Subscribe
Been getting loads of emails—okay, a few—all right, one—on how to receive the daily posts, steaming hot, right in your Inbox.
That’s easy! Go to the bottom of the blog and look for the “Subscribe to Blog via Email” form. Input your email and you instantly join the most sophisticated articulate perspicacious scintillating braggadocious community on the internet. (I’m thinking of having badges done up.)
Unsubscribing is, of course, impossible. Once you’re in, you’re in forever, like the mafia, but with stronger intellectual penalties for breaking your email-oath. Not only that, posts are daily—they never, ever stop. Relentless ain’t in it. Choose wisely.
Full disclosure: The NSA will collect your email addresses and reading habits. What they will do with this information will be entirely to your benefit, our most beneficent government loving us and wanting only what is best for us.
Gift
It is certain your mother would want a copy of Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics. Do not disappoint her. She’s counting on you.
This award-eligible book has a hundred-and-two uses. It can be used to prop up sagging Christmas trees. It can be thrown at small children to get their attention. Its pages can be torn out and used as a sound buffer to block the snoring of your beautiful spouse. Since you would naturally bring it camping, its pages (especially Chapter 4) can be used to set fire to kindling.
Most importantly, like Stephen Hawking’s books, it can be left “lying about” at nonchalant angles on the coffee table, looking as you have just lain it down after a session of pure knowledge flowing into your soul.
Act now! Copies are practically unlimited.
Video
Regular readers will have noticed the flirtation with video. The reason for these was my messing about with a Linux video editor, seeing if I could do it. I could. Not well, though. I gave no thought to the script, which is the most important element. Podcasts are superior to video, sans camera. I am sans camera. And my microphone would have embarrassed Edison as he intoned Mary…
Even with camera, I’m not sure video is a good idea. They take too much time to produce. Still, many prefer them to reading. Plus, I am shockingly handsome and imposing, which is sure to steer eyeballs my direction.
I could do a whole probability/statistics class this way, for instance. Though I’d rather do a philosophy of knowledge class. I’m barred from appearing in ordinary classrooms (in my native land), but not yet from extraordinary ones, like here. We’ll see.
I’d need a blackboard. I dislike whiteboards. What in the world was wrong with far cheaper and more robust blackboards that whiteboards were supposed to have solved? Chalk dust brushes off. Ink, not so much.
Advent
Except for the most horrifying and sickening ever Doom tomorrow, the blog will be on auto-pilot next week, with many longed-for thought-lost-to-the-ravages-of-time classics appearing. Regular service will resume with our annual predictions posts on New Years. I don’t believe we did too well this year.
Start thinking of your predictions now!
Incidentally, re-posts do not get re-emailed. So those who get posts by email will have a quiet week. Consider it my gift to you.
Meanwhile, blessed Advent and Merry Christmas!
Well, have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
No way out,you say. Well, I’ll take it. Christmas is out there somewhere.
Merry Christmas!
Please , no videos or podcasts. They are slooow and not appealing to the “hearing impaired “ (mostly deaf) like me.
One may not be able to unsubscribe, but we do have a “delete” key that can be used very liberally!
My mother is dead and even if she wasn’t, she despised math. Now sending her a copy might have signaled my superiority, which she believed to be the purpose of every gift I sent, but so not worth it.
The book thrown at small children or pets to get their attention is something I hadn’t considered as use. Thank you. As for kindling, the phone book is free.
No coffee table….
I don’t watch video. If one cannot read, one is uneducable.
Blackboards forever! Never adjusted to whiteboards in the lecture room. There are things you can do with a stick of chalk that ain’t possible with a whiteboard marker.
Merry Christmas!
People should also be aware that feedly.com is a way to index and read blogs very nicely – using the RSS feeds.
That said, Briggs, if you care how many come directly to the blog itself, you might want to limit the amount of text goes out in the RSS feed. I can read the whole blog – other than comments – on feedly.