February 2021 – microblog

To slightly misappropriate an excellent phrase from politics here in the UK, McConnell’s appalling, unsurprising and self-serving near-simultaneous acquittal and condemnation of Trump is the purest example of cakeism — and it will probably work.

RIP Arianna Rosenbluth, the programmer of the first implementation of the Metropolis algorithm, the forerunner to and basis of now-ubquitous Monte-Carlo simulation algorithms (a history the details of which I didn’t know). H/T Andrew Gelman @statmodeling.

Hey, parents: I was surprised that “er”, “ar”, “or”, &c are so-called digraphs here in the UK. With my American accent, those seem like they ought to be two separate sounds. Here, there isn’t an explicit “r” sound at the end. Or have I been speaking wrong forever?