Hi, I’m Michael 👋

My dog Sudo has diabetes. In humans, that is quite manageable. Constant monitoring of blood sugar levels and insulin dosage is required, but many tools exist to help with this and – importantly – are covered by medical insurance. The situation with dogs tends to be more challenging. Fewer tools are available and many people don’t have medical insurance for their dogs. According to our local vet, this unfortunately leads to many dogs being euthanized instead of cared for. Care for the dogs themselves is more challenging as well. The process for establishing Sudo’s dose was as follows: for about two weeks, he wore a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and we recorded his blood sugar levels. We then used that data to determine his insulin dosage. We settled on one specific dog food that he would get the same amount twice a day, every day so that his carb intake stays stable. We administer insulin twice a day with his food. The vet used that data to generate a dosing table. Most people apparently just use a fixed dose twice daily, because some dogs are not particularly fond of blood sugar sticks and CGM is expensive. Sudo has been doing well with the blood sugar pricks, so we have generally been able to use adjustment doses as recommended. ...

My new post demonstrating how to do Bayesian analysis with MI is live.

A fun physics problem people keep getting wrong, despite knowing all the relevant physics.

Substack’s algorithm for figuring out what I like to read is still serving up some odd stuff, but this time it found a good article. In The Mensa Fallacy Emil Kirkegaard takes on Karpinski et al (2018) which claimed that high intelligence is a risk factor for both psychological and physiological disease. The claim in the paper is to a novel finding, but Kirkegaard cites a number of studies that would indicate problems with Karpinski’s arguments. ...

If you visit the Project Jupyter website you’ll encounter a bunch of “try it in your browser” buttons. If you’ve used Jupyter for a decade or so like me, you probably have also been ignoring these buttons. And if you have clicked on them, you might have been lead to a mybinder.org. Don’t get me wrong, mybinder is cool. It creates a docker image that remote-hosts a live environment so that you can share your interactive notebooks on the web. Cool stuff. But I just found something better. ...

Most have heard of Pascal’s wager, but have you heard of the thought experiment known as Pascal’s mugging? The mugging attempts to reframe the essence of the wager argument using only finite values, thereby getting around some standard objections to the wager argument. ...

Ever heard someone say they were “letting the data speak for itself?” I often encounter this phrase on the internet by someone claiming not to be interpreting the data, but merely relaying facts. I don’t believe that’s actually true in the sense that it’s typically meant. ...

Improve the interpretation of your frequentist analysis output’s strength of evidence by incorporating Bayes factor bounds using SAS.

I have recently returned to work from my paternity leave. I really enjoyed my time with my youngest and am grateful to SAS for providing 8 weeks of paid paternity leave – a benefit that remains uncommon in the United States. This precious time allowed me to bond with my youngest child and navigate the dynamic world of parenting four children whose ages span from infancy to the teenage years. ...

From the null program: Object Oriented C Skeeto’s C coding style Portable Makefiles Beating NumPy’s Matrix Multiplication in C. A list of cli-tools provided by Python.