say right up front that I’m not going to give sources for everything I say here, or indeed for most of it. If you want to know where I get...
View ArticleCoronavirus Quickies
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. There a couple of things that some people who comment here already know, but some do not, leading to lots of discussion in the comments that keeps rehashing...
View ArticleCoronavirus Grab Bag: deaths vs qalys, safety vs safety theater, ‘all in this...
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. This blog’s readership has a very nice wind-em-up-and-watch-them-go quality that I genuinely appreciate: a thought-provoking topic provokes some actual thoughts....
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Years of Life Lost due to coronavirus
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. A few days ago I posted some thoughts about the coronavirus response, one of which was that I wanted to see ‘years of life lost’ in addition to (or even instead...
View ArticleAdvice for a yoga studio that wants to reopen?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. My 79-year-old mom likes to go to yoga classes, although of course she has not done so in months. Her favorite yoga place is cautiously reopening — they’ve had a...
View ArticleCoronavirus corrections, data sources, and issues.
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. I’ve got a backlog of COVID-related stuff I’ve been meaning to post. I had intended to do a separate post about each of these, complete with citations and...
View ArticleDecision-making under uncertainty: heuristics vs models
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. Sometimes it’s worth creating a complicated statistical model that can help you make a decision; other times it isn’t. As computer power has improved and...
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Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. A commenter on an earlier post quoted Terence Kealey, who said this in an interview in Scientific American in 2003: “But the really fascinating example is the...
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All maps of parameter estimates are (still) misleading
I was looking at this map of coronavirus cases, pondering the large swaths with seemingly no cases. I moused over a few of the gray areas. The shading is not based on counties, as I assumed, but on...
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Follow-up on yesterday’s posts: some maps are less misleading than others.
Yesterday I complained about the New York Times coronavirus maps showing sparsely-populated areas as having a case rate very close to zero, no matter what the actual rate is. Today the Times has a...
View ArticleDon’t Hate Undecided Voters
This post is by Clay Campaigne, not Andrew. (It says ‘posted by Phil’, and that’s technically true, but I’m just a conduit for Clay here). This is copied from Clay’s blog, which may have comments of...
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I like this way of mapping electoral college votes
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. I like maps — everybody likes maps; who doesn’t like maps? — but any map involves compromises. For mapping electoral votes, one thing you sometimes see is to...
View ArticleLiterally a textbook problem: if you get a positive COVID test, how likely is...
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. This will be obvious to most readers of this blog, who have seen this before and probably thought about it within the past few months, but the blog gets lots of...
View ArticleOne more cartoon like this, and this blog will be obsolete.
This post is by Phil. This SMBC cartoon seems to wrap up about half of the content of this blog. Of course I’m exaggerating. There will still be room for book reviews and cat photos.
View ArticleCOVID and Vitamin D…and some other things too.
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. Way back in November I started writing a post about my Vitamin D experience. My doctor says I need more, in spite of the fact that I spend lots of time outdoors...
View ArticleThe Pandemic: how bad is it really?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. Andrew’s recent post about questionable death rate statistics about the pandemic has reminded me that I have not yet posted about a paper Troy Quast sent me....
View ArticleIf a value is “less than 10%”, you can bet it’s not 0.1%. Usually.
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. Many years ago I saw an ad for a running shoe (maybe it was Reebok?) that said something like “At the New York Marathon, three of the five fastest runners were...
View ArticleWhat is a “woman”?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. As we approach the Olympic Games, this seems like a good time to think about the rules for deciding whether a person is a “woman” when it comes to athletic...
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How much faster is the Tokyo track?
Speed (meters per second) in Olympic and World Championship finals in track sprinting. This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. The guy whose company made the track for the Tokyo Olympic stadium says...
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Tokyo Track revisited: no, I don’t think the track surface is “1-2% faster”
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. A few weeks ago I posted about the claim — by the company that made the running track for the Tokyo Olympics — that the bounciness of the track makes it “1-2%...
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Wanna bet? A COVID-19 example.
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. Andrew wrote a post back on September 2 that plugged a piece by Jon Zelner, Nina Masters, Ramya Naraharisetti, Sanyu Mojola, and Merlin Chowkwanyun about...
View ArticleThe COVID wager: results are in
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. Frequent readers of this blog will already know about the wager between me and a commenter called Anoneuoid. Would the number of new COVID cases in the U.S. in...
View ArticleWhy are goods stacking up at U.S. ports?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. I keep seeing articles that say U.S. ports are all backed up, hundreds of ships can’t even offload because there’s no place to put their cargo, etc. And then the...
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Objectively worse, but practically better: an example from the World Chess...
A position from Game 2 of the 2021 World Chess Championship match. White has just played e4. This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. The World Chess Championship is going on right now. There have been...
View ArticleIs “choosing your favorite” an optimization problem?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. A week or so ago, a post involving an economic topic had a comment thread about what is involved in choosing a “favorite” (or a “preferred choice” or “the...
View ArticleAn Easy Layup for Stan
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. The tldr version of this is: I had a statistical problem that ended up calling for a Bayesian hierarchical model. I decided to implement it in Stan. Even though...
View ArticleHigh-intensity exercise, some new news
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. Several months I noticed something interesting (to me!) about my heart rate, and I thought about blogging about it…but I didn’t feel like it would be...
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The Course of the Pandemic: What’s the story with Excess Deaths?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. A commenter who goes by “Anoneuoid” has pointed out that ‘excess deaths’ in the U.S. have been about as high in the past year as they were in the year before...
View ArticleIs Martha (Smith) still with us?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that I haven’t seen a comment by Martha (Smith) in quite a while…several months, possibly many months? She’s a long-time...
View ArticlePraising with Faint Damnation
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew.A friend and I were discussing a route for a bike ride. I was pretty tired and unmotivated so I said sure but let’s do a really easy ride. I suggested taking Bay...
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Time Series Forecasting: futile but necessary. An example using electricity...
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew.I have a client company that owns refrigerated warehouses around the world. A refrigerated warehouse is a Costco-sized building that is kept very cold; 0 F is a...
View ArticleThe cleantech job market: Every modeler is supposed to be a great Python...
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew.I’ve had a run of luck ever since I left my staff scientist position at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to become a freelance consultant doing statistical modeling...
View ArticleChatGPT4 writes Stan code so I don’t have to.
Several months ago I (Phil Price) wrote a Stan model to do some time series forecasting. It took me almost a full day to get it running and debugged. Today I decided to test ChatGPT4, by seeing if it...
View ArticleA client tried to stiff me for $5000. I got my money, but should I do something?
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew.A few months ago I finished a small consulting contract — it would have been less than three weeks, if I worked on it full time — and I find it has given me some...
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