Feller’s 2-volume work is, as you may know, canonical, but it is also remarkably rigorous and very British; I’ve never been able to make it far into Feller.

My CMU professor, Larry Wasserman, has published a couple books about which I’ve heard good things: “All of Statistics” and “All of Nonparametrics”; I’ve not checked them out. CMU’s best stats professor (at least while I was there — Cosma Shalizi is there now, and I’d have to bet that he kicks butt as a teacher), Chris Genovese, has had a book in production for a while. He had a draft PDF up on his site for a while, but it seems to have come down now. I TAed for him; his material was always extremely useful, starting right away with non-toy problems geared to engineers. (E.g., use statistical methods to figure out the running time of a compiler, based on some models of how frequently new tokens appear in the source-code stream.)

A couple other canonical ones, which may or may not be outdated by now: the two classic works by Erich Lehmann, late of UC Berkeley. They’re entitled “Testing Statistical Hypotheses” and “Theory of Point Estimation.”

That’s probably more information than you need. The quick takeaway is: DeGroot. You’ll get all the distributions you need, all the statistical testing, and so forth. You will be able to explain why the F-statistic looks the way it does, you will be able to describe the probability distribution of F-statistics, and you will learn a whole set of methods for deriving the distributions of other statistics. It’s a really great book.

Cars don’t ghost ride the whip; cars people ghost ride the whip.

Great line though! (And the article looks great too, but I’m not done reading it.)

Your closing idea—that one of the main problems for the use of Wikipedia is conservatism in the practice of law—is particularly interesting; the idea might apply to other academic disciplines as well.

As for the capitalization, that’s how her legal name is capitalized. I don’t know that I agree with her reasons for it, but it would be disrespectful not to use her preferred capitalization. And I’ve got my own precedent on my side; it was lowercase in my search engine piece from last year. (See footnote 80.)

A note on page 6: you talk about “Networks” being central to Facebook. That was true, but Facebook seems to be phasing out Networks at the moment, possibly as part of its attempts to compete with Myspace, and that may be worth mentioning. Networks have less access-control significance on Facebook now than they used to; you have more ability to join multiple networks than before and there are fewer restrictions on who can join each network; and it looks like the goal is for them to eventually have no more significance than “Groups.”

I notice that you refer to “danah boyd” consistently as such, without capitalization. That’s something I don’t think I would do in formal writing, even if I knew the person involved preferred it.

http://braid-game.com/walkthrough/walkthrough.html

A lecture about never using walkthroughs, with constant reassurance that the game is fair, and that I’ll enjoy it more if I solve the puzzles myself. The taunting seemed self-satisfied, but I was inclined to give Blow the benefit of the doubt. I banged my head on the puzzle some more, and sadly gave up.

So I found a hint on some random message board instead, and you know what? That last puzzle wasn’t fair. There was a huge red herring that made it look like the solution depended on high-precision platform hopping, and I had wasted two hours banging my head against it.

THEN the ending turned out to be a very, very artful version of one of my least favorite game twists.

THEN I learned about the stars, and read a description of the “reward” for getting all the stars, and I was forced to conclude that Jonathan Blow is too much of a dick for me to place the trust in him that his exquisite game design requires.

On that account I am sad.