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• Commented on The Rhesus Chart: Chapter One
  You are of course correct to say that you cannot confirm a null hypothesis, strictly speaking, but frequentist testing can be used to perform what amounts to the same thing - confirming that two drugs are substantially equivalent - see...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  Colleagues are reminded "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". In particular, exorcism of Members of Parliament must never be attempted without written authorization from at least two officers of level D.S.S. or above. The attention...
• Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
  Background - my ancestors seem to have been skilled workers whose natural allegiance would have been to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata. I was brought up in N. Ireland by parents who expected me to go to university in Scotland and then get a...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  OGH points out in comment 239 and in the next blog entry that there is something of a zero-sum game among publishers and authors for reader's eyeballs. This is consistent with books being partially fungible to me as a reader....
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  Keeping it open as an option, and tracking the costs of that option, sounds like a really good idea. Looking at the arguments over the price of academic textbooks, it would appear that publishers are capable of loading extra costs...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  I don't think you can escape from politics here. I think the idea of the hero is an extreme of the halo effect, which is one example of people over-simplifying a situation. If you could write (and sell) fiction which...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  Just-In-Time compilers can be interpreted as self-modifying code. That includes not only the Java VM, but emulators like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU. Satellite simulation for mission rehearsal includes both the requirement to simulate the satellite cpu and support chips and a performance requirement...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  Classic Nazi fascism and variants are well described in "The Anatomy of Fascism" by Paxton. It was not optimal even in its native environment because, as an authoritarian state, the Party wished to control everything, and gave power to party...
• Commented on Generation Z
  The demise of the student grant was pretty much forced on the government by the decision to expand the proportion of the population receiving university education by something close to an order of magnitude. Receiving a degree - any degree...
• Commented on A nation of slaves
  Religious believers might be an exception to slowing population growth. As well as those like the quiverfull you have mentioned in your books there may be a general trend in less extreme believers: see http://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/reproductive-vs.-cooperative-theories-in-the-evolutionary-studies-of-religi. A government dispensing welfare by...
• Commented on A nation of slaves
  I suspect that there are a lot of things around, like the Bolsa Familia, which in retrospect will be seen to be pointers towards the eventual solution, or at least ways of claiming that an apparently large change of policy...
• Commented on Commercial announcement
  The English class system got right what the CPSU got wrong - it never let itself get too big, ruthlessly cutting younger sons loose to genteel poverty or high-stakes adventuring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpsu informs us that the CPSU ballooned to 10% of...
• Commented on Monarchy versus the Panopticon
  I believe that every prospective parent capable of understanding "Regression toward the mean" should have it explained to them, in case their children are not capable of understanding it. I hadn't tied this up with over-production of elites before, but...
• Commented on Monarchy versus the Panopticon
  I understand from my Father's stories how the stereotype of the upper class twit might have got started. I believe that an alternative reality in which the aristocracy were blamed for everything wrong with this country and for attempting to...
• Commented on Monarchy versus the Panopticon
  1) I picked economics with a view to future trouble. Prince Charles has caused a lot of fuss by promoting his viewpoints on architecture and various new age sillinesses, subjects far less controversial than economics. Also, the heir to the...
• Commented on Monarchy versus the Panopticon
  This child need not manage their own social media pages or publicity, or work out what they think about the media on their own. In fact, those with advanced ideas about the perfectibility of humanity via nurture might wish to...