JordiGH @JordiGH@mathstodon.xyz

Time for new #introductions!

I'm Jordi. #Mexican expat living in #Montreal, #Canada. I can say expat instead of immigrant 'cause I've had a super-sheltered and comfortable life. Nothing dreadful has ever happened to me.

I like #mathematics, #knitting, #skating, #swimming, and old #gameing because I'm old (not that old).

I also do software stuff because of course.

I work on #GreenhouseGas assessments and #environmental #mapping, which I want to call #ecological cause we need that word again!

Pet peeve: hyphenation of Spanish surnames for the benefit of English speakers and other foreigners.

We have two family names! Father's and mother's, in that order! I will forever fight that hyphen between my surnames just because other cultures don't understand that I want both of my parents in my name.

Man, I don't know why I was having so much trouble yesterday. The Poisson-like distribution with heavier tails that I wanted akin to a discretised Gamma distribution -- I almost exactly described a negative binomial distribution.

I think I was getting confused because it appears that Octave and Excel reverse the usual roles of the probabilities of success and failure that I see elsewhere.

Whoo boy, made some #vindaloo so hot that my ears popped like when the air pressure changes, aw, yeah, that's the good stuff.

I have been extremely lucky in my life that I have always been able to choose what I can do, so my dad's advice worked for me.

I don't think I've always worked as hard to be as good as I could be. But I remember his advice and try to work harder. I was given everything in this life, so it is only fair I try to do a little something for others, as much as I can.

I was fortunate to feel loved by my dad. He never quite knew what to make of me, but he was kind and helpful, even if I don't feel like he ever understood me completely.

At his funeral I told the story of the best advice he ever gave me: do whatever you want to, be whatever you can. Be a scientist, be a street sweeper. It doesn't matter how you decide to help. But if you decide to sweep streets, always try to be the best damn street sweeper ever.

I wanted to write a blog post but in the middle of it I got distracted by the negative binomial distribution and I had forgotten everything about it.

Now I'm trying to figure out how #Octave defines it and if it just has some parameters backwards compared to textbooks and Wikipedia or if I'm reading it wrong.

What's a good distribution for Poisson-like counts but with heavier tails? Say, for 1000 counts with average 2, 98% of all counts cluster around 0-5, but twenty counts go as high as 100 in value.

Maybe some discretised gamma distribution?

I have seen African women get praised for their colourful summer clothes around town, usually by white women.

I wonder if they appreciate the praise or would just rather be left alone.

Anyone got a favourite banana pancake recipe? I need to fix some breakfast.

So much of some people's thinking is based on fear and uncertainty, and then they redirect this fear and uncertainty by punching down instead of punching up.

I responded with, "That's not hate speech. Hate speech is speech that attacks a person or a group on the basis of protected attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity."

This made me think, some people really don't know what hate speech is. They think it's just any kind of expression of unhappiness. They're afraid they won't be able to say something like "I don't like this video game".

You know how a lot of people against hate speech rules say that, well, who defines hate speech? They are afraid that banning hate speech means that anyone will get banned for any arbitrary reason, that banning hate speech means moderators will go hungry with power.

Someone just came to a #Battletoads chat room I moderate, wanting to express discontent with the new game, but was afraid of getting banned for having his or her discontent interpreted as "hate speech".