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Honestly, after the p-value article, why is this crap still being published? p value was said to mean its worth a second look, but NOT imply anything else

Second, notice its not in PLOS one. Wonder why? Oh right, they require all data to be public, so you can't "use a model" that just happens to make the results you were looking for.

Lastly, percentages e.g. 19 times more likely! See http://xkcd.com/1252/ Without the baseline, this 19 times more likely is utterly useless. If their "average case" had a 0.000000000001% chance of death, 19 times that would be 0.000000000019% Thats still pretty low. It reeks of numbers manipulation in an attempt for publicity and funding. If the baseline was something reasonably high, like say 1%, and it jumped to 19%, sure that's quite significant! However, were that the case, it would be far more exciting to say that, than simply 19 times, and they would have done so. My guess is my examples are hyperbole, and the actual is probably closer to 0.1 with those markers, their modeling, number fudging, etc, 1.9%. Still not an accurate predictor of mortality, and basically useless.

Fortunately there's a paper linked to in the summary that answers your concerns.

The 5-y mortality for persons with a biomarker score within the highest quintile was 19 times higher than for those in the lowest quintile (288 versus 15 deaths during 5 y, corresponding to 15.3% versus 0.8%). Individuals within the highest quintile were further differentiated in terms of their short-term probability of dying according to their biomarker score percentiles: 23% of the individuals with a biomarker score within the highest percentile had died within the first year of follow-up (23 out of 99), and the estimated 5-y mortality was 49% (Figure 5B).

I'm not gonna run the numbers but 288 vs 15 is probably outside of most p-values.

Also note this was a replication of another study, once could be publication bias, but replication raises the odds you're looking at something real.

23% first year mortality for the highest percentile group?? That's definitely something worth writing home about (and you might want to send a will along with it).

The cake is a lie!

http://xkcd.com/538/

"By default, Internet Explorer on Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2 runs in a restricted mode that is known as Enhanced Security Configuration. This mode mitigates this vulnerability. "

Translation: IE is crippled by default on windows server. Any attempt to use our browser means you are screwed.

An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

http://xkcd.com/1200/

In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a website that contains a webpage that is used to exploit this vulnerability. In addition, compromised websites and websites that accept or host user-provided content or advertisements could contain specially crafted content that could exploit this vulnerability. In all cases, however, an attacker would have no way to force users to visit these websites.

Most popular sites directly and indirectly link to at least a dozen different ad networks, stats, "market intelligence", CDNs, social media all interacting with your browser able to inject or command your browser to visit whatever site they please without asking.

Obligatory?

https://xkcd.com/512/

xkcd

Real programmers use butterflies.

Sudo Mastery: User Access Control For Real People

I really need this. Whenever I say

sudo make me a sandwich

I never get any food. And using it in bed! Let's just draw a curtain over that!

So, I am convinced I need help with using access control on real people. Maybe this book would be just the thing

http://xkcd.com/149/

You can use it for everyday tasks too. At least the summary is easier to read than man 5 sudoers.

Fine, it's the oldest known rock, you pedant. It's still plenty interesting because the oldest known rocks up until know were only about 3.8 billion years old. There is the potential to learn a great deal about the early days of the earth from this rock. Oh, and obligatory xkcd: 1194

relevent

1) I haven't seen GOTO statements since my GWBASIC days, and I've surely never seen this many.
2) I really like one-liners for if statements in Ruby: "do_this if x==1"
3) Two-liners for C if statements without curly braces feel wrong, are dangerous and hard to read
4) http://xkcd.com/292/
5) GOTO 1

Eating. Beer. Coffee. Hardware for building & testing.

Perhaps hiring freelancers to help or not having to work freelance themselves.

But most likely beer.

I've started using a concatenation of many easy words, related to the system and my daydreams. According to xkcd, long plain word passwords are more secure. So at work, one password is "servertwomybitterlife". At home, it's "Anypornonthis24inchmonitor?" My bank account is "Ohlookabalancebelowzeroagain!"

Obligatory XKCD.

Thank you, Randall Munroe.

I'm gong to get a new bumper sticker which will read:

4TH AMD"); DROP TABLE PlateScans;

oblig ref

C'mon, I'm disappointed. It's been solved ages ago.

https://xkcd.com/593/

I'd go another way: http://xkcd.com/851/

I know Linux is all about freedom, especially freedom of choice, but is The Linux Foundation doing anything actively to encourage consolidation instead of fragmentation to avoid the situation Randall Munroe describes in xkcd? The current situation: Distributions galore, a profusion of system initialization versions from simple to incomprehensible, a plethora of desktop metaphors (probably stopping this year and next year from being The Year of the Linux Desktop), ...

You

I know Linux is all about freedom, especially freedom of choice, but is The Linux Foundation doing anything actively to encourage consolidation instead of fragmentation to avoid the situation Randall Munroe describes in xkcd?

The current situation: Distributions galore, a profusion of system initialization versions from simple to incomprehensible, a plethora of desktop metaphors (probably stopping this year and next year from being The Year of the Linux Desktop), ...

Tell me more about global warming, please.

Sure thing.

http://xkcd.com/1331/

Obligatory XKCD
https://xkcd.com/865/

For your information and pleasure: https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/

Ah yes, "c". We all now the ugly reality, aren't we?

The consequences of that could be terrible!

The shark would be safer - at least they can't climb trees.

I think Randall was onto something; (e^pi) - pi = 20 in actual reality, and the rounding error is just a result of our being in a simulation.

Mathematician Edward Frenkel writes in the NYT that one fanciful possibility that explains why mathematics seems to permeate our universe is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics

Or we could live a "real" universe based on the laws of mathematics.

http://xkcd.com/435/

Or maybe it's all just A Bunch of Rocks.

