Philipp Wacker
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phkwacker.bsky.social
Philipp Wacker
@phkwacker.bsky.social
170 followers 550 following 150 posts
Senior Lecturer in Statistics, University of Canterbury (NZ).
he/him
Bayesian stats, Applied Math, filtering & sampling
pls send me awesome vegan waffle recipes!
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phkwacker.bsky.social
This is brutal. Without even mentioning all the science funding cuts youtu.be/h-yjkAXxnMA?...
Honest Government Ad | Visit New Zealand!
YouTube video by thejuicemedia
youtu.be
October 14, 2025 at 8:24 PM
phkwacker.bsky.social
I am sure he will take it well when he won't have won the Nobel Peace Prize in four hours.
October 10, 2025 at 7:01 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
Who decided that the literally most vanilla dessert flavor that everyone can agree on is a very specific South American orchid? Runner-up: Rotten tree seeds, from a very specific South American tree.
September 16, 2025 at 8:12 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
Declined an invitation to a Minisymposium at a conference I usually like to go to solely because the location is in the US.
August 23, 2025 at 1:26 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
As a mapping from C to C, z \mapsto z is holomorphic, but z \mapsto \bar z is not? How do you explain reconcile this with the assumption of an all-powerful and benign god, theists?
August 20, 2025 at 1:27 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
The last few weeks I have been using our fantastic UC makerspace (with its 3d printers, soldering iron, and tools) to print the OpenFlexure Project Manual Microscope. Kudos to @openflexure.bsky.social for an amazing open source design. Looking forward to looking at pond water and earth critters.
3d-printed microscope in black, gray, and light blue. Shows a power source consisting of 3 AA batteries and badly soldered connections. A hair follicle under magnification. Looks like a black-ish twisted worm with four edges (?)
July 29, 2025 at 7:46 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
This might be the perfect way to phrase it
catebridget.bsky.social Catherine ❄️ @catebridget.bsky.social · Jul 21
it’s like they think that the laws of nature and laws of physics are riddles hidden in the words themselves, so if you shuffle the words enough times like a slot machine, you’ll make new discoveries. that’s not only unscientific, it’s literally magical thinking.
July 21, 2025 at 7:52 PM
phkwacker.bsky.social
Next time I run out of symbols/letters for a paper, I will take my cue from the ridiculous stuff economists seem to be get away with. This is all from a single publication.
(grave) accented beta, boldly generalising the concept of pitch accent from vowels to consonants. A hebrew Dalet, and a strike-out capital, no-serif D. The strike out comes directly after an inline "/", leading to two diagonal lines with very different meaning. I would have given bonus points for combining Dalet with a capital Gamma but it seems the authors chickened out at the last time. vertically flipped capital Omega ("Agemo"?), superscript g word-final version of lower case sigma, multiplied by "normal" lower-case sigma (squared), subscript capital Xi (cursive!)
July 17, 2025 at 2:34 AM
Reposted by Philipp Wacker
olivia.science
"When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning." deplet.ing/the-copilot-...
The Copilot Delusion
Disclaimer: This post was written May 2025, and the arguments apply to AI code capabilities at this time. The arguments around lack of competence are certainly likely to become less prevalent-while th...
deplet.ing
June 24, 2025 at 7:57 PM
phkwacker.bsky.social
What is the correct metre for the "woof, woof, woof, woof" part of "Who let the dogs out"? This has been on my mind too much recently, so here's my attempt. You're welcome, internet. (or am I wrong?)
four bits of "woof", on ONE-e-and-e-two-e-AND-e-three-e-AND-e-four-E-and-e
June 3, 2025 at 6:14 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
the sound that you're hearing is global maths research grinding to a halt
May 14, 2025 at 8:01 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
Please sign this petition if you're based in NZ www.together.org.nz/fbt_for_pay_...
