IMS_Blog

Via New Scientist Feedback (soon to get a new name, incidently) the Intelligent Design Sort. Genius! I wonder if things may have been placed in this obviously divine order by his noodly appendages?

Most of David’s stuff’s good actually; his is one of my favourite esoteric programming languages, Ook (OK, it’s basically BrainFuck, but it’s for orang-utans—what more do you want!). And I, er, regularly read Irregular Webcomic.

While I’m on the subject, which I almost was, any layman (and not so layman come to that) about to be made to deal with statistics in an important way should be made to watch Peter Donnelly’s TED talk which politely shows that you’ll probably get it wrong and carries a wonderfully clear example of the prosecutor’s fallacy (which has a direct bearing on the usefulness of DNA databases, biometric testing and other surveillance society techniques by the way).