Thanksgiving weekend miscellany
Scott Hanselman has an interesting interview with James Marcus Bach, author of Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. Bach lives Mark Twain’s advice to never let school interfere with your education.

A beta-like distribution
I just stumbled across a distribution that approximates the beta distribution but is easier to work with in some ways. It’s called the Kumaraswamy distribution. Apparently it came out of hydrology. The graph below plots the density of the distribution for various parameters. If you’re familiar with the beta distribution, these curves will look very familiar. The PDF for the Kumaraswamy distribution K(a, b) is f(x | a, b) = abxa-1(1 – xa

Thomas Edison’s fire
When Thomas Edison was sixty-seven years old, his factory was destroyed in a fire. This was his response the next morning: There’s value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God, we can start anew. Related posts: Questioning the Hawthorne effect Innovation I

It doesn’t pay to be the computer guy
This weekend I ran across a post by Shaun Boyd called Ten reasons it doesn’t pay to be the computer guy. He begins with the observation that if you’re “the computer guy,” most of your accomplishments are invisible. Nobody consciously notices things working smoothly. In fact, if you do a great job of preventing problems, people will assume you’re not needed. After discussing being unappreciated, Boyd goes on to complain about unreasonably high expectations people have of  “the computer guy.” These are valid complaints. However, they somewhat offse

Weekend miscellany
Leaf art 3435 = 33 + 44 + 33 + 55 Why experts are morons Math Teachers at Play #20 Passion as a competitive advantage