idiolect

A particular pattern in the numbers, a misbehaviour which shows that the scale is more than just a record: Source: Reddit Distribution of results of the Matura (high school exit exam) in Poland in 2013. The minimum score to pass is 30%. Commentary: Unusual distributions of scores on final high-school exams in Poland. But let’s be clear — this is not about Poland. The x-axis pretends to innocence, just a passive measure of how the data fall. This pattern, though, the cratering before the…

You can follow this blog on the fediverse. Technical issues mean I may have purged my followers, so if you already followed you may need to re-follow. On something like mastodon you can search for the blog profile @notes, clickable as https://idiolect.org.uk/notes/@notes Previously: ActivityPub on this blog (2024-09-16)

I’ve been making a website which tracks metascience relevant seminars – the Global metascience seminar monitor. The site subscribes to emails, scrapes seminar webpages (takes RSS), updates daily, takes updates and corrections by email automatically and publishes a calendar feed so you can see events in your calendar automatically. It’s half a useful tool to keep up with an interesting and evolving area, and half an experiment in using AI. I vibe coded the website, using my openclaw agent…

I finished East of Eden last week, and today The East of Eden Letters. Steinbeck wrote East of Eden from January to November 1951, long-hand, wearing down innumerable pencils. He wrote in a bound book, only committing the novel to every other page. On the facing pages he wrote a daily letter to his editor, […]