Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers, and picking the right fights
On the way to and from my mother-in-law’s house today, I finished Theodore Porter’s Trust in Numbers (1995). (I should say that I finished it while my spouse was driving!) While I was distraught this morning at Porter’s style, I slogged through, a matter which I knew was important. And the book has plenty of […]
Kids, don’t write these sentences at home
I was wondering why I just couldn’t get far in Theodore Porter’s Trust in Numbers (1995) until I came across the following (on p. 15): Lorraine Daston instances Charles Dufay, a French researcher of the 1720s and 1730s, to epitomize a different experimental ideal. So it’s not my lagging attention due to a virus. It’s […]