Interesting Links for 18-11-2014

[andrewducker]

• Six-way Venn diagram of banana genes (best visualisation I've seen in a while!)
  (tags: visualisation banana )
• Lego wars: How Big Bang Theory beat Dr Who
  (tags: Lego BigBangTheory drwho )
• LSD-assisted psychotherapy for anxiety associated with a life-threatening disease: a study
  (tags: psychology anxiety drugs lsd psychedelics )
• On Dictionaries and

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Sucks that you have to be on Google Plus to see that Interstellar article.

That said, I seriously doubt any article could explain the plot holes and logic fails in that film.

[fanf]

That video game demographics thing is screwy: lots of Z scores saying various statistics are dozens of standard deviations away from the mean. Something is very wrong with their numbers.

(Also the whizzy website is extremely annoying.)

[andrewducker]

Can you explain that to someone who doesn't know stats?

[simont]

In anything remotely normally distributed, a result more than about 5 standard deviations away from the mean has well under a one-in-a-million chance of occurring. Thereafter it gets more-than-exponentially worse, e.g. by the time you're 10 standard deviations away from the mean you're at about 10^-23 probability. So if results that extreme are coming up all the time in your analysis, it's far more likely that you've computed the standard deviation wrong!

[fanf]

What Simon said. And in case it isn't clear, the Z score is the difference between a measurement and the mean, divided by the standard deviation, i.e. it is how much of an outlier that measurement is counted in standard deviations.

There's a fairly nice diagram on Wikipedia comparing a bell curve, percentiles, Z scores, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score

[gonzo21]

Yeah, I think it is likely Labour will reap a whirlwind for their almost criminally inept handling of the Scottish Independence Referendum. At times I almost thought they were secretly campaigning for the 'yes' camp.

I'm still not convinced it's going to be as cataclysmic as these polls suggest. But yeah, if anything they're perceived as having treated Scotland with as much contempt as the Tories, if not more.

You know, my MP is Labour, and I'm on his mailing lists because I write to him semi regularly. But not a single word did I hear from him about the referendum.

[cavalorn]

Interstellar annoyed me on several levels, but I still found this to be an extremely well thought out piece on the movie:

https://medium.com/@somebadideas/on-interstellar-love-time-and-the-limitless-prison-of-our-cosmos-ef59ee28fd8e

[andrewducker]

I'm afraid to say that about the only bit of that I liked was the link to the technology David Fincher is now using in the editing suite.

The rest of it seemed to vague and waffley that I couldn't actually pin down what it was trying to say, other than "Film is atemporal, and so is this movie, so that's ok."

(It may appeal more once I actually watch the movie on home release.)

[alextfish]

That banana diagram is awesome. No, wait. That Bananagram is awesome.

[snarlish]

Vennanagram?

[cheekbones3]

I replied on the Dreamwidth entry with precisely the opposite view!