Of course we are in a simulation. But only XKCD seems to care about what language that simulation is programmed in.

https://xkcd.com/605/

Also, compare with this (which I seem to be posting a lot today, between this and the "Star Trek Economics" article).

XKCD #1298 is considerably more interesting for this discussion.

Part of the questions we were posing to the grad student from UC Santa Cruz: many of the planets they're identifying are about White Dwarfs - which means planets which have survived the exit of main sequence and a expelling of gas, at high velocity it could strip atmosphere and perhaps scour water from the surface - these are likely to be dead worlds, if not mostly frozen.

Those in the Goldilocks are still very hard to detect, which is why so few have been. There's a couple hundred thousand candidates which Kepler identified, and these are still being evaluated and processed - no small task. Exciting times.

Obligatory XKCD

Given that what 20 years ago wasn't even a notable winter is being treated as the end-of-the-world-winter-storm, one can instead use it w/ a bit of perspective to see how global warming has crept up on us:

http://www.xkcd.com/1321/

William
(who made it into work in south-central PA w/o difficulty in a front-wheel drive Cavalier w/ all-season radial tires, but only saw 4-wheel drives and snow plows and vehicles w/ tire chains on the road)

Because this was fucking heartbreaking: https://xkcd.com/695/

Oblig XKCD

The only issue I see is that you use too much italic and it makes you look like a wuss.

And your opinion of me is what I care about most, of course. I'm just crushed. :-)

Also I tried to read the articles you linked, but for the most part they suck.

Actually having to process a "flood of boring information" is too challenging or something? Well... okay, then.

I guess you provided that article to make it clear that people with a Ph.d. are competent only if they agree with your specific vision of the world.

I was interested to see how you'd process it. And yes, unfortunately, it went about like I suspected it would. There's a reason why there aren't any flood geologists in the oil industry.

Finding oil is a very high-stakes issue for oil companies. Literally trillions of dollars are riding on it. When they look for the most likely spots to drill, do they use Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one actually delivers the goods?

Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plankton (with a few plants and dinosaurs), but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could in those conditions? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?

Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone making money doing this? (I can suggest one possibility...)

The Earth is not round. It is an oblate spheroid.

Actually, it's a sphere defined by the EGM96 coefficients.

Any researcher worth their salt states a p-value with enough additional information to understand if the p-value is actually meaningful. Anyone who looks at a paper and makes a conclusion besed solely (or largely) off a p-value without thinking about how meaningful the results are from a clinical or real-world perspective is being lazy or reckless.

I guess there are quite a few insightful XKCD strips but this one seems most apt, here: http://xkcd.com/552/

http://xkcd.com/882/

Even the example of p=0.01 from the article is subject to the same problem. That's why the LHC worked for something like 6 sigma before declaring the higgs boson to be discovered. Even then, there's always the chance, however remote, that statistics fooled them.

Reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/870/

I give it a solid 8 out of 10, based on the following:

• On the internet, nobody know's your a dog.
• Charlie the Unicorn
• xkcd
• Amazon Prime

Deductions given for trolls and things like this.

Having done both for 30+ years, I'll have to correct you.

There is no more ingenuity required by expert software development than is required by expert masonry.

In fact, the number of valid but unique combinations of architectural elements a mason may be called upon to use is probably far greater than the number of valid but unique combinations of code syntactica available to the programmer.

Obligatory XKCD I guess. Everybody thinks the job they've not done is easy. I'm guessing you could not tell me when to use hollow bedding, or how to adjust slaked lime putty for the acidity of stone under field conditions?

There are a lot of bad masons and bad programmers, of course. More than good ones, in both cases......

> Right ... I'll tell Norway they own North America, ok?

Don't you mean Netherlands?

https://xkcd.com/1232/

s/Exploring other planets/building cool stuff/

It's not so much "WHY" they have the information or even "WHAT" their intentions are. It's tremendously unlikely that the government has raw computer capabilities even as high as an order of magnitude more than what's currently available on the market. They simply don't have the expertise and such huge amounts of private money are going into the same kind of R&D they'd be doing. I suppose it's possible that all the cost overruns in every government IT project and every recent military project have been going into some sort of super secret project to build high capacity storage and really fast processors, but I think it far more likely that that money has gone to making immensely powerful planes that are useless in modern warfare and paying for 50 levels of contracting.

The most recent data I can find indicates that in 2012 just under 28 exabytes of data per month was flowing through the internet and it was increasing at about 7 exabytes year on year, so a relatively safe assumption is that internet traffice for 2013 was probably about 35 exabytes a month. Based on an old whatif" from xkcd, the highest density storage we have microsd cards is about 160 terabytes per kilogram. Let's assume for the sake of insanity that the government can store 10 times that in a manner which is actually practical to process, so we'll give them a data density of 1.6 petabytes per kilogram. This is obviously insane, but let's do it anyway. By that math storing all internet traffic everywhere will mean 35 tons of storage every single month. Note this is ridiculously low and the actual figure is likely substantially higher not counting the mechanisms to actually process and archive all that information.

None of that even comes close to all the data that isn't on the intranet that they're supposedly trying to siphon down, which probably easily doubles or trebles this figure. This is how we know they aren't storing everyone's information indefinitely, or even temporarily, they can't.

Actually, this scheme relies on reliable ability to trade virtual money for hard currency. This makes exchanges the natural single point of failure.

It's yet another variation of the old xkcd joke: https://xkcd.com/538/

Every time Mt.Gox, by far the most popular and basically main exchange went down, bitcoin's trade value against hard currency went down hard. The rest of the factors are mostly irrelevant because their importance compared to relative value of easy, functional and legal way to exchange bitcoin for hard currency is simply too small.

http://xkcd.com/202/