Briggs

Why Global Warming Won’t Go Away: Inertia

Rajendra Pachauri---chairman of the IPCC, railway engineer, and the man who penned these words, "Sanjay saw a shapely dark-skinned girl lying on Vinay's bed. He was overcome by a lust…

Culture Philosophy

Tim Tebow’s Super Bowl Ad and the Washington Post Editorial

Very delicate ground, here. I want to be as precise as I know how in discussing the language used in today's Washington Post editorial about the upcoming Tim Tebow ad,…

Culture Statistics

Welcome-to-Saturday Links

My heart soared like a hawk this week after several readers sent in fascinating stories. Here are a few of them. Reader Sara C sent in a wonderful example of…

Statistics

R Lecture 4: Help & Plotting

This is the fourth in a series of lectures on R. 10 minutes is a shockingly short period of time! Today, we learn the R way to create comments: start…

Statistics

R Lecture 3: Our First Program!

This is the third in a series of lectures on R. (DAV, I kept the intro for one last time.) Open the myRcode.R file we saved in our myR folder.…

Culture

Two-and-a-Half Millennia Don’t Change Much

Herodotus begins his history by telling us that some Phoenician traders came to Argos, Greece and, on a whim, abducted the king's daughter Io and took her to Egypt. Later,…

Statistics

Create Tax Refunds That Must Be Donated To Political Parties?

In the State of the Union address, President Obama thought it would be pleasant to slam the Supreme Court, shaming them for their recent Citizens United v. FEC decision. Our…

Statistics

R Lecture 2: Prepping a Folder

Main page for R Lectures. This is the second in a series of lectures on R. R is command-line software. We need to type in commands. These commands should be…

bruce g charlton on Academics Call Pregnancy A DiseaseMay 12, 2025
Biologically speaking, the most objective definition of a disease that I know is on the lines of: "Something that reduces…
Robert Arvanitis on Academics Call Pregnancy A DiseaseMay 12, 2025
In the most charitable interpretation, perhaps the authors meant to protect medical benefits and employment protection to "birthing persons..." If…
E C on Reproducibility Crises Will Be Forever With Us Until We Abandon Classical StatisticsMay 10, 2025
If I understand your linked article in Academic Questions correctly, it seems frequentism is a classic example of tunnel-vision; or,…
Paul Murphy on Class 49: Relevance & Importance Of Evidence In ModelsMay 9, 2025
hey doc Steven Hayward's substack post on "Pope Bob" https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/pope-bob includes an image and summary of a book on "evaluative…
JH on Class 49: Relevance & Importance Of Evidence In ModelsMay 9, 2025
Probability is defined on a sigma field. But what exactly is a sigma field? In simpler terms, it represents the…