by Nate Silver
* One such petition, which was claimed to have been signed by 15,000 scientists, later turned up names like Geri Halliwell, a.k.a. Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls, who had apparently given up her career as a pop star to pursue a degree in microbiology.
* I use the term complexity in its plain-English meaning in this chapter meaning that complex is largely synonymous with complicated. There is also a particular scientific domain called complexity theory, which some scientists distinguish from chaos theory. We explore these very interesting ideas in chapter 5.
* If you scale back their warming estimates to reflect the smaller-than-assumed rate of CO2 increase, you wind up with a revised projection of 1.4 °C to 3.6 °C in warming per century. The actual rate of increase, a pace of 1.5 °C per century since the report was published, falls within this range, albeit barely.
* It may be hard to objectively measure scientific progress, but in the related realm of technology, the number of patents issued continues to increase at roughly exponential rates and is about double now what it was just a decade ago.
* Although the term was not widely used at the time, the sorts of threats that planners were worried about might be thought of more along the lines of “terrorism” today.
* I chose the title of this book before I came across Wohlstetter’s, but she pioneered the use of the metaphor fifty years ago.
* A conspiracy theory might be thought of as the laziest form of signal analysis. As the Harvard professor H. L. “Skip” Gates says, “Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.”
* Hawaii did not become a state until 1959.
* You may even decide that the best estimate is that something is essentially random: you are certain that you are uncertain!
* United 93 departed Newark Airport at 8:42 A.M., forty-one minutes after its scheduled departure time, hitting its cruising altitude just as the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
* The largest terror attack in any country had been the arson of the Cinema Rex theater in Abadan, Iran, in 1978, which killed 422.
* Note that “the basis on which I’d make bets” is essentially a Bayesian prior possibility.
* They were stopped by Jack Bauer, of course.
*You may even want to hone your skills in fields like sports, which offer rich data sets and rich opportunities for testing your techniques. The NCAA bracket pool may be less of a diversion than you realize, especially if you take it seriously.
*A sign that you’re spending too much time in model land is if you start to use the word “prediction” to refer to how your model fits the past data. As I describe in chapter 5, it is very easy to overfit a model, thinking you have captured the signal when you’re just describing the noise. Sticking to the simple, commonsense definition of a prediction as something that applies strictly to a future event may reduce the risk of these errors.