Politics
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The Talk I Gave on September 12
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More 25th anniversary thoughts and recollections. I was heading off to Durham, in the north of England — my first big talk now that I had started my permanent academic job. I arrived toward the end of the first day of the conference: September 11, 2001.
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25 & 60
Twenty-five years ago, I moved from San Francisco to the UK, from a fellowship at Berkeley to a permanent job at Imperial College, London. A lot has changed since then. I was 35; now I am 60. It was two weeks before 9/11; the world hasn’t seemed as open and free since. I arrived from…
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It’s been a while
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If you’re reading this, then you might realise that I haven’t posted anything substantive here since 2018, commemorating the near-end of the Planck collaboration. In fact it took us well into the covid pandemic before the last of the official Planck papers were published, and further improved analyses of our data continues, alongside the use…
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Knightian Uncertainty
[Update: I have fixed some broken links, and modified the discussion of QBism and the recent paper by Chris Fuchs— thanks to Chris himself for taking the time to read and find my mistakes!] For some reason, I’ve come across an idea called “Knightian Uncertainty” quite a bit lately. Frank Knight was an economist of…
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Electoral woes and votes
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Like everyone else in my bubble, I’ve been angrily obsessing about the outcome of the US Presidential election for the last two weeks. I’d like to say that I’ve been channelling that obsession into action, but so far I’ve mostly been reading and hoping (and being disappointed). And trying to parse all the “explanations” for…
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Atheism, naturalism, and the way things ought to be
In an occasionally thoughtful but mostly silly attempted takedown of the so-called New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and such), philosopher John Gray writes that there is an irresolvable contradiction between viewing religion naturalistically — as a human adaptation to living in the world — and condemning it as a tissue of error and illusion. -John…
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STFC and UKSA
Funding for space missions in the UK was split from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to the the UK Space Agency earlier this year. Very roughly, UKSA will fund the missions themselves all the way through to the processing of data, while STFC will fund the science that comes from analysing the data. To…
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Industrial Action?
This week is the 100th anniversary of one of the most important events in the Labor movement (at least back in the US): the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a disaster in which the garment factory’s sweatshop conditions led to the death of almost 150 workers, mostly Jewish immigrant women, locked by their bosses into their…
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Bayes in the World I: Wikileaks
I’ve come across a couple bits of popular/political culture that give me the opportunity to discuss one of my favorite topics: the uses and abuses of probability theory. The first is piece by Nate Silver of the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog, dedicated to trying to crunch the political numbers of polls and other data…