Even though in my last post I tried to describe the movement towards “doing scholarship in public” that forms a background for three different levels of academic fights these days, it still seems sometimes like the “humanities is a waste of time” fight remains the most salient.
After all, if one takes that waste of time [...]
Continue reading about Cultural neuroscience to the rescue of us lost humanists?
Obviously, I suppose, my previous post about the likelihood of getting all 8 anniversary Astérix figurines in only 14 tries of Kinder Surprise eggs was related to a classic statistics problem, the Coupon Collector’s Problem. The problem assumes a uniform random distribution of coupons (I guess, in cereal boxes, or something), and then goes about [...]
Continue reading about Astérix and the coupon collector’s problem
In my last post, I described my new effort to collect enough Kinder Surprise eggs to win all eight Astérix figurines. I’ve done it. What’s more, I managed to do so having only gone through 35 eggs! That’s almost hilariously quickly, if you think about it.
I wish I had kept track of how I was [...]
Astérix turns 50 this year, as does Fererro, at least in France. The two culture industries for youths have teamed up to provide Kinder Surprises with little figurines from the Astérix series in them (among other prizes, of course).
The above was a death sentence for any sort of plans about avoiding chocolate I may have [...]
[I'm not entirely sure why I'm turning this into a post. It's essentially my final project for my Advanced GIS class. I think it's rather provocative, however, and it shows a few immediate possible further directions for analysis.]
In my earlier geospatial analysis of the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos, I decided that I was [...]
Continue reading about Nearest Neighbors and Monte Carlo Simulations with Dos Passos
Mitch McConnell, this morning on Morning Edition, in his role as new deficit hawk, explained that Obama can’t be spending like mad with his stimulus package before taking into account the fact that the (newly) anti-deficit spending GOP has their own agenda the want respected. But McConnell then made a questionable assertion while explaining why [...]
Continue reading about McConnell spin: Senate GOP represents “half the American population”?
(This is how I spent GIS Day)
I was surprised in my previous post by how young and black Louisiana was (in 2000), yet how not for Obama it went. Only 10 of 64 parishes were carried by the Democrat, though they included three of the four most populous parishes. I wondered if maybe there was [...]
[I massively updated the middle part of this post after thinking about it on the ride home]
I was pretty startled by the two maps I saw at Strange Maps over the weekend. They showed a distinct correlation between cotton production in 1860 and Obama support in 2008. Where more cotton was picked 150 years ago, [...]
