Tim on July 31st, 2008

I’ve got a post at Websites and Beer talking about adding vinegar to beer. Blasphemy? Maybe not…read on.
I’m reposting this here, because it’s sort of a follow up to my post about cheap versus expensive wines. Hooray for food. Hooray for science. And hooray for food & science together!

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Tim on July 30th, 2008

I love Science. I don’t just love Science, I *fucking* love it. Maybe I’ll do a post on the Science sticks someday.
There’s a webcomic I particularly like, called XKCD.  It’s Science-y, Math-y, geek humor. Perfect for me.
One of the best is the following comic, good old #397. I love it because Feynman (one of the […]

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Tim on July 22nd, 2008

Zombie Feynman got me reading about Feynman, and I came across a great page discussing Feynman’s involvement with the textbook industry. Although it’s funny at times, it’s fairly sad that this is actually the back end of our education system.

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Tim on July 17th, 2008

Saw a post on the Freakonomics blog about wines, and people’s abilities to tell the difference between good and bad wines. I love Levitt for his willingness to piss people off in the pursuit of truth (read the part about the scholar who stormed out of the room!) Anyways, there was a large study done, […]

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Tim on June 12th, 2008

There’s this idea I’ve had rolling around my head for a while now. I call it the Law of Small Numbers, but it’s not really a law, and it’s apparently not called that either, at least according to Wikipedia.
Basically, it’s that small numbers increase easier than big numbers. It’s an idea that’s become popular with […]

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Tim on June 4th, 2008

OK. I’ve been running a test where I’ve been attempting to gather Viagra spam into a Gmail mailbox, viagraspamtest@gmail.com
I started the test in mid-May, posting the email address to questionable and shady mailing lists, as well as linking the address in plain text on my blog.
And 6 weeks in, how is it going? Well…it’s not. […]

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Tim on April 14th, 2008

At the end of my presentation on Bayes’ Theorem at BarCampOrlando, there was some Q&A time.
I was asked a question about automatically training a spam filter, and I got into explaining how Bayesian filtering isn’t a “spam test” per-se. The simplest way to think about Bayesian filtering is that you sort email you’ve already received […]

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