Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
In the late 90’s I started (a good decade for starts) a daily quotation server project at www.quoteserver.ca. The domain is now defunct—some pages are partially viewable at the Way Back Machine.
Below is the list of quotes I had collected by the end of the life of the project. Most are about love—duh—and a few are jolly jests from funny trenches. You know, that place where mustard gas makes your eyes water.
The quotes weren’t scraped from quote archives—each is meaningful and hand-picked.
And now for full list of 1,700+ other things worth reading. Such as everything Dorothy Parker has written and ... yes, even the Pinky and Brain quotes, which are a special kind of special.
Quote collections about love, heart, desire, life, death, god, mind, science.
Feeling lucky? Read 10 random quotes. Well, will you, punk?
Celebrate `\pi` Day (March 14th) and finally see the digits through the forest.
This year is full of botanical whimsy. A Lindenmayer system forest – deterministic but always changing. Feel free to stop and pick the flowers from the ground.
And things can get crazy in the forest.
Check out art from previous years: 2013 `\pi` Day and 2014 `\pi` Day, 2015 `\pi` Day, 2016 `\pi` Day, 2017 `\pi` Day, 2018 `\pi` Day and 2019 `\pi` Day.
All that glitters is not gold. âW. Shakespeare
The sensitivity and specificity of a test do not necessarily correspond to its error rate. This becomes critically important when testing for a rare condition — a test with 99% sensitivity and specificity has an even chance of being wrong when the condition prevalence is 1%.
We discuss the positive predictive value (PPV) and how practices such as screen can increase it.
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2021) Points of significance: Testing for rare conditions. Nature Methods 18
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! âD. Adams
A popular notion about experiments is that it's good to keep variability in subjects low to limit the influence of confounding factors. This is called standardization.
Unfortunately, although standardization increases power, it can induce unrealistically low variability and lead to results that do not generalize to the population of interest. And, in fact, may be irreproducible.
Not paying attention to these details and thinking (or hoping) that standardization is always good is the "standardization fallacy". In this column, we look at how standardization can be balanced with heterogenization to avoid this thorny issue.
Voelkl, B., Würbel, H., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2021) Points of significance: Standardization fallacy. Nature Methods 18:5–6.
Clear, concise, legible and compelling.
Making a scientific graphical abstract? Refer to my practical design guidelines and redesign examples to improve organization, design and clarity of your graphical abstracts.
An in-depth look at my process of reacting to a bad figure — how I design a poster and tell data stories.