Posted inPhilosophy
Morality Can’t Be Decided By Vote
These are all old arguments, but since Mr Obama has put us in the mood over the birth control controversy, it is best to revisit them. The dominant thinking is…
Posted inStatistics
Heartland Documents Leaked, Massaged, Faked
First thing I did, after hearing that the Heartland Institute's budget was leaked, was to pore through it looking for my name in the hopes of seeing how much moola…
Posted inStatistics
Why Reconstructed Temperatures Via Proxies Are Misleading
This is an edited and expanded re-post from last September; it makes a natural and needed companion to last week's series on how to statistically handle temperature time series, particularly…
Posted inStatistics
Autism Caused By Highways?
Epidemiology is nothing if not a productive field. All that is needed for success is a database (larger the better), a disease (any will do), and some minor facility with…
Posted inPhilosophy
Stove On Unintended Consequences
A few quotations, incomplete, on this important subject from Stove's On Enlightenment. A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe…
Posted inFun
Mathematical Magic Trick: 8 4-Digit Numbers Summing To 35712?
From reader Noble Abraham comes this question: Is it possible to create a pool of distinct four digit numbers, so that the sum of 8 randomly chosen numbers from this…
Posted inCulture Philosophy
The Obama-HHS Diktat On Contraceptive Coverage: Non-Religious Arguments Against It
The government has decided that citizens who agree to work for other citizens must be given "free" coverage for contraceptives and drugs for auto-abortions. The "free" is a misnomer. Actually,…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Let’s Try This Time Series Thing Again: Part V
Part I, II, III, IV, V. We started by assuming each X was measured without error, that each observation was perfectly certain. This is not always so for real X.…
