Berna Devezer

I knew I forgot something!

me sitting on a low, long, concrete platform with words Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität carved in it

me and Leibniz, we go way back

I have my suspicions. Drunk on nervous liquor, you never know.

edition*
it's getting late; the brain is mush

I waited for Mead to discover Newton's occult works and alchemical writings to explain the drivers of poisoning in much later addition. Alas... he might have drawn the line somewhere.

Me: Wow fascinating how little we knew about so much 300 years ago

Hubby: de Moivre wrote the first serious work on probability theory with Doctrine of Chances in 1718 and added the first special case of Central Limit Theorem (de Moivre-Laplace theorem) in the second edition

What any of this had anything to do with Newton, no one seemed to understand. Which appears to be the main reason historians chided him.

He ended up tending to Newton as a physician in his later years so at least his fandom paid off in some way!

In the 9th ed of his book on poisoning, Mead switches gears from Newton's Principia to his Optiks (still a devoted fan), renounces his earlier mechanistic explanation and decides that poisons can't be acting on blood because their effects are too sudden, so they must be acting on nervous liquor!

Due to my earlier research I also remember him shrugging off the idea of someone else replicating his experiment as unnecessary (not using such generous words either) because he already showed why it should work and that it worked! No one should take heed of anyone else.

LMAO very on character!

Me: Wow fascinating how little we knew about so much 300 years ago

Hubby: de Moivre wrote the first serious work on probability theory with Doctrine of Chances in 1718 and added the first special case of Central Limit Theorem (de Moivre-Laplace theorem) in the second edition

well it did make me laugh out loud, derivative or not!

Quite surprisingly, Mead was able to offer some common features when explaining such distinct cases: poisons obstructing blood circulation, a process of fermentation, poisons damaging the internal fabric of the body mechanically (thru picking & tearing).

Apparently historians hung him out to dry.

glad I wasn't drinking something hot while reading this

Newtonian physician Richard Mead wrote Mechanical Account of Poisons in 1702. His general mechanism of all poisons is based on a collection of five essays on poisonous things. Namely: vipers, tarantulas and mad dogs, poisonous minerals, opium, and bad airs.

A very puzzling combo to say the least!

ah the 'I don't like X >> it's because X is a and b >> a and b makes X morally wrong >> no one should like or do X >> those who do X are both stupid and evil' pipeline

most confusing part is that it genuinely do be like that sometimes. not always though. not even most of the time.

the suffering one must endure so one can endure more of the same suffering later. life can be so hard sometimes 😂

Surely he was waiting for the rest: Jeff, the magnificent. Jeff, the divine. Jeff, the transcendent.

now that you mention it hmmmmm

🥰

i should question him about his choices!

my faith in this take is getting stronger every day

on the right side*

on my phone i deliberately started scrolling closer to the edge of the screen on the side to avoid accidental liking. now there's a save button exactly on that path.

does anyone else's saved page include a bunch of random posts they must have accidentally saved while scrolling or is it just me? either that or my tastes change really fast and the past berna is currently unrecognizable to me.

OK the actual closure to this 7-parter is here:

"It’s only from the incremental pieces that aren’t precisely reproducible or clean that we can see the big picture. Don’t worry about the distribution of p-values. Do think hard about how to produce reproducible data and coding artifacts."

Congratulations! Nice trick to get it done when no one else was looking 😂

That clip of Timothee Chalamet being like “no one watches the opera or ballet” is wild and I am dying over every ballet and opera acct (correctly) being like “we’ve been here for hundreds of years before you and we’ll be here for hundreds of years after you” lmao

Anyhow ultimately this work wasn't as interesting to me as I hoped it would be. It's just a theoretical version of Devezer's urn again.

It upsets me that we have no standards whatsoever on this. Kitchen sink citation habits make it so much worse.