A lot of links this week for some reason – to be honest some of this is clearing out an old backlog, but it may reflect the beginning of the new year as well
Andy T. Woods, Charles Michel, and Charles Spence give a scientific study of the ‘rules’ of plating. This follows an earlier “plating manifesto” in two parts: Charles Spence, Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, Charles Michel and Ophelia Deroy:
The plating manifesto (I): from decoration to creation and Plating manifesto (II): the art and science of plating.
Alan J. Bishop, Western mathematics: the secret weapon of cultural imperialism (1990; via Hacker News).
Machine Learning, Uncertain Information, and the Inevitability of Negative “Probabilities” (video lecture, David Lowe, 2007)
John Horgan on Bayes’ Theorem: What’s the big deal? at Scientific American.
Juan Maldacena, The symmetry and simplicity of the laws of physics and the Higgs boson
Bill Gosper on continued fraction arithmetic (1972). At some point I want to sit down and digest this. See also Mark Jason Dominus’ talk on the material.
Aaron Clauset is teaching a course on The History and Future of Computing which has an intresting reading list.
Nick Berry on the Koch snowflake.
Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Martin Wainwright have a new book, Statistical Learning with Sparsity: The Lasso and Generalizations, which you can download.
Christie Aschwanden at FiveThirtyEight wrote You CAn’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition – because collecting data about nutrition is hard and also because there are so many studies that data mining is easy.
Udemy and Priceonomics on How William Cleveland Turned Data Visualization Into a Science.
Too good to be true: when overwhelming evidence fails to convince (via phys.org).
Nicky Case is simulating the world (in emoji).
Cathy O’Neil gave a talk on “Weapons of Math Destruction” and she’s finishing up a book of the same title.
Frank Wilczek (whose classes I slept through freshman year of college) on people’s preferences in recreations showing that they like math and don’t realize it.
God plays dice 