Miscellaneous stuff about P.B. Stark
applications | ultras | espresso | bread | forage | wheels | Erdös | Newton | schooling | the king and I | Vicarism | In Memoriam | pithosophy | neologisms | haiku | stuff I wish I'd said
Thoughts on applied Statistics:
- Consider the underlying science. The interesting scientific questions are not always questions statistics can answer.
- Think about where the data come from and how they happened to become your sample.
- Think before you calculate. Will the answer mean anything? What?
- The data, the formula, and the algorithm all can be right, and the answer still can be wrong: Assumptions matter.
- Enumerate the assumptions. Check those you can; flag those you can't. Which are plausible? Which are plainly false? How much might it matter?
- Why is what you did the right thing to have done?
- A statistician's most powerful tool is randomness—real, not supposed.
- Beware hypothesis tests and confidence intervals in situations with no real randomness.
- Errors never have a normal distribution. The consequence of pretending that they do depends on the situation, the science, and the goal.
- Worry about systematic error. Systematically.
- There's always a bug, even after you find the last bug.
- Association is not necessarily causation, even if it's Really Strong association.
- Significance is not importance. Insignificance is not unimportance. (Here's a lay explanation of p-values.)
- Life is full of Type III errors.
- Order of operations: Get it right. Then get it published.
- The most important work is often not the hardest nor the most interesting technically, but it requires the most patience: a technical tour-de-force is typically less useful than curiosity, skeptical persistence, and shoe leather.
- All models are wrong, and most are useless. (apologies to George Box)
- The problem with most Bayesian data analysis is that it starts by pulling a prior out of somebody's posterior. (This is literally and figuratively true: in many examples, analysts adjust the prior to get an answer they like, to the prior itself is posterior to the data, and Bayes' Rule doesn't actually apply.)
Some ultramarathons I've run:
Event | Distance | Year | State | Climb |
---|---|---|---|---|
Angel Island 50k | 50 km | 2005 | CA | 4,200' |
Backward Western States | 100+ mi | 2004 | CA | 21,970' |
Backyard Hundred | 100 mi | 2006 | CA | ~20,000' |
The Bear | 100.33 mi | 2004 | ID | 21,061' |
Berkeley to the Boardwalk Boondoggle | ~100 mi | 2008 | CA | ~15,000' |
Bighorn Mountain Wild & Scenic | 103.6 mi | 2005 | WY | 18,308' |
Calico 50k | 50 km | 2011 | CA | 3,890' |
Cascade Crest Classic | 100 mi | 2005 | WA | 20,470' |
Coyote 2 Moons | 100 mi | 2008 | CA | 28,102' |
Dick Collins Firetrails 50 | 50 mi | 2006, 2007 | CA | 7,800' |
Miwok 100k | 100 km | 2004, 2005 | CA | ~10,000' |
Mt. Diablo Trail Run | 50 km | 2004 | CA | 8,200' |
Octo-Dipsea | 56 mi | 2004 | CA | 18,552' |
Ohlone Double | 100 km | 2008 | CA | 15,600' |
Paatuwaqatsi Water is Life Run | 30 mi | 2010 | AZ | ~6000' |
Rocky Raccoon | 50 mi | 2004 | TX | |
San Diego 100 | 100 mi | 2004 | CA | |
San Diego 50 | 50 mi | 2003 | CA | |
Seacliff Beach Trail Run | 50 km | 2003 | CA | 3,710' |
Skyline 50k | 50 km | 2003, 2006 | CA | 4,750' |
Wildcat to Diablo | 50 mi | 2006, 2008 | CA | ~11,300' |
Wildcat to Diablo | 44 mi | 2010 | CA | ~11,300' |
Lately, I've been running barefoot and in minimalist non-shoes, primarily homemade huaraches. In cold and mud, I run in homemade moccasins or split-toe surfing booties. I believe humans are well suited to distance running in minimal footwear or barefoot.




