Reuben

Author's details

Name: Reuben Gann
Date registered: 11/30/-0001

Latest posts

  1. An illuminating trip to the Microsoft store — 12/29/2013
  2. Netflix streaming continues to founder as dozens of prominent movies are taken down — 12/28/2013
  3. Saints Row IV is the most fun I've had playing a game — 11/19/2013
  4. Statisticians need to see how experimental science really works, then shut up about it — 11/13/2013
  5. Surface Pro 2: first impressions — 10/24/2013

Author's posts listings

Oct 11 2012

Thermo for Normals (part 24): Some closing thoughts on the 3 laws

Categories:

Science, Thermo for Normals

by

At last we know all 3 laws of thermodynamics: Internal energy of a system increases when heat is added to it and decreases when it does work (). No cyclic process can turn heat entirely into work. Absolute zero cannot be attained. The first two of these statements encompass all of what we think of …

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Oct 10 2012

Strange things in conditional probability

Categories:

Math

by

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A test for cancer is positive 99% of the time that a patient actually has cancer, and is negative 95% of the time a patient does not have cancer (suppose only 1/1000 in the population has this type of cancer). Question: if a patient's test comes up positive, what is the probability he has cancer? …

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1 comment

Oct 05 2012

Moderate Romney a genuine threat to Obama

Categories:

Politics

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Mitt Romney's campaign, in the days leading up to Wednesday, said that he was ready with a number of "zingers". This feint made it seem like "47%" hating, plutocrat Thurston Howell Romney was going to come out swinging and defend his campaign and his running mate's budget. He didn't. He changed the fundamental message of …

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Oct 05 2012

Understanding polls (part 1)

Categories:

Politics, Science

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A hypothetical population distribution of voting totals.

Let's say that we want to know how many people are going to vote for Obama and how many for Romney. The population of all voting people has a certain distribution (a number who vote for one, another number who vote for the other). For the sake of argument let's say it looks like this: …

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Oct 03 2012

Three hypotheses as to why Obama sucked tonight

Categories:

Politics

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1. The president is rusty or worn out. As Jake Tapper tells it (no link), this is the version of Obama from the summer of 2007, where the listless senator lazily moved from chore to rhetorical chore at the stump. He didn't prepare enough, didn't expect much from his opponent, and didn't think he needed …

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