Search results for: “bayes”
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With yesterday’s article on “Faith” (vs Science) in the Guardian, and today’s London debate between bioligist Lewis Wolpert and the pseudorational William Lane Craig (previewed on the BBC’s Today show this morning), the UK seems to be the hotbed of tension between science and religion. I’ll leave it to the experts for a fuller exposition,…
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The work that I’ve been doing with my student is featured on the cover of this week’s New Scientist. Unfortunately, a subscription is necessary to read the full article online, but if you do manage to find it on the web or the newsstand, you’ll find a much better explanation of the physics than I…
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I know that nobody cares about the peregrinations of astrophysicists but there’s not much else to blog about when you’re on the road. So a quick explanation of my absence from the blogosphere: Last week, I was in Taipei for the CoSPA meeting (at which website you can find a copy of my talk on…
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Author and cosmologist Paul Davies has got a new book out, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? Like other recent books, it touches on the Anthropic Principle, the idea that we can learn something deep about the universe from the simple observation that we — sentient, water- and carbon-based life…
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Last night I went to hear Alejandro Escovedo at St James Church in London. As an atheist/Jew, I’ve never really gotten used to churches (and this really is a church, not a performance space), can’t help but want to be respectful of the sanctity of the space. Escovedo brought along his string quintet, and the…
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In a bid to combine numeracy with sports coverage, The Observer presents the Poisson distribution as a headline on its front page today. Supposedly, it has something to do with predicting the number of goals a team will score in the World Cup. The Poisson distribution is P(n) = λn e-λ/n! This gives the probability,…
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In his most recent post, Cosmic Variance’s Mark Trodden talks about one of the presentations we both saw at last week’s meeting in Ishcia, where he explains one of the hot new techniques for analyzing cosmological data, the (so-called) Bayesian Evidence. Let’s unpack this term. First, “Bayesian”, named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes. The question…