A longshot cry for help from statisticians/ philosophers of stats:

I vividly remember reading a paragraph quoted from some famous frequentist statistician (I'd like to say Fisher, but I'm not entirely sure) about how we should only use statistical analysis on a data when we don't have other information to go on. And there's a story about the probability of him forgetting to put stamp on his letter is different to a stranger than to himself.

I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw that. Anyone happens to know? 🙏

Suppose you were trying to invent a bright orange powder that could easily dye clothes and be hard to wash off. Using your knowledge of quantum mechanics you'd design this symmetrical molecule where an electron's wavefunction can vibrate back and forth along a chain of carbons at the frequency of green light. Absorbing green light makes it look orange! And this molecule doesn't dissolve in water.

Yes: you'd invent turmeric!

Or more precisely 'curcurmin', the molecule that gives turmeric its special properties.

The black atoms are carbons, the white are hydrogens and the red are oxygens.

Read on and check out what pure curcurmin looks like.

(1/n)

I was asked on another platform to give a somewhat less-technical intro to my book, Evolution and the Machinery of Chance. I'm posting here in case anyone's interested. (Long!)

It seems that natural selection helps to *explain* why animals and plants have the traits they do. People say that natural selection is "the survival of the fittest". But then sometimes people also say that being fittest means surviving better or having more offspring that survive. 1/10

The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels of Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.