Julien pointed out to me that the ‘Og was #2 in this list of “40 fascinating blogs for the ultimate statistics geek“… Dunno how to take it! I also note Statisfaction ranked as #4 and Freakanometrics as #5, which sounds like the ranking is a wee haphazard, the latter blog having at least four times as much trafffic as the ‘Og and focussing solely on statistics, acturial science, R programming, and related scientific questions! (Still, verrry nice to make it to a list!)
Archive for the Uncategorized Category
#2 blog for the statistics geek?!
Posted in Uncategorized with tags blogging, Freakonometrics, geek, R-bloggers, Statisfaction, Statistics on January 24, 2011 by xi'anNo more adds
Posted in Uncategorized with tags adds, blogging, fees, Wordpress on January 11, 2011 by xi'anAfter being warned by readers that my posts were often terminated by an add, of no immediate connection with the contents and sometimes completely inappropriate (!), I decided to opt for a no-add version of WordPress. This is not intended as a criticism of what I consider to be a great blogging service, as running adds is the natural way to support a free blogging system, however I prefer to pay a moderate fee to avoid ludicrous and unpredictable adds popping in at the end of my posts!
Top ten in 2009
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 2009, Happy New Year, Og on January 3, 2010 by xi'anHere are the top ten entries of this ‘Og, in terms of access in 2009:
Of black swans and bleak prospects 991
Bayes’ Theorem 691
Solution manual to Bayesian Core on-line 417
Reference prior for logistic regression 326
Happy New Year!
Creationism on French public television
Posted in Uncategorized with tags creationism, Darwin, Grande Galerie de l'Evolution on November 21, 2009 by xi'an
“If you take an entire DNA molecule, coding for all the proteins required for life, I think it’s about 1 followed by 40,000 zeros (which is really no chance) that such coded DNA can arise by chance.” André Eggen, Creation, sept. 1998.
Jean-Louis Foulley signaled to me an incoming show on the French public television (Chanel 5): a debate paradoxically taking place in the beautiful Grande Galerie de l’Evolution, about creationism and its increasing intrusion in France. The presentation seems a priori critical of the creationist theses, and the show seems to rightly consider the relativist opening of schools to creationist theses as a danger for education, but one sentence in the script is appalling: “scientists from both tendencies will debate“. Considering that creationism is one among other scientific theories is the main argument for teaching it in schools! (The representant of creationism is was supposed to be André Eggen who is a researcher in Genetics at the French public research institute in agronomy, INRA, who contributed to the sequencing of the bovine genome, and also a very active advocate of creationism on the French scene. The above quote shows the abyssal level of his arguments in this area… [11/22: Eggen’s name has now been removed from the list of invitees])
Gourmet tea
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Darjeeling, Rooibos, tea on October 9, 2009 by xi'anThere was a paper in the weekend selection from The New York Times delivered with Le Monde that got my full attention as it was about gourmet tea. (The original paper was published on Sept. 17 but I missed it.) The paper covers the surprising popularity of expensive tea (mini-)chains, including three French companies, Le Palais des Thés (pun between Summer Palace and Tea Palace), Mariage Frères (no pun), and Dammann Frères (no pun either!). As a tea addict, I can understand the appeal of selecting special teas of a much higher quality than the major brands, even at a significantly higher price. I was nonetheless shocked by some prices reached by 2009 summer Darjeelings like the Sungma-Turzum clonal wonder at about 300 euros per kilo! About 10 times more than the decent Twinings Darjeeling I get from the local supermarket… 
Since I got those two wonderful bags as a B’day present, as well as another bag of Rooibos red tea, I can testify of their incredible taste(s) and that they are truly gourmet teas of the highest order!
