Briggs

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…

Culture

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…

Philosophy

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…

Statistics

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…

Fun

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,…

Philosophy

Randomness isn’t in charge of anything: the “hot hand” in basketball

The Wall Street Journal is helping Leonard Mlodinow tout his book The Drunkardâ€™s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Among other things, Mlodinow, like academics Tversky, Kahneman, and Gilovich before…

Fun

Internet Advertising Company to Fund Itself With Advertising

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Internet Advertising Company to Fund Itself With Advertising New York - July 4, 2009 - Word leader in being a new company engaged in ways of bringing…

Book review

Public Enemies — by Bryan Burrough

I am re-posting this book review because the movie came out today, and it might be of interest. Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI,…

JH on Class 72: Most Claims Of “Controlled For” Are Wrong: The Wrong WayNovember 20, 2025
Two basic points. (1) Predictions made beyond the range of observed data are unreliable. Just as political extrapolations, these predictions…
Heresolong on Black Women Can’t Do Physics As Well As White Men, Says ResearcherNovember 20, 2025
I feel like you zipped right past her solution to the problem, which is not to make black women think…
Cary D Cotterman on Black Women Can’t Do Physics As Well As White Men, Says ResearcherNovember 19, 2025
"Damn, those white people are smart! --Duke Ellington, upon first seeing the Golden Gate Bridge
shawn marshall on Black Women Can’t Do Physics As Well As White Men, Says ResearcherNovember 19, 2025
Are there 700 million black africans? Has whitey screwed all of them?
Uncle Mike on Black Women Can’t Do Physics As Well As White Men, Says ResearcherNovember 19, 2025
Not to mention their reproductivity. Or lack of both. One might hope that they change their focus from physics to…