cats do not believe in capitalism

in my post-academic era i have become extremely scathing of the way academia considers papers to the primary outcome of intellectual work, and refuses to give credit to academics who write software or build other tooling. in industry we very rarely read your papers; but we always use your software

i ran to the city today. first time post-covid back at my preferred 10k distance. yay me. i'm grateful to be back in the world but god i'm so skittish now. enclosed, crowded spaces freak me out. had to find a pharmacist to buy a mask just so that i could work up the courage to get on a train home

oh fuck me. i wrote "Newton-Raphson" where techncially i should have written "Gauss-Newton" and i panicked at my error when ffs literally nobody who reads the report will ever care about the distinction

there are numerous criteria upon which programming languages can be assessed. but i would like to assert that, among the languages in widespread usage, #rstats is the cuntiest. intended in both the complimentary and derogatory senses, at the same time, with anger and love

my love-hate relationship with lazy evaluation in #rstats is very much in a "hate" phase at the moment. please send flowers or at least kind thoughts

This is a really good article by Julia Baird. Australian democracy is still working pretty well, unlike other countries one might name. But we still face a lot of the same pressures, and it's not clear how resilient our system is. www.themonthly.com.au/october-2025...

"short skirt, long jacket" plays very differently to me now, 10 years post-transition and in possession of both a short skirt and a looooong jacket

i feel very down on bluesky at the moment.

Love that the lack of safety for trans people on here is a fucking punchline to Jay

Quote with your yellow art 💛

Binding #Abstract #creativecoding #algorithmicArt #Processing #programming #glsl #java #computerart #digitalart #post-processed

A great post from @djnavarro.net, providing an accessible explanation of why statistics that can appear to reveal our ignorance may actually do the opposite. Makes excellent use of #datavis to provide visual support for the argument. blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

A few words on survey weights, why I'm embarrassed to have forgotten to take them into account in the past, and how I got lucky because I personally didn't get burned. Not a mistake I intend to repeat in the future blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

Prediction modelling hat on: this great post extends to how humans interact with predictions. Generally we appear to be good at discrimination, ie ranking things by risk. Calibration OTOH: cooked. Maybe we should focus decision support on realistic risk preds, w less focus on AUROC? #statsky #rstats

For this week's #TidyTuesday chess player rating data, I made an annotated barcode plot to show the distribution of age by title ♟️ It was hard to set a good transparency level for the lines since there's such a difference between the number of male and female players 📊 #RStats #DataViz #ggplot2

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

for once i have managed to write a short blog post on a lazy sunday arvo, picking up on a suggestion from @coolbutuseless.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy for generating procedural palettes in #rstats. it works better than i expected blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

I like this post because it explains distributional regression so clearly. It's not magic folks, just more regressions.

It’s been a little overshadowed by the slightly unexpected mental health issues that hit me very hard yesterday afternoon, but for what it’s worth here’s the GAMLSS regression post I’ve been working on for the past month #rstats blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

May we all write as spitefully and beautifully as @djnavarro.net writes about splines here 🙏 READ THIS NOW

At the risk of stretching the imagination beyond the limits of human endurance, the reader is asked to pretend that the author is interested in splines #rstats

i have finally found a need to use rlang::env_clone() in the wild. please kill me

I’m especially proud of this article I wrote about Gaussian Processes for the Recast blog! 🥳 GPs are super interesting, but it’s not easy to wrap your head around them at first 🤔 This is a medium level (more intuition than math) introduction to GPs for time series. getrecast.com/gaussian-pro...

she smol

new #rstats art series posted

slightly damaged

I wrote a thing about substituting LLMs for survey respondents notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/08/15/i...

tech in 2025 source: mastodon.social/@nclm/115021...

eating a book today to teach the other books a lesson

oh

TIL that the thing i was taught in year 12 was not in fact the Riemann integral it is the Darboux integral and i feel betrayed

Super excited to curate the @weare.rladies.org account this week. Follow me over there for data viz inspo, some things I think are magic, as well as chat about burnout, navigating career change and showing up for the #rstats community. Thanks for the nudge @pipinghotdata.com !

New paper with @richarddmorey.bsky.social now out in JASA, where we critically examine p-curve. Below is Richard’s excellent summary of the many poor statistical properties of p-curve (with link to paper). I wanted to add some conceptual issues that we also tackle in the paper.

Just a standard reminder that statistics is a stand-alone discipline because it’s really hard and it is very easy to get catastrophically wrong. (This example is p-curves, beloved of the reproducibility/scientific fraud warriors, absolutely indefensible in practice)

i’m mindful of the fact that i’m no longer an academic and should probably stay out of this discussion but — this is what frustrates me the most. tools and procedures are being pushed very hard by “reform advocates”, and those tools don’t work. they shouldn’t have been published in the first place

Paper drop, for anyone interested in #metascience, #statistics, or #metaanalysis! @clintin.bsky.social and I show in a new paper in JASA that the P-curve, a popular forensic meta-analysis method, has deeply undesirable statistical properties. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/?

good night all

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

@djnavarro.net just came across your blog post blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2021-0... and it contains the solution to exactly the problem I was having - trying to get {cli} messages to format nicely in Quarto output. Thank you for figuring this out and taking the time to write it up and share 💜

Last night I did a presentation for my new meetup "Code==Art". Had a good turnout. I got to show off some cool computational artwork from @djnavarro.net and talk about some of the techniques (thank you Dr Navarro for releasing your art+code!!!) Meetup details: nwhitehead.github.io/code_is_art/

"I don’t have lately. I have always. I have a constant blur of plates spinning and knives on the floor and needy, panicked faces at the door, of which you are but one of many." -- A consulting statistician, probably

I regret to inform you that she has, yet again, written more words than are necessary on a topic you don't care about

A weekend building notes for making something really stupid. I wanted a stupid image/gif to pop up every time there's an R error. It worked but at what cost. #rstats

My new album The Lazy Producer is now open for pre-order on Bandcamp. mikeksmith.bandcamp.com/album/the-la...

Finally checked out the annoying traffic spike to my blog from May. and it was HN on my MASS::mvrnorm() post. Quoting from one of the comments: "I don't actually understand why you'd want reproducibility in a statistical simulation" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4402...

idk why but this one feels like it should be the cover of an anthology of dark fairy tails?

love sometimes loses

Automaticity (R code) Algorithm-based generative art. #codeart #genartclub #genart

2:30am and I should not be awake