Is World War III coming?

You say you are a statistician. What programming language/s do you use to carry out data analysis?

Is World War III coming?

Given the absence of a time frame in the question, I'd say it's very likely... Let's just hope that it won't be any time soon?

Globalisation is a thing for now, and as a result any conflict really gets international meddling, both in the form of foreign governments taking sides in conflicts, or in the form of actively or behind the screens helping in the negotiation between warring parties.
Of course, foreign or outisde meddling is not limited to conflict, for this question that is just the most relevant part of it.

In both previous world wars, we did see an escalation happening. Tensions rising between nations, an event or series of events that lead to a declaration of war between two nations where others chose or were forced to be involved, until in the end nearly the whole world was involved.

At this moment, I see up to six separate, yet connected situations that could cause that, listed here in order of likelihood.

The first is the ongoing war in Ukraine. If Russia decides to escalate through the use of nuclear weapons, it's not unimaginable that the US or NATO decides to attack Russia itself. This could lead to a series of events where most of the world gets involved in one way or another, especially since in this conflict sides are already pretty baked in.
However, China may be reluctant to openly take Russia's side if it uses nuclear weapons, and in Africa people are just not interested in this. Russia may be unlikely to resort to the use of nuclear weapons if through diplomatic channels China told or tells them that this is crossing a red line for them too.

The second is a potential invasion of Taiwan by China. Winnie the Pooh has recently upped his rhetoric and there is no denying that they feel strengthened by how easi it was in the end to get Hong Kong back in the fold. Have no doubt that the Chinese government is keeping a keen eye on how the war in Ukraine evolves, especially when it comes to the behaviour of the US and NATO. If there is a good opportunity, they may strike and given the American guarantees to get involved in that case, things may escalate fast. Additionally, given the massive stakes of China in many countries, we are truly talking about a global crisis if this were to happen. The supply chain issues during Covid would be peanuts compared to the consequences of such a war.
However, the main goal for the Chinese government is to stay in power comfortably. They will not attack Taiwan if they fear that this risks a chain of events that gets them pushed from power. For now, that's still a possibility (otherwise they'd have attacked already). That's why they are taking preparations step by step, from increased security laws, cameras everywhere, face recognising software, online censorship and control including making VPN use illegal, ... The government needs to know that their people are sufficiently powerless to revolt against them before they'd take a major action such as attacking Taiwan.
Finally, it is commonly known that there is only one thing that the Chinese love more than their country, and that's money. A lot of Chinese people are actually pretty much OK with giving up so much of their freedom and privacy because the government implies strongly that this is needed to create a stable environment in which they can have economic growth and earn more money. If an attack of Taiwan would lead to economic sanctions and heavy hits to the Chinese economy, this would lead to unrest for sure. This is why China is diligently working towards becoming an economy that is less dependent on others than others are dependent on them. Spoiler: they are pretty successful at it...
But still, despite all that, Chinese leaders are very rational. They know that way too many countries, some quite powerful, would be all to happy to break their power: US, Japan, India to name a few, and Europe and most Southeast Asian countries are not particularly friends with China either anymore and would, all for their own reasons, likely side against them. It's unclear if African allies could save them in such situation. Needless to say that the Chinese government will be risk averse up to a point and first test the waters before going full blown attack and risking a third world war. This is the reason why I place this one lower than the ongoing Ukraine war.

The third is the current protests in Iran. It's no secret that Iran accuses western countries of being behind it, despite there being abundant proof that the majority of people in Iran is against the current government and way of governing. However, if the situation really starts to escalate there, things may spill over. First of all, Iran and Russia are allies. Secondly, Iran may or may not have nuclear weapons, but they definitely have powerful conventional weapons.
However, I do believe that even if it escalates, it'll likely be a more localised conflict similar to Syria. Which immediately brings me to.

The fourth is the ongoing situation in Syria. While by itself, this conflict is just simmering and not a threat by itself, it was a recent example on how Russia and the NATO sometimes support opposing factions in a war. If this conflict were to increase in strength again, it's not unimaginable, with the situation in Ukraine and Iran in the back of our heads, that tensions would rise beyond the manageable and it would be the first brick that starts toppling the others.

