Linear Digressions

@BittahWizard Honestly, it just felt like time. Nothing more or less than that.

@LinDigressions Thank you both for all of your hard work! Content creation is hard, even harder to make great content. This was one of the few I never missed. Guess I’ll start listening to them all over again. Care to share why you’re stopping?

After over 5 amazing years of podcasting, we're hanging up our microphones--it's with bittersweetness that we say that this week's episode will be the last of Linear Digressions. It's been so much fun joining you each week, and we will miss you all. Thanks for listening! 🤓❤️👋

@PerryMoen1 Stay tuned. Some pals are cooking up an idea for a new podcast and I'll be helping out when launch time comes...

@LinDigressions aaaannnnd?

@SadnessGlutton ok i lol'd at this

@DanielMKiefer hahaha like your style

@LinDigressions I've really enjoyed the show; I'm sorry to see it end. Thanks for all your hard work. Parting question: Do you think enough content was covered for us to create an algorithm for autogenerating new episodes using the show archive as input? I'll take my answer off the air. ❤️

@TomWeinandy Ha yeah that sounds pretty close! But probably not literally me, I was jamming more with a Naive Bayes classifier during most of my time at CERN 🤓

@LinDigressions Hey Katie, this sounds like you! What are the odds you were involved???

Data scientist and PhD student in criminology @ZachDrakeTweets is on the pod this week, unpacking statistical pitfalls, challenges detangling cause and effect, and data-driven criminal justice policy from an expert perspective

This week: explaining an algorithm that's used to sentence defendants. It's harsher on black defendants than whites. But the algorithm isn't buggy, it's the patterns it learns from replicating racist policing patterns that are broken. It's the system. #BlackLivesMatter

[Katie here] We're doing a rerun this week. I didn't plan to, but events of last week and this weekend make podcasting seem less important than usual. For folks who've asked over the years how they can support the podcast: donate to a bail fund or food pantry. #BlackLivesMatter

@ThomasSpeidel Climate models or hurricane models?

@LinDigressions I know you once did an episode on weather forecasting models. For the life of me I can't find it... Any hints?

This week's episode features AI expert Prof. Stuart Russell, in a discussion about the risky path that AI is currently on and what changes we should make now for our long-term safety and happiness. AI is powerful stuff, folks--let's not mess this up.

This week's episode: the ups and downs, the ins and outs (mostly ins) of working from home. What are you all doing to stay sane and productive if you're suddenly working from home full time right now?

This has big implications for the importance of social distancing of a way to get the pandemic under control and explains why a more comprehensive testing program is critical for the United States 3/3 Here's the paper: science.sciencemag.org/content/early/…

This episode digs into the epidemiological model that was published in Science this week—this model finds that the data suggests that the majority of carriers of the coronavirus, 80-90%, do not have a detected disease lineardigressions.com/episodes/2020/… 2/3

One thing that’s extremely important to understand, in order to fight covid-19 as effectively as possible, is how the virus spreads and especially how much of the spread of the disease comes from carriers who are experiencing no or mild symptoms but are contagious anyway 1/3

Stay safe out there, everyone. We'll talk to you again next week.

What does this mean? STAY HOME RIGHT NOW, as much as you can. Practice good hygiene. It doesn't matter if you think you'll be fine (although even young and healthy people are ending up in ICUs), the network effects of your actions are huge for others.

Now seems like a good time to re-release an episode where, among other things, we cover this paper: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…