Philipp Wacker
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phkwacker.bsky.social
Philipp Wacker
@phkwacker.bsky.social
Senior Lecturer in Statistics, University of Canterbury (NZ).
he/him
Bayesian stats, Applied Math, filtering & sampling
pls send me awesome vegan waffle recipes!
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
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
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
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
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
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.
July 29, 2025 at 7:46 AM
This might be the perfect way to phrase it
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
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.
July 17, 2025 at 2:34 AM
Reposted by Philipp Wacker
"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
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?)
June 3, 2025 at 6:14 AM
the sound that you're hearing is global maths research grinding to a halt
May 14, 2025 at 8:01 AM
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
New dating platform for tradies just dropped
May 13, 2025 at 8:23 PM
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
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
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.
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.
April 30, 2025 at 11:18 PM
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.
April 27, 2025 at 5:06 AM
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
Finally time for baking over the holidays. Rye/wheat
April 20, 2025 at 9:50 AM
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?
March 24, 2025 at 9:52 AM
What's happening with the indices here? Why are they not aligned?
March 23, 2025 at 10:06 PM
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
Ominous. (Seen in Sydney)
March 13, 2025 at 9:15 AM
Reposted by Philipp Wacker
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
🧪👩‍🔬
March 6, 2025 at 4:40 PM
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