The fifth would start in Brazil. Again not that likely, but if Bolsanairo is defeated in the elections (quite likely), a violent uprise (somewhat likely) up to a civil war (sadly not unlikely) are all on the table. If other countries do get involved, it's not impossible to spill over.
The likelihood of some sort of violent conflict in Brazil is sadly quite large. However, the likelihood of it truly spilling over into a world war rather than a localised conflict is quite small, I'd say.

The sixth would be a new war in the former Yugoslavic republics. Given that both Russia and China are each on their own investing in them and fueling hate against each other, it's not unlikely to have (a) a war between Serbia and Kosovo and (b) a new war in Bosnia. History suggests that the start for a world war was often located in Europe, although I'm not sure if history would be a good indication which population, wealth and global power obviously redistributed in the last decades. Still, it's not impossible that events in former Yugoslavia would once again be a stepping stone to escalation, with a war there weaking a European front/collaboration, followed by nuclear attacks in Ukrained, followed by an invasion in Taiwan, ...

Obviously, other events could happen that shake up the current world order and could act as a trigger to a new war. A new civil war in the US would definitely have consequences all over the world for example, although that currently sounds somewhat unlikely.

Meanwhile, other more likely events are less likely to lead to a world war. Personally, I believe North Korea is too isolated to cause events that lead to a world war, with a more localised war and war by proxy much more likely in my opinion.

Muslim and other terrorism meanwhile seems less of a threat when it comes to a world war, because almost all nations are united against that.

Finally, the renewed rise of right extremism and nationalism is definitely a threat to peace, although current right wing nationalism seems to focus much more on their own country and there is less interest in invading other countries (it's usually more about kicking out and suppressing minorities than it is about the dreams of creating a great empire that spans more territory than they currently have, with the exception of the three examples above - Russia, China, Serbia - which are each not typical right wing extreme nationalism).

You say you are a statistician. What programming language/s do you use to carry out data analysis?

The majority of my data-analysis is done with the R programming language, which is based on the so-called "new S" language, best known for its use in the (now defunct?) S-PLUS statistical program.
I used R for about 80% or so of my data-analysis in the last 4 years, and more than half in my full career, including most of my PhD.

I am quite old-school myself and still use the original RGui most of the time, although for students and colleagues, I usually advice to use RStudio which gives the user more tools for easier use.

Next to R, I mostly use statistical packages rather than programming languages.

I know and use SAS, although I'm not a fan. Especially for clinical trials and when using code of others, SAS is still seen as the gold standard, so as a statistician who does work in that field, I cannot fully avoid it even though I'd like it.
SAS is about 10%-20% of my software use both in my career and recently.
While there is nothing wrong with SAS per se, it's quite a hard program to do, with a steep learning curve that remains eternally steep. It's like nothing can be done in an easy manner in SAS.
If SAS were real life, it'd only allow you to breathe if you first formally declared the concepts of air and lungs.

Recently, I have used Stata more as well. I never had any formal training in Stata, but many people at my institute use it, so I have a licence and can help out where necessary. I'm personally not a fan of Stata with my two main pet peeves being that (a) it doesn't seem to be able to consistently choose between being code-based or menu-based, with both being possible but neither being optimal, and (b) that due to its dataset-based approach, single numbers may have to be stored as columns in a dataset, or other funky workarounds which is very inefficient for large datasets.

I have used SPSS in the past for teaching purposes in multiple classes. It's not bad, just click and play, and if you need code or do anything atypical, it's very complex and annoying. The last "SS" part refers to social sciences and I agree that is what it's good for, a basic package for social science students who do basic analyses. For anything else, R or Stata is better.

Excel... It's bad practice, it's full of errors, and it's not a statistical package (let alone a programming language). But sometimes people come with Excel data that are in such a bad shape, cleaning or trying to fix the data would take more time than just doing something quickly in Excel that is only moderately trash. It's a choice between the pest and the cholera as we tend to say here. If I'd not do it, they'd do it themselves and much worse. For other purposes, or my own projects, I much prefer Google sheets over Excel if I need to use such program, as it at least has detailed track changes by default, which is an absolute necessity for database management and in Excel is a nightmare to set up properly.

