Briggs

Full Disclosure, Anita Dunn, and Fox News: A Fairness Proposal for Journalists

In the United States, we have several major news outlets. On television: ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox. There are also several national-ish newspapers (and a diminishing number…

Statistics

Podcast Lecture #2: Understanding Statistics and Probability

[podcast]https://www.wmbriggs.com/audio/wmbriggs_com_lecture_0002.mp3[/podcast] On today's lecture: Quick review All knowledge is conditional on evidence, which eventually leads back to our intuitions. The steps in an argument that make it valid are also…

Podcast Statistics

Podcast Radio Show â€“ Episode #4: Belief in Climate Models

[podcast]https://www.wmbriggs.com/audio/wmbriggs_com_14oct2009_0004.mp3[/podcast] On today's episode: Science and skeptical bloggers A small article in last week's Science magazine frets that skeptical bloggers are teasing climate scientists over their failed predictions. Bloggers are…

Culture Fun

F train Blues, Michael Palin is proud, and some misuses of statistics

Just back from my trip. I'll go through the comments from last week's posts later today and catch up. Meanwhile, here are a few interesting stories. That F'ing train! You've…

Statistics

Podcast Lecture #1: Understanding Statistics and Probability

[podcast]https://www.wmbriggs.com/audio/wmbriggs_com_lecture_0001.mp3[/podcast] First lecture: I'm away to a conference this week, and so thought it would be fun to start a lecture series Understanding Statistics and Probability (this is posting automatically---I'll…

Culture Podcast

Podcast Radio Show – Episode #3: Call the Health Police!

[podcast]https://www.wmbriggs.com/audio/wmbriggs_com_07oct2009_0003.mp3[/podcast] On today's episode: What is health? Herr Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore: "a degree of adaptation to the organism's environment so nearly complete that there is no irritation." Health…

Culture

The Case of the Rape-rape Patrol: a 17th precinct mini-mystery

We last met Officer Hannigan and Sergeant Fitzgerald in The Case of the Missing Global Warming and The Age of Stupid "Sarge, we got a call." Officer Hannigan motioned to…

Statistics

About Half Will Not Pay Federal Income Tax: Plus, A Solution To This Unfairness

What's to stop a large bloc of voters from joining forces to create laws so that they get a free ride, that they, in effect, make everybody else pay their…

hudbwu on Math Is Epistemic Violence, Says Lady AcademicJune 20, 2026
We they're certainly re-inventing. Promises kept, I guess. Also, I can't escape thinking this is what the mice and rats…
hudbwu on The Ultimate IQ Test: Guessing the Author’s Mind and Escaping the Infinity of AnswersJune 20, 2026
ObvIOusLy, the correct formula for the triangles at the start is (upper_left + upper_right) * upper_left , which gives us…
Andras Kuthi on Truly Random Numbers Found?June 19, 2026
Contemplate that Epstein won the New Mexico lottery...so much for randomly generated numbers.
Rich on Math Is Epistemic Violence, Says Lady AcademicJune 18, 2026
Perhaps she and her friends would accept being paid according to the indigenous mathematics of crows who can, apparently, count…
Cary D Cotterman on Math Is Epistemic Violence, Says Lady AcademicJune 17, 2026
Lunatics like this Kather are well-paid and get great benefits for putting out hooey like that. People pay a lot…