Books

Books that I have written.

pyndamics3

Dynamical systems simulation in Python. Includes both continuous and stochastic simulation.

Stats for Everyone

An introductory stats book from a Bayesian perspective, including Python software.

Blog

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Why do we need double-blind studies?

I was recently reading some articles about dubious medical procedures, and the claims of miraculous healings. I was struck by a level of credulity with some of these claims, but …

#science

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Sometimes there really isn't enough evidence to believe a claim

A particular response has now happened twice in an ongoing discussion about extraordinary claims, and I felt I needed to think about it more deeply. The response is, essentially, that …

#religion

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Ongoing Conversation with Jonathan McLatchie including what would convince me, a visit from Jean Luc Picard, and more

I'd like to thank Jonathan McLatchie for the detailed response to my two-part response.

If you're following along, we have:

#religion

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Chemical Reaction Dynamics Reproducing a Computational Paper

As an exercise, I like to reproduce computational papers, but with my own tools. This let's me know that I understand completely what is being written and in many cases …

#science

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Simulating Stochastic Processes Gillespie Algorithm

In this post we are going to explore the simulation of stochastic (i.e. random) processes, and work our way to understanding how the Gillespie algorithm works. We'll be using …

#science

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Science as a metal detector

In my post about "naturalism of the gaps" I stated that in evaluating claims,

  1. Methodological naturalism is the only choice we have available, because no one has demonstrated any procedure …

#religion

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Convert mp3 files to audiobook for Apple Books ...youtube playlists, cds, and more...

The Mac/iPhone Books app has some issues. Before switching the content out of iTunes into a separate app, audiobooks were housed in the same app as music. You could …

#programming

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Stats 101 Examples with MCMC Part 2 Estimating mean with unknown 𝜎

This is another in the series of "Statistics 101" examples solved with MCMC. The previous in the series can be found here. In all of these posts I'm going to …

#math

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Stats 101 Examples with MCMC Estimating mean with known 𝜎

I'd like to walk through some of the "Statistics 101" examples (e.g. estimating \(\mu\) with known \(\sigma\), estimating a proportion, etc...) for which we have simple analytical solutions, but …

#math

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Gravitational Attraction

What would happen if two people out in space a few meters apart, abandoned by their spacecraft, decided to wait until gravity pulled them together? My initial thought was that …

#science

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Fitting parameters in dynamics systems using lmfit with pyndamics

A while ago I wrote this little package called pyndamics which was a thin wrapper around the scipy odeint function. Since then I migrated it using nbdev to experiment with …

#programming

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Bayes vs Apologetics

In this episode, David (the Graceful Atheist and I explore how Bayes theorem can structure our thinking. We bounce ideas off each other, talk about injecting information into arguments, and …

#media

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A Simple Physics Problem Gets Messy

A physics problem from a practice AP test came to my attention, when my daughter was in AP physics this past spring. I went over her solutions when she did …

#science