I'm serious about espresso:
I roast coffee on the stove using a heavy 6q pot and a whisk; I cool the beans in wire collanders. I grind using a Knock Hausgrind hand mill or a Rosco Mini Hand Grinder. In 2011, I abandoned my Olympia Cremina 67 (another review) for a Bacchi stovetop espresso machine. It is not a mokka pot, although it looks like one. It's a steam-powered piston espresso machine, truly a marvel of engineering. In 2016, I replaced it with a Rossa HC Hand Espresso machine, a hand-cranked screw-driven piston machine, with a naked portafilter. It consistently pulls (pushes?) amazing shots; it's silent; and it's small and light enough for travel.



I bake:
I don't eat wheat, rye or oats now, but I used to bake bread from scratch, including grinding the grain by hand.



Now I do some grainless baking. These are a pumpkin seed and coconut brittle with cardamom; grainless peanut butter and mace cookies with foraged bay nuts, orange zest, and sel gris; and pecan brittle with orange habanero, cinnamon, and orange zest:



I forage, mostly for greens. See forage.berkeley.edu
These pictures include blewitt mushrooms, cat's ear, chickweed, cow parsnip stems, dock, field mustard leaves and flowers, plantago, fennel, sheep sorrel, purple sage, miner's lettuce, western lettuce, bitter lettuce, sow thistle, prickly sow thistle, several varieties of dandelion, mallow, bracken fern fiddleheads, bay nuts, bay leaves, young pine needles, mugwort, pineapple weed, wild onions, wormwood, yarrow, wild blackberries, raspberries, huckleberries, gooseberries, and wild plums. See also the Berkeley Open Source Food Project.






















Favorite wheels:
Mostly I walk or run for transportation. My daily driver is a Brompton Superlight 6S with a rear triple substituted for the stock double (making it 9-speed), and a bunch of weight-saving modifications. (It's amazing to be able to put a functional bike into the overhead bin on a plane, carry a bike into a cafe, onto a train, etc.)
My Erdös Number is 3:
(Erdös → Felzenbaum → Hochberg → Stark)
(Erdös → Bollob´s → Arratia → Stark)
(Erdös → Diaconis → Freedman → Stark)
(Erdös → Diaconis → Evans → Stark)
(Erdös → Tovey → Donoho → Stark)
(Erdös → Kleitman → Rivest → Stark)
(Erdös → Linial → Rivest → Stark)
(Erdös → Odlyzko → Rivest → Stark)
(Erdös → Spencer → Rivest → Stark)
In December 2006, there were about 33,605 people with Erdös number 3. I believe that my Erdös number of the second kind is also 3; in December 2006, there were about 10,118 people with an Erdös number of the second kind equal to 3.
I'm an academic descendent of Sir Isaac Newton ;-)
Sir Isaac Newton | 1642-1727 |
Roger Cotes | 1682-1716 |
Robert Smith | 1689-1768 |
Antony Shepherd | 1721-1796 |
Samuel Vince | 1749-1821 |
Robert Woodhouse | 1773-1827 |
George Peacock | 1791-1858 |
Augustus De Morgan | 1806-1871 |
E.J. Routh | 1831-1907 |
Lord Rayleigh | 1842-1919 |
J.J. Thomson | 1856-1940 |
Lord Rutherford | 1871-1937 |
Sir Edward Bullard | 1907-1980 |
Robert L. Parker | 1942- |
Philip B. Stark | 1960- |
(Devised by Duncan Agnew.)
Schooling
My education is idiosyncratic. I dropped out of high school to go to MIT, where I intended to major in Physics and Philosophy. After a year, I transferred to Princeton University, where I majored in Philosophy. I spent a semester in Oxford as a junior. From Princeton I went to law school at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). I dropped out after six weeks, and worked in management for an industrial marketing company. After a year, I switched to part-time consulting and took undergraduate courses at UT in Biology, Chemistry, Geology, and Physics, then started graduate work in Geophysics. I transferred from UT to UC San Diego (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), where—while self-employed as a car mechanic—I finished my Ph.D. and started postdoctoral work in Geophysics. I came to UC Berkeley as a postdoc in Statistics, which was my first formal exposure to Probability and Statistics. I was hired as Assistant Professor of Statistics in 1988 after a year as a postdoc.