In the distant past, I've also worked with S-PLUS (RIP, you were nice, but R is better), Matlab and Maple, the latter especially for more formal mathematical statistics and as part of my training/education.

I do know a bit of Python, but given my limited knowledge, R is always more efficient for me unless someone has written Python code ready (happened only once so far).
I also know a basic of a few other programming languages (Fortran and C++ for example) and I can read most code in most languages with the help of Google and my general knowledge of other languages, although it's extremely rare that I need that skill.
I am not familiar with any of the big data science packages, other than that I heard about them.

Are you bored?

What do you usually drink in the morning besides the obvious water?
Asking because I'd like to know if you drink tea, coffee, milk, or something else.

Are you bored?

A very valid question given the time that I spent preparing answers in this topic.
Interestingly, I am not at all. If anything, I have not enough time ever to do everything that I want to do. That is also the reason why I waited with this topic until I had no games at all and knew that there would be opportunities to answer if there were, against my expectation, more than just a few troll questions.

For those opportunities, look no further than moment where I need a distraction. In essence, most of the answers, including this one, were written out during online meetings at work. I am the type of person who likes to be mentally challenged a bit, and meetings where the same point is rehashed for the fifth time can get pretty boring, right? So it seems that I have to revise my answer above. While I'm not bored in life and almost never have "nothing to do", it does seem like I can be bored while I'm doing something that is boring.

What do you usually drink in the morning besides the obvious water?
Asking because I'd like to know if you drink tea, coffee, milk, or something else.

Interesting question! I do wonder what others do.
I have to make a distinction between three different situations here:

• When I'm at home, alone or with my partner, it's usually just water, nothing else. In winter, every now and then I may also take some instant soup in addition, especially if I'm feeling a bit under the weather or it's very cold.
  
• When I go to work, I usually just drink water at home, but after arriving at work, I usually take a hot chocolate milk from our coffee machine to start the day.
  
• Finally, when I'm in a hotel or B&B, or staying over with friends or family who insist on offering me something else to drink at breakfast, my prefered choices are, in order, chocolate milk (hot or cold), fruit or orange juice and tea.
  

I don't drink milk often, but I do make banana milkshake regularly (very easy: just milk + ice cream + banana + vanilla sugar and mix well) and I eat yoghurt every day.
However, I never drink coffee, or at least, extremely rarely. I do not like the taste, but especially I do not like the nervous energy that caffeine gives me. So I don't drink Cola either. Instead, as answered to an earlier question, my unhealthy energy boosters are chocolate and cookies, and cookies with chocolate. :-)

In essence, most of the answers, including this one, were written out during online meetings at work.

How many of your meetings could be emails? What could you do to change those meetings into emails? Will you do any of the things you can do to change meetings into emails? Or do you like wasting your time so you have time to answer us?

>can you do science without philosophy
badly

>can you do philosophy without science
yes

Is pineapple a valid pizza topping?

Which clans active today do you expect to still be alive 3 years from now?

How many more questions do you expect l4v.r0v to ask?

but after arriving at work, I usually take a hot chocolate milk from our coffee machine to start the day.

I can relate.. The coffee at your work is undrinkable ;)
I also took the hot chocolate from the machine the other day... (in september)

My question today to you: have you played the Trippel-Tafl map (created by Lionheart, went public on 2022/06/06) https://www.warzone.com/SinglePlayer?PreviewMap=99305

And what are your thoughts about it?

In essence, most of the answers, including this one, were written out during online meetings at work.

How many of your meetings could be emails? What could you do to change those meetings into emails? Will you do any of the things you can do to change meetings into emails? Or do you like wasting your time so you have time to answer us?

So many related questions! Let me answer them one by one.

In theory, any meeting can be an email. However, in practice, of the meetings that I actually attend, very few would be more effective as email, as there is usually quite a lot of back-and-forth going on.
I think that is the most important criterion for a meeting rather than an email: if there is a lot of direct interaction needed, a meeting will usually be faster. If it's one of a few people informing others, then it's usually better to go over email. Of course, even when there is a lot of back and forth between many people, my role in the meeting may still be that of an observer and technical (statistical) support. Thus, in conclusion, it may still be boring for me even though that I must admit that it is useful to have a meeting.

