OT, but I love the explanation of the name of the author's blog ("The Hardest Science"):

https://hardsci.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/making-progress-in-...

The author's field of study is psychology, often thought of as the softest science. It reminds me of the initially non-intuitive reasons for why the two hard problems (naming things and cache invalidation) in computer science are hard: because their solutions are non-deterministic and inextricably linked to human decision making and needs:

> What are the “hard” — as in difficult — problems in science? Hard problems in science are those that are embedded in complex systems; they are hard because to study something well you often need to isolate it from outside influences. Hard problems are those that vary by local conditions — science seeks to identify general laws, and when something is locally dependent, you need to sniff out the complex interactions that make it so.

I want to take this course! Assessing the state of publication, significance testing, experimental inference, and more? Great subjects....

(Since I wear a lot of black, I should do fine on the exam.)

undefined

undefined