Fun – Page 48 – William M. Briggs

First Signs of Rampant Global Cooling Seen At Nome, Alaska?

The headline from the 12 January 2012 Nome Nugget ("Alaska's Oldest Newspaper!") strikes a chill into one's heart: Nome in long deep freeze. The Nome post of the National…

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Only 2 days left! Predictions For 2012: Submit Yours Today!

Update Predictions are closed for this year. Come back New Year's Eve to see how we've done. We'll change the rules slightly this year and ask that everybody now predict…

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Predictions For 2011. How’d We do?

Last January 1st I asked for everybody to provide verifiable predictions for the year. Time for reckoning! Tomorrow I'll ask us to provide predictions for 2012, so hold off on…

Culture Fun

Merry Federal Holiday Of December 25th That Shall Remain Nameless!

Here's proof that the unnameable Day's---a.k.a. "holiday", a.k.a. "holidays", a.k.a. (rare) "holy day"---spirit is in all of us. Plus sure evidence that Shakespeare was right (yet again). One grand lady…

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Top 10 Upsets In The NFL Over Last Decade

Today's post is over at Edgehogs. It's all self explanatory. Surf on over to comment. I'd write more, but my North Pole duties have me busier than average. Tip: Even…

Culture Fun

Iowa Professor Shocked To Discover He’s In Iowa

Stephen Bloom is a long-time professor of journalism ("Double spacing has twice as much space as single spacing", "On-line journals are called 'blogs'") at the University of Iowa. Bloom thinks…

Culture Fun

What’s Funny About Tbilisi Ordinands? Hitchens, Stalin, and Buckley

The (we hope eventually) prodigal son of William F. Buckley said in his New Yorker obituary on Christopher Hitchens: As for the wit...one day we were talking about Stalin. I…

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Top 10 Sure Things: Which NFL Games Were The Easiest To Pick?

Today's post is over at Edgehogs. I wanted to see how extreme bookies would go in making NFL picks, as judged by the probabilities of home-team wins as derived from…

Rudolph Harrier on The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AIMarch 10, 2026
I've started thinking of this as the "juice loosener problem" (after the Simpsons bit where Dr. Nick hawks an orange…
Cary D Cotterman on The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AIMarch 10, 2026
After spending years in school doing my own writing, then decades in my profession busting my ass to write somewhere…
Uncle Mike on The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AIMarch 10, 2026
AI isn't the entity smoothing the data. The alleged decline in Arctic sea ice was a key assertion in Algore's…
JH on A Synchronicity Or Coincidence? What Is Behind Curious Events?March 10, 2026
The definition of cause can vary, and each incident may have its causes or contributing factors. I see coincidences as…
JH on The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AIMarch 10, 2026
AI can be ‘gullible’ because it takes all the information fed into its optimization or backpropagation system. In many tasks,…