Posted inBook review
Closing Time, by Joe Queenan
Closing Time: A memoir by Joe Queenan Viking Recommendation: Borrow from a library if you're going fishing and think you won't be catching much. Joe Queenan's dad was a self-defeating…
Posted inCulture Statistics
What Makes Music Bad? A New Scale: Part I, the Definition
It might have been coming out of the air space between her ear buds and flesh, or it might have been seeping through the holes in the woman's head. Either…
Pet Peeves
Car ads on the radio I listen to a lot of baseball, which means I'm forced to endure a lot of ads. The worst are for cars, where each has…
Posted inPhilosophy
Sophomoronology, John C. Wright’s Pathology of Intellectuals
The article by John Wright was suggested by reader Nate Winchester. The tenured intellectual is the only known creature that denies its own existence. They are, therefore, dangerous animals. Rather,…
World Cup, Statistics, Movie Lines, Cracked, and Clubbing
USA 1, Small Island Nation 1 Fabio Capello, pictured left, shows us the tracks his tears took after Robert Green revealed his American sympathies by suspiciously letting a shot through---a…
Posted inStatistics
Last Class
It was the Nines last night. Pizza, beer, and wine, followed by sketchy music. A definite conceit of statistics is its habit of declaring with something-approaching-certainty that this or that…
More Bad Music; Class Wrap-Up; Go USA
Way Behind Back Thanks to everybody who stuck through the lectures, such as they were, for the last two weeks. I wrote these "lessons" over about a twenty-minute period each…
Posted inCulture
Global Warming Set To Song: Withering in the Heat
Little Aitan Grossman, just age 13, and cute as hell, has taken Honorable Mention in the 2010 Action For Nature International Young Eco-Hero Awards! A hero---an eco hero---and only 13!…
