Briggs

Peer Review Fails? Sympathetic Priest? What’s Going On Here?

Duke Scores Another Own Goal According to Science, Duke University oncologist Anil Potti quit after being caught cheating: Anil Potti had published papers in prominent journals identifying gene signatures in…

Culture Statistics

The Government Loves You And Wants You To Stop Smoking

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking…

Culture

New Expert Panel To Pick Experts For Expert Panels: Lessons From The TSA

But climate change experts opposed to [Prime minister Julia Gillard's idea of creating a citizens panel to discuss climate change] were saying 'these are citizens, they are not experts on…

Culture

TSA Full-Body Scans Would Not Pass Hospital IRB Reviews

Zzzzaapp! Some angry photons have just been blasted off toward your body, scouting for "contraband." In the process of the search, these energetic massless particles will kick the crap out…

Culture Statistics

College Students More Loquacious Than Erudite: Vocabulary Test Results

The results of the Great Vocabulary Test of 2010 are in. Two weeks ago, in this thread, after announcing my surprise that no student in any of my classes knew…

Statistics

TSA Cops A Feel: More Bad Statistics

As far as I can discover, Janet "There's Nothing To See Here" Napolitano's newly created policy of feeling up and peeking under the skirts of random airline passengers has not…

Culture Statistics

Texting Leads To Sexting…Leads To Bad Television

Researchers Find What they find is a way to publish yet another study documenting what everybody already knew. According to this article, sent in by reader Jack Mosevich, researchers have…

Statistics

Mandatory National Standards For Salt Content Coming To A Government Near You

What's better: (A) voluntarily reducing your salt intake, or (B) having the government mandate that you do so? Naturally, if you don't opt for A, you get B, which we…

John Pate on On The Myths Of ScientismSeptember 15, 2025
I'm considering that adopting flat Earth as my model is the way forward, as an antidote to all this nonsense…
McChuck on The Various Solutions To Black Crime AnalyzedSeptember 13, 2025
@John - If you don't know already, you haven't been paying attention for, oh, your entire life. But you probably…
John Pate on The Various Solutions To Black Crime AnalyzedSeptember 13, 2025
I need a bit more of an explanation about "woke whites" - what exactly they are and what motivates them.…
cdquarles on The Various Solutions To Black Crime AnalyzedSeptember 12, 2025
Where I grew up, in the last days of Jim Crow, no-one really cared that much about skin color. It…
cdquarles on The False Expectation Of PermanenceSeptember 12, 2025
If the definition of an ice age, geologically speaking, is a large mass of perennially persistent ice over a substantial…