In response to a fascinating article about Charles Babbage and the plantation management techniques that informed his calculating engines, Kevin Marks pointed to an earlier article about how eugenics shaped statistics that was every bit as interesting. I was familiar with some of the background to Galton, Pearson and Fisher but had not taken on board the extent to which “statistical significance” started life as a way of examining the homogeneity of human populations. Does that history negate its usefulness entirely?
Today is the International Day of Biological Diversity. As it happens, Eat This Podcast today published an episode that raises a question I have seldom seen given any serious discussion. Are rare breeds important for the conservation of genetic diversity?
Like all headline questions, the answer is probably “No”. Let me explain.
“Tool” is a euphemism, in English. This post is not about that kind of tool. It is about things we use to help us perform a job, the job, in this case, being writing on a computer. It requires a tool because almost any time a human is writing for a computer they are writing a draft that will be tweaked in one way or another by a computer before it appears on a screen.
The point about it being on a computer is that nothing else separates the presentation from the content quite so thoroughly. For example, if I want to emphasise a word by making it bold I need to know how you might be reading it. If you’re reading it in a web browser, I want the browser to receive <strong>bold</strong>, knowing that it will present it to you as bold. If I plan to make the text available as a PDF, I need to take other steps to make the text look the way I want it to.
It was "the most boring, uneventful adventure in the entire history of geocaching". But it was mine to bag. No point saying more than that.
One of the nicest things about publishing our recent paper What is Wrong with Biofortification is that it prompted several people to share results and opinions that support our conclusions. Confirmation bias aside, we have not yet had any substantive pushback. This piece was prompted by one of the responses we received.
See those beans? They are “iron-rich”. Why the “scare quotes”? Lots of reasons, some trivial, some much less so.
