There was nothing interesting about Gary, or rather an index of his blankness was that the most interesting thing about him was that he was lactose intolerant.

Pearson wrote perhaps the most silly influential book of philosophy ever published, The Grammar of Science (1911), in which he maintained, repeatedly and without any sense of incongruity, that there is no material world, the entire world is nothing but subjective sensation, and sensation is the production of brains.

Inanimate objects tend, on the whole, to be things that children cannot alter, or that they can alter reliably, or if they cannot be altered reliably, that do not alter themselves.  Animate objects tend to be unreliably altered and to alter themselves.

Suppose that an odd new law is enforced: a random device decides who will and who will not smoke.

even more discoveries

From an “autobiography” I wrote at age 8, describing one of the “games” I played with my best friend at the time:

The Drip Drop was the name we gave one of those toys with little plastic edges and colored liquids that drop and slide down the ledges to receivers which pick up the liquid.  Once it is all down you must turn it over and it will start dropping from the receiver.  This game was played by saying (when we had the Drip Drop with us) something wrong.  Like when we were having lunch we might say “we are not having lunch.”  We pretended that the Computer in Maine said that.  The Computer in Maine is the enemy of the Drip Drop.

Everyone who takes basic statistics has it drilled into them that “correlation is not causation.” (When I took psych. 1, the professor said he hoped that, if he were to come to us on our death-beds and prompt us with “Correlation is,” we would all respond “not causation.”) This is a problem, because one can infer correlation from data, and would like to be able to make inferences about causation. There are typically two ways out of this. One is to perform an experiment, preferably a randomized double-blind experiment, to eliminate accidental sources of correlation, common causes, etc. That’s nice when you can do it, but impossible with supernovae, and not even easy with people. The other out is to look for correlations, say that of course they don’t equal causations, and then act as if they did anyway. The technical names for this latter course of action are “linear regression” and “analysis of variance,” and they form the core of applied quantitative social science, e.g., The Bell Curve.

Graphical models are, in part, a way of escaping from this impasse.

(Cosma Shalizi’s notebook on Graphical Causal Models)

Judged by his behavior, James’ world was pretty well described by a language with just two predicates: “brown-spot-in-water” and “fast-large-motion-nearby.”

Other factors that could contribute to a burp’s attractiveness are: Method of and reaction to burping; age, gender and appearance of the person burping.

The stEin universe was the world we resided in during the 1990s.

I think this was the area where he lost everyone with a pun about Cuban socialism being social cubism.