dmwood

Photo editor of a 1970 high school yearbook here. These are accurate reflections of MY memories too. Maybe it was a Yashica Mat I used...

In my dotage I have become interested in radiation epidemiology and, of course, the issue of 'statistical power' comes up repeatedly. As noted, most physicists know only as much statistics as is absolutely necessary for their work. It would be wonderful to introduce statistics by a set of scenarios (possibly with references to relevant parts of the text itself) drawn from, say, 10 distinct fields. To my dismay, I found that chatGPT did a remarkably decent job of telling me what had been missing in my readings. So think of the project as: what value is added above what a reader could find after 30 minutes of AI delving.

C'mon, man. The use of the 'attributable fraction' (AF) in legal cases about toxin exposure is well established, if not uniformly legally applied. Careful epidemiology routinely produces the `excess relative risk' of an exposed population to a specific exposure. From this the AF can be computed as ERR/(1+ERR). For example, for uranium miners in the early days of the nuclear program the AF for lung cancer (via radon in mines) was 60% or more. Large scale epidemiology for U.S. cabin crews is already past the planning phases. Naturally not much can be said about one individual's case (except via intrusive genetic testing for predisposing factors), but the AF permits at least a rational way of proceeding.

Crashes on launch

macOS: macos-26_arm version installs (with intervention to permit running), but crashes on launch. ------------------------------------- Translated Report (Full Report Below) ------------------------------------- Process: perspec [94673] Path: /Users/USER//Perspec.app/Contents/Resources/perspec Identifier: perspec Version: ??? Code Type: ARM-64 (Native) Role: Unspecified Parent Process: Exited process [94672] Coalition: com.adriansieber.Perspec [86355] Responsible Process: Perspec [94671] User ID: 501

Date/Time: 2026-08-04 12:50:37.5848 -0600 Launch Time: 2026-08-04 12:50:37.5821 -0600 Hardware Model: Mac13,1 OS Version: macOS 26.6 (25G72) Release Type: User

Crash Reporter Key: 9FD40ACB-279F-0F79-41E1-8B4D3B663EA7 Incident Identifier: 207F9047-B786-4C8C-8263-BA9C4DB370EB

Time Awake Since Boot: 320000 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Triggered by Thread: 0

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT) Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Termination Reason: Namespace DYLD, Code 1, Library missing Library not loaded: /opt/homebrew//libwebp.7.dylib Referenced from: <47F30FA1-4AB9-310F-8988-5CABFEF76F5E> /Users/USER//Perspec.app/Contents/Resources/perspec Reason: tried: '/opt/homebrew//libwebp.7.dylib' (no such file), '/System/Volumes/Preboot/Cryptexes/OS/opt/homebrew//libwebp.7.dylib' (no such file), '/opt/homebrew//libwebp.7.dylib' (no such file) (terminated at launch; ignore backtrace)

Dyld Error Message: 1

Question from a naive macports user. To some extent brew is orthogonal to macports. Is there an easy way to link to ffmpeg installed by macports? Thanks.

Not an average software engineer--beautiful page (imperfect spelling)! Why does detection scale as the 4th root of the RCS? Nice problem for the radiation theory part of a graduate electrodynamics class.

Yippy! I feel like I'm 15 years younger

This appears to be prodigiously powerful, but has a --dry-run option and support for whitelists. I love the fact that it's a lightweight and verbose script.

Thank you for your website.

A trip to Wanamakers at Christmas (including eating in the top-floor restaurant and listening to scheduled organ concerts) was a treasured fixture of my childhood in the late 50s and early 60s. If I remember correctly, there was a monorail-like tram that ran around the periphery of the toy department too. Christmas lights festooned the facade of the organ.

Depending on the field, 3 Gy IS 'small' (with respect to doses to tissue during cancer treatment, which can be 60 Gy). Whole body doses of 1 milliGy in the environmental biz are considered worth examination. Even investigations of biomarkers for radiation exposure typically use doses in the range of 3 Gy.

Probably from one of the crazies in Dr. Strangelove (the movie)

Phenomenal. Just wish I knew if this was under a CC license.