The King and I
I am not King Harald V of Norway. But I could play him on tv.

Moral system
I am the founder of Vicarism.
In Memoriam
Two of my dearest friends died in late 2008:
John Matthew Emery III, M.D., 8/23/1957–12/7/2008: obituary, eulogy, second eulogy.
David A. Freedman, Ph. D., 3/5/1938–10/17/2008: obituary, eulogy.
Pithosophy
- Stark's Theorem: You can't prove theorems about the real world. (The proof, by exhaustion, is left as an exercise.)
- No matter how busy I am, I can always find time to procrastinate.
- The hardest thing to do is something you don't want to do.
- Nothing feels quite as good as feeling good.
- Pain hurts more than anything else.
- Sometimes, convincing others is less satisfying than punishing those who disagree with you.
- There's no need to seek out irritating wastes of time: They will find you.
- A wise man knows his irritations.
- An anal retentive obsessive compulsive's work is never done.
- The problem with patience is that it's so time-consuming.
- I limit my multi-tasking: I only multi-task while I'm doing other things.
- I try not to be judgmental. On a scale of 1–10, I'd give myself a 4.
- The glass might be half empty. It might be half full. Regardless, somebody will have to wash it.
- Measure thrice.
- Don't take shortcuts if you don't have time to spare.
- I have simple needs, for complex reasons.
- In replication lies truth.
- Nothing exceeds like excess.
- There's no present like time.
- My illusions aren't what they used to be.
- If the answer to a question will make you feel bad—no matter what the answer is—consider not asking.
- If you piss into the wind, you'll probably get wet. The stronger the stream or the breeze, the wetter you're likely to get.
- Just because you're a jerk doesn't mean you have to act like one.
- Meditation is all fun and games, until somebody loses an I.
- There's a fine line between being morally eccentric and having a scruple loose.
- Unsolicited advice is rarely heeded. Ditto for solicited advice.
- I compensate for lack of willpower with robust appetite.
- I'm a pretty good Buddhist: usually in the present, tense.
- Pro tip: You will never fall down if you touch the ground only with your feet.
- Popularity and veracity are uncorrelated.
- Everybody is dealt a different optimization problem: different objective function, different constraints.
- No one deserves his lot.
- If I had a nickel for every time I've heard somebody misuse "statistically significant," I'd have a statistically significant number of nickels.
Favorite neologisms
- Assumptimation
- To estimate by making unrealistic assumptions. Usage: They assumptimated the cost of climate change over the next 300 years.
- Irrationalization
- To go to absurd lengths or make absurd arguments to rationalize an action, opinion, or conclusion.
- Nematoadie
- Someone who is a slave to his or her parasite masters (be they the microbiome, nematodes, or other); i.e., most of us.
- Pithosophy
- Experience, distilled.
- Quantifauxcation
- To assign a meaningless number, then pretend that since it's quantitative, it's meaningful. Examples: student evaluations of teaching effectiveness; earthquake probabilities.
- Somatisfaction
- Somatic satisfaction
- Unnececeremony
- Don't stand on it.
- Obscenery
- You try to look away, but end up soaking it in.
Haiku on working as an Expert Witness
The job is simple:
Help the judge and the jury
understand the truth.
If the other side
were scrupulous and careful,
I would be useless.
Opposing counsel:
They feed me and my children.
Why don't I love them?
A clean beheading
beats Death by 1,000 Cuts &dots;
whether yours or mine.
Favorite quotations and things I wish I'd said (first)
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. —Sir Francis Bacon
By far the best proof is experience. —Sir Francis Bacon
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune. —Sir Francis Bacon
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. —Gloria Steinem
No ask, no get. —unknown
The more you assume, the less you know. —Robert L. Parker
Caeteris are never paribus. —Andrea Saltelli
It's hard to tell the difference between science-based policy and policy-based science. —Andrea Saltelli
A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it. —Albert Einstein
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. —Niels Bohr
Timing Toast.
There's an art of knowing when.
Never try to guess.
