allokkio

nuggets

• good science. Good science is trying everything to show that you are wrong — and fail.
• as abow so below. How you do the small things is how you do in the large things — and vice versa.
• swans. Below the water hard work and constant struggle, above the water elegance and gracefulness.
• occams razor. Shortcut learning is a pretty good argument against occams razor.
• life. The Ian knot seems to be the fastest way to tie shoes. Here is a description from the inventor himself (also, please appreciate this website. It is gold).
• stats. If we estimate the standard deviation of a normal distribution from an i.i.d. sample, then the estimated standard deviation is chi-squared distributed with n-1 degrees of freedom.
• food. Ciabatta was invented in 1982 (via kottke).
• earth. Hurricanes do not cross the equator (via kottke).
• earth/society. Droughts might be a reason for todays popularity of skating.

Degrees of Freedom. Wikipedia says:

Although the basic concept of degrees of freedom was recognized as early as 1821 in […] Carl Friedrich Gauss, its modern definition and usage was first elaborated by English statistician William Sealy Gosset in […] article “The Probable Error of a Mean”, published under the pen name “Student”. While Gosset did not actually use the term ‘degrees of freedom’, he explained the concept in the course of developing what became known as Student’s t-distribution. The term itself was popularized by English statistician and biologist Ronald Fisher […]. - I changed the links to in-text links for convenience

The first link of the outline seems to be its primary source. In my opinion it is a great peace, does not only clarify where the term comes from but also teaches a lot about the concept.

Stationatiry. If the statistics of the joint distribution of the random variables does not change as a function of time we speak of stationarity.

This definition seems to be first appear in Khintchine (1934). I reproduced the text-passage below for convenience reasons and it indeed is in accordance with the definition given above. Luckily German is my mother tongue. It seems that Kolmogorov (1938) follows the one given by Khintchine (1934), which reinforces the canoonical aspect of the definition, since well… it is Komogorov. Alas that reference is in Russian, so I cannot realy say if its the case.