That also means that there isn't much that I can do to change it to emails. In fact, a lot already happens through email, even in cases where the back-and-forth just keeps going on and a meeting would've been more efficient. I'm in a field where it's very easy to misunderstand each other, so having a meeting where one can discuss until it's clear that all is clear to everyone, is usually a positive.

That doesn't mean that I want more meetings, or more work for that matter. It's all about efficiency, and choosing when to have a meeting and when to ask questions or give comments through email. Usually, we try to make sure that we only schedule a meeting when we feel it's necessary already. I do know people sometimes would like to have more meetings with me, but I do always ask (myself, and when relevant them) what the purpose of the meeting is.

Also, I absolutely and utterly hate "wasting time", although I don't mind spending some time in ways that others may find wasteful as those may be relaxing for me.
So let it be clear, these are all meetings that were already there, scheduled by others, and where my presence is for various reasons considered useful or necessary by the organiser. I won't go as far to schedule useless meetings myself.

Is pineapple a valid pizza topping?

Hmm, such an easy question that can be extremely hard.
Validity is a concept in logic, in statistics, and in science in general, so the answer could be anything based on how we want to interpret the word here.

If we use elementary logic: pineapple is a valid pizza toping if and only if we can take any pizza, and after adding pineapple, it is still a pizza.
So, the next question is of course what the definition of a pizza is. There, it seems it gets really murky, with even the circular shape only "usual" and topping typically being described as "a variety of".
So it seems, according to such vague definitions, the technical answer would be yes.

However, some people may say a pizza without pineaple is a pizza, while a pizza with pineapple is actually a fruitcake, in which case the validity assumption is not fulfilled.

Personally, I struggle to find a proper term for a pizza with pineapple that would not be "pizza", because it is quite obviously not fruitcake either. Hence, I believe it is still pizza, and thus pineapple is a valid topping.

However, calling it pizza Hawaii, which seems to be a usual term, is a bit strange to me. I really don't understand why adding pineapple to something (not just pizza, many things) should result in it being called "Hawaii".

Which clans active today do you expect to still be alive 3 years from now?

I guess this does depend on what exactly you mean by "alive".

Warzone does have a feature where it shows inactive clans, although the exact criterion is not clear.
A clan like GeZyS of 9 years old with only one active member is not inactive according to that list.

Actually answering the question on a clan by clan basis seems quite impossible, there are several hundreds of clans (689 at the time of this post) and it seems more than 400 of those (rough estimation) are considered active. That's not a big drop-off if you realise that the oldest clans are 9 years old, as mentioned above, and it does make sense if one active member is enough for them to stay active.

So I assume less than half of those are truly active, which makes looking into more detail quite difficult.

I also took a random sample among the inactive clans according to Warzone, and it seems their year of creation is all over the place, from old clans to relatively new clans. There are clans that used to be big and clans that I never heard of. So all in all, it seems very hard to really predict which clans will go inactive and which ones will still be alive. We have all seen that implosions can happen all of a sudden.

Also structure wise, I don't really see any (dis)advantage for any clan to survive: one manager is more stable but depends much more on a single person, multiple managers have the risk for drama and the clan falling apart. Roleplay, strategic or just groups of friends? Each of them have surviving clans and clans that have gone inactive.

So my final answer is that I have no clue really. The reasons why a clan stays alive are more the intangibles rather than easy to observe or quantify reasons, it seems.

However, looking at the raw numbers, my best guess is that the majority of clans alive and active today, will still have that active status three years from now, although it is too early to study the introduction of the clan cap on the long-term survival of clans.

How many more questions do you expect l4v.r0v to ask?

Well, he only asked two so far, unless I missed any?

My best guess would be that l4v.r0v keeps asking reasonable and interesting questions for a while, as long as the topic is active otherwise as well. To me, he doesn't look like the kind of person who'd want to keep a topic alive with only his questions after all, while at the other hand he is active enough on the Warzone forum, as has a sufficiently deep enough array of thoughts and questions to be able to ask a new one every few days without running out of inspiration.