Toast until it smokes and then
Twenty seconds less.
—Piet Hein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away. —Tom Waits
We pass over all regularity conditions in respectful silence. —David A. Freedman
Naturally, there is a desire to substitute intellectual capital for labor. —David A. Freedman
Keep after the rascals. —David A. Freedman
You can express the most outrageous heresy and—if you get the tone right—people will just nod and smile. —David A. Freedman
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. —Richard P. Feynman
If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted. —Karl Popper
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve. —Karl Popper
[] no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white. —Karl Popper
It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness. —Karl Popper
Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification – the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit. —Karl Popper
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude. —Karl Popper
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! —Upton Sinclair
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. —Albert Einstein
When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends. —Mark Twain
There is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. —Astronaut saying
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. —George Bernard Shaw
There is no sincerer love than the love of food. —George Bernard Shaw
I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. —George Bernard Shaw
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. — George Orwell
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig. —Robert A. Heinlein
An armed society is a polite society. —Robert A. Heinlein
So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. —Psalm 90:12
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. —Anatole France
Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal. —Anatole France
An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid. —Ernest Rutherford
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken. —Oliver Cromwell
When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir? —John Maynard Keynes
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. —J.W. Tukey [I would add, "if you know how bad the approximation might be."]
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data. —J.W. Tukey
We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true. —Robert Wilensky
If you want to make small changes, change how you do things. If you want to make big changes, change how you see things. —Gabe Brown
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. —Jack Kornfield
Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man. —Leon Trotsky
Revolutions are always verbose. —Leon Trotsky
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. —Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
The difference between theory and practice is smaller in theory than it is in practice. —unknown
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. (The Napoleon-Clarke Law) —Vernon Schryver and/or Paul Ciszek.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. (Grey's Law) —Andy Finkel
The core of [the scientific method] is remembering your own level of ignorance. —Jaron Lanier
It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers abroad. —George Box
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. —Mary Wollstonecraft
Reality: what a concept! —Robin Williams
A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles. —Joseph Addison
Some virtues are only seen in affliction and some in prosperity. —Joseph Addison
If you wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. —Toni Morrison
Life is short, but the days and nights are long. —Cheryl Wheeler
Now I don't know but I've been told
it's hard to run with the weight of gold.
Other hand I've heard it said
It's just as hard with the weight of lead.
—Robert Hunter, New Speedway Boogie
If everybody's grateful, how come nobody's satisfied? —Ryan Adams
I'm not a passenger: I am the ride. —Chris Smither
I would not mind being lonesome, if I had someone to call. —Chris Smither
And when I do my job, I am thinking about these things. Because when I do my job, that is what I think about. —Laurie Anderson
You don't like the sound of the truth
Coming from my mouth.
You say that I lack the proof.
Baby, that might be so. —Patty Griffin
Just because you shot Jesse James, don't make you Jesse James. —spoken by Mike Ehrmantraut, in Breaking Bad Season 5, Episode 3, by Peter Gould
Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose. —spoken by Arthur Howitzer, Jr., in The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, by Wes Anderson
If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day. —Leonard Cohen
Well, that happened. —spoken by Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni) Happy, Season 2, Episode 8, "A Friend of Death," directed by Wayne Yip
Such is life, and it just gets such-er and such-er. —Hungarian saying
Today is an average day: worse than yesterday but better than tomorrow. —Russian saying
Life is good. But a good life is better. —Russian saying
Ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veri dicere non audeat. —Cicero
If the shortcut saved time, it would be the regular route. —unknown
No ask, no get. —unknown
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. —unknown
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. —unknown
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions. —G.K. Chesterton
If something isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well. —unknown
There are two reasons I don't trust people: (1) I don't know them. (2) I know them. —unknon
It's only when you look at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realize how often they burst into flames. —Harry Hill
"Research" is when you don't know what you're doing. —unknown (By this definition, I do a lot of research.)
Nuance doesn't scale. —John Vermes
Life isn't one damned thing after another. It's the same damned thing over and over. —unknown
Starting is a shortcut. —Dan Charnas
Last modified 5 October 2024. www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/other.htm