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 inStatistics
Leszek Kolakowski is dead
From Roger Kimball we learn that the fascinating Polish philosopher has died. Kolakowski was probably best know for his magisterial three-volume Main Currents of Marxism , published in the late…
Posted inCulture
Amazon remotely deletes legitimately purchased books from Kindles
Ari Schwartz sends along this link, from Gizmodo. Amazon [was] bending to the wishes of a publisher and deleting every single legitimately-purchased copy of 1984 and Animal Farm from all…
Posted inCulture
The sad decline of music: Cole Porter vs. The Beatles
Paul McCartney has once again crept upon our shores. He was, of course, vanguard in the original "British Invasion", which occurred in early 1964. Now, an invasion is something to…
Posted inPhilosophy
The strange insignificance of statistical significance
Who is more likely to support the death penalty: college undergraduates from a "nationally-ranked Midwestern university with an enrollment of slightly more than 20,000" majoring in social work, or those…
Posted inStatistics
Hannah Arendt on global warming theory
...there are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades. The trouble…
Posted inFun
A Return to Seriousness: 7 Best Songs About Beer; Or, God Bless the Pope
Update: the embeddings have been shifted to links, because the embeddings were eating up too much memory on some people's browsers. 7 John Lee Hooker/George Thorogood, One Bourbon, One Scotch,…
Posted inPhilosophy
Randomness isn’t in charge of anything: the “hot hand” in basketball
The Wall Street Journal is helping Leonard Mlodinow tout his book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Among other things, Mlodinow, like academics Tversky, Kahneman, and Gilovich before…
