I'm drafting a new piece for Hilobrow, and realised I've been writing posts for them about my assorted enthusiasms for exactly fifteen years today! The first one was about Vera Rubin, dark matter, and Kirby Krackle, and you can read them all here: www.hilobrow.com/author/dchac...

#rstats 4.5.3 "Reassured Reassurer" scheduled for March 11. Full schedule on developer.r-project.org (or the svn if you're impatient.) This should be the wrap-up release for the 4.5 series.

what even is the fucking point

Today, in honour of WEB DuBois's birthday in 1868, the @publicdomainrev.bsky.social features the hand-drawn infographics DuBois made with his students to depict the conditions of African-American life in 1900. Arts-based pedagogy all those years ago! buff.ly/3kdWqRD

The point here about our most prominent talking heads eagerly repeating a baseless claim from a website run by notorious loons is well made. Of course, they won't apologise.

The fact I can't ask Claude to add accessibility tags to Fred Moten's Case of Blackness without it saying it can't do that because of content sensitivity seems really bad?

Of course, around here A.I. is traditionally the solution to a ram shortage

In this incredibly long media roundup of 'immigration' views about Asian migrants, not a single Asian migrant opinion cited, man I thought we did all this work already in the 2000s i'm tired

It's the first day of our 2026 academic year here. And this statement 100% applies to university study; if there's no friction in what you're doing, no challenge, then there's little value in what you're doing here beyond a really expensive sticker chart you can turn in for a meaningless certificate

Someone's stolen a lot of opium poppies that are bred to produce toxic precursors of potent opioids rather than opium itself. What's the betting on clueless users vs sophisticated chemists vs someone who's read Wikipedia and thinks they're a sophisticated chemist? www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people local newspaper reporters are rarified elites instead of ink-stained wretches driving their Honda Civic to a crime scene so you know don’t have to rely on Nextdoor and the police press release.

Brilliant visualization of women’s clothing sizes and how they change, and how they do or don’t work for various sizes of women pudding.cool/2026/02/wome... Via @howtoreadthisch.art

Do they though

Nature Medicine starts an investigation into inconsistencies in a study that found it was better to have immunotherapy in the morning. www.statnews.com/2026/02/20/c...

Nearly 15 years ago, I discovered @isec-stats-ecol.bsky.social as a first year PhD student and knew it was my dream conference/community. Haven’t missed one since & now I get to bring it to México. Que padre unir mi comunidad académica y mi gente 🇲🇽 🌎 bsky.app/profile/isec...

How people think about a stronger immune system vs Actually a stronger immune system.

At face value, the problem with this is it would have been even more valuable to our ancestors, so why doesn't the immune system do it already? Could be - just expensive in energy 🥳 - like interferon prophylaxis it makes you feel shitty😐 - encourages autoimmune disease😱 www.bbc.com/news/article...

Watching the guys at the super-nerdy specialty coffee shop adjust the internals of an ultra-fancy hand grinder with little screwdrivers of various shapes.

People who say knees are evidence against intelligent design should remember that Microsoft Windows is the result of intelligent design

Has anyone interviewed the spiders about their disappointment?

Love communicating about stats? Early career or student? Enter our 2026 writing competition for the chance of publication and a conference session https://ow.ly/Tg0A50Yi2Mf

JSSAM Special Issue 13(5) is now available. The first of two special issues showcasing survey research across Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania is now online: 🔗 academic.oup.com/jssam/issue/13/5 Thread ⬇️

New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....

"Microsoft morged my diagram" --Vincent Driessen #continvuocly nvie.com/posts/15-yea...

All are welcome to the March @vicbiostat.bsky.social seminar. Lee Kennedy-Shaffer from @yalesph.bsky.social will be presenting " #Estimands, Assumptions, and the Challenges of Evaluating Policies: Lessons from Staggered Adoption" 12 March, 9:30 AEDT online. www.vicbiostat.org.au #steppedwedge

That's not a nice email to send someone who's marking exams

Some more details on the omnibus test for whether the ADRF is flat, as I mention in this test. We have an estimate for the ADRF at each treatment value `a`, and jointly they have a multivariate normal distribution. This makes the ADRF estimate a Gaussian Process. 1/8

The bike underpass that has excellent drainage except when there's, you know, rain

Fun times: a paper of ours is finally "properly published" in AAP: 'Weak Poincaré inequalities for Markov chains: Theory and applications' - Christophe Andrieu, Anthony Lee, Sam Power, Andi Q. Wang This was the final part of a trilogy of joint works during Andi's and my postdoc.

I love R for everything statistics, but I've always been a little jealous of statisticians using SPSS Complex Samples or SAS SURVEYSELECT to design their samples. So I decided to build samplyr, a tidy and pipe-friendly grammar for survey sampling design in #rstats. dickoa.gitlab.io/samplyr/inde...

RAM shortage so severe they're talking about finding the man who put it in the ram-a-lama-ding-dong and making him take it out www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKpZ...

"99% of adults over 40 have shoulder “abnormalities” on an MRI, study finds" arstechnica.com/health/2026/...

Survey researchers: I'll discuss LLM "synthetic respondents" in a free webinar this week. ➡️ Synthetic Survey Data? It's Not Data Thursday Feb 19, 12pm Eastern, hosted by Sawtooth Free registration: sawtoothsoftware.com/resources/ev... (P.S., I give no quarter on this topic 😆)

1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.

Bad clogs and Englishmen #noelcowardice

Next steps for Parliament: declare that Winston is a citizen, legalise rugby, allow burgers to be made of meat

At training in what appears to be the ARSE building

"the median voter theorem is basically the ivermectin of politics"

Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding: Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere. samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...

In this age of LLMs, it's trivially easy to get a Phd-level-expert™️ summary of any journal article that will extract the main arguments and findings for you and often even flags up the most relevant connections to the larger literature: just look for the bloody abstract, kid #AcademicLifeHacks

maybe not thought control exactly but perhaps some sense of what counts as a thought?

New open source: cuthbert 🐛 State space models with all the hotness: (temporally) parallelisable, JAX, Kalman, SMC

Do international nonproprietary names of drugs come with approved pronunciations, or is it left to custom and practice? For example, is there an official rule as whether the new oral GLP1 drug orforglipron is orFORGLYpron vs orforGLIPron?

Almost every complaint about what academics in the humanities study could be solved by quantities of money that are - in the scheme of these sorts of things - very small. In that context, what is telling is that the right, aware that the humanities were for sale, opted to destroy them instead.

The anti-trans propaganda push is one of the best examples I know of real-world disinformation in action.

Here is another way of approaching it - for the 0.1% (318) most rainy known hours at Auckland Airport (in north of country, has long run of data), when were those hours distributed through time.

A single image that captures NZ's dominant belief system and economic model #nzpol www.reddit.com/r/newzealand...

"tulip kiwi tantrum beavers" is a sequence of words I needed some help with