Protect Pay Equity – stop scrapping equal pay claims and law
Sign the petition: Protect Pay Equity
www.together.org.nz
May 14, 2025 at 2:42 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
New dating platform for tradies just dropped
Photo of "Pro-strength Liquid PLUMR clog destroyer gel"
May 13, 2025 at 8:23 PM
phkwacker.bsky.social
Maybe not surprising, but today I found out that a Zoom call with participants from Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and the US is hard to schedule.
May 8, 2025 at 8:20 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
This is about half a year too late, but finally Germany's domestic intelligence agency has declared AfD "confirmed right-wing extremist". www.faz.net/aktuell/poli...
Verfassungsschutz stuft AfD als gesichert rechtsextremistisch ein
Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz stuft die AfD als gesichert rechtsextremistisch ein. Der Inlandsgeheimdienst teilte mit, der Verdacht, dass die...
www.faz.net
May 2, 2025 at 8:17 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
I do want to encourage everyone to follow Auschwitz Memorial in order to get regular reminders on their timeline of what fascism invariably leads to.
auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social Auschwitz Memorial @auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social · Apr 30
1 May 1932 | A Hungarian Jewish girl, Agnes Neuman, was born in Szombathely.

In July 1944 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber.
A photo of a smiling girl with long hair and braids.
April 30, 2025 at 11:18 PM
phkwacker.bsky.social
One of the most fun things about reading comic books in languages you are trying to learn is that you learn "comic speak", i.e. other languages equivalents of "kaboom" and the like.
A cartoon panel of an old Victorian (?) home with lots of forest and shrubbery in the background. In the sky above the house the words هاهاها، هاهاها hang in the air, transliterating hearty laughter that can be heard outside
April 27, 2025 at 5:06 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
I found a super cool example for an affine space (as contrasted to a vector space) in real life: A piano keyboard (or more abstractly, musical notes in the western music tradition). You cannot add two notes (points) to get a new points, because you will get a chord, which is something else entirely.
April 22, 2025 at 12:59 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
Finally time for baking over the holidays. Rye/wheat
Two long-ish loaves of bread, dark brown color, with diagonal cuts
April 20, 2025 at 9:50 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
Something cool I understood this week: The Kullback-Leibler divergence between two multivariate Gaussian distributions has a closed form solution. The term with the means somehow makes sense: Penalise a covariance-weighted squared distance between the respective means. But all these matrix terms?
Formula for KL divergence between two Gaussians N_0 and N_1 {\displaystyle D_{\text{KL}}\left({\mathcal {N}}_{0}\parallel {\mathcal {N}}_{1}\right)={\frac {1}{2}}\left(\operatorname {tr} \left(\Sigma _{1}^{-1}\Sigma _{0}\right)-k+\left(\mu _{1}-\mu _{0}\right)^{\mathsf {T}}\Sigma _{1}^{-1}\left(\mu _{1}-\mu _{0}\right)+\ln \left({\frac {\det \Sigma _{1}}{\det \Sigma _{0}}}\right)\right).}
March 24, 2025 at 9:52 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
What's happening with the indices here? Why are they not aligned?
PDF LaTeX output of $Y_i Y_i^\top$. The heights of the two indices i are not aligned.
March 23, 2025 at 10:06 PM
phkwacker.bsky.social
I like all the songs in both Moana and Moana 2, but it has been bugging me that in "How far I'll go", she sings "Everybody on this island has a role on this island", rhyming "island" with "island". Is this just lazy writing or am I missing some hidden metaphor or something here?
March 20, 2025 at 6:38 AM
phkwacker.bsky.social
Ominous. (Seen in Sydney)
A scary looking storm drain(?) with a placque above it which says "The detention control pit shall be regularly inspected and cleaned"
March 13, 2025 at 9:15 AM
Reposted by Philipp Wacker
adrianaguatame.bsky.social
A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬
There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.
March 6, 2025 at 4:40 PM
phkwacker.bsky.social
Trying to be more mindful of violent language that I inadvertently use (and reduce it). In math we often write "with abuse of notation". I am on the fence about whether that's still an appropriate way to phrase this (and leaning towards "no"). #mathsky, what are your thoughts? Any alternatives?
March 6, 2025 at 7:56 AM