That means the number of questions I expect him to still ask would be proportional to how long I expect this topic to remain active.
Given previous AMA, my expectation was possibly getting to the second page, and then it would die. It seems so far that it survived already quite a bit longer both in time and questions than I anticipated (which I don't really mind, nor does that make me super excited, I take it as it comes).

That does mean that we are a bit in uncharted territories on how much longer this topic will become. The rate of questions per day seemed to have dropped over the weekend but picked up again meanwhile. As a reference, the number of unique people asking a question each day should be (if I counted well): 6 - 6 - 5 - 1 - 1 - 6 - and none yet today.
So there is a chance of it dying over the next weekend, or it can go on for who knows how long...

If I model the probability that the topic will die on a given day independently as p% if it did not yet die the day before, then the number of remaining days would be the mean of the geometric distribution, which is simply 1/p here. At a 20% chance of dying every day, we expect the topic to live on another 5 days, at a 10% chance of dying, that would be already 10 days. At 5% of dying each day, on average 20 days even.
Given that we've gone with 6 days without dying and never coming truly close to it (the lower number of questions may also have been linked to me being too busy to answer, case in point no questions again today after I did not yet answer the previous questions yet), I'd say 10% is a reasonable guess. At an average of 10 more days of questions and a question on average every 3 days of l4v.r0v, that would be about 3.3 questions more to expect from him, with expect here the statistical concept of the expected value.

Given the limited data and massive uncertainty on each of the estimates, I'd say the 95% prediction interval goes from 0 to 40 or so though.

Finally, it's worth noting that such estimates are based on historical data, and in science the publication of results itself can change the behaviour of what is observed in the future. (e.g. if you observe that a certain group is at risk for disease, this may not be true anymore 5 years later, because steps were taken to screen this group for the disease as a result of your study.)

Similarly here, l4v.r0v may or may not adapt his posting and question asking rate as a result of reading this analysis. After all, for some people it could be tempting to "prove me wrong" by asking 42 questions at once? Some people find joy in doing exactly the opposite of what people expect them to do, just to prove a point (sometimes positively) or show how cool and adverse they are (sometimes negatively), while others don't really care. Think about all the sportsmen who in interviews say things like: "nobody thought I could do it" / "They'd written me off" / "I proved the critics wrong" / ...

I'm not implying in any way that l4v.r0v will change his behaviour as a result, I'm only pointing out that from a technical a statistical point of view, this is a possibility. Additionally, what he would have done if I had not written this post, can only be modelled or estimated at best, and never be known, also called "the counterfactual event" in statistics.

but after arriving at work, I usually take a hot chocolate milk from our coffee machine to start the day.

I can relate.. The coffee at your work is undrinkable ;)
I also took the hot chocolate from the machine the other day... (in september)

My question today to you: have you played the Trippel-Tafl map (created by Lionheart, went public on 2022/06/06) https://www.warzone.com/SinglePlayer?PreviewMap=99305

And what are your thoughts about it?

I missed your session again this year... I actually was looking forward to it, but I got ill a week in advance when I was decided for which sessions to subscribe and decided to work from home for everyone's safety and health. At least my bike got fixed, and maybe next year I'll be in your session finally!

I haven't heard anyone else complain about the coffee yet despite the machines being there for quite a while now after they changed from one provider to another. But then again, I wouldn't know or understand the difference between a good and a bad coffee.

Your question is already implicitly answered through the topic title and my answer to Lionheart's question. Given that I'm still in no games and I listed all maps that I played by them, I still haven't. Thanks for bringing it to my attention because it is indeed a very interesting concept, and beautifully executed. I love how the hidden layer works. So I feel that I must double down on the message in my other post: map quality is really good in some of the more recent maps!

The only drawback for me, is that it is more suited for 3 players, and I personally dislike 3-way FFA. I'd love to see a similar map like that for a 1v1 or team game.
I can imagine that having to click on the castle the whole time to see the bonuses may also be a bit of a hassle, although I don't really think that there are better solutions.

Do you think there is extraterrestrial life, which is smarter than humankind?