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,…

spetzer86 on Death By Organ DonationJuly 28, 2026
Right out of the old Monty Python skit where the guy was a "liver donor" and the guys came to…
The Four Chords of Modern Music - Roadie Music Blog on Four Chords Is All You Need: The Limited Nature of Pop MusicJuly 28, 2026
[…] Four Chords Is All You Need: The Limited Nature of Pop Music […]
Mary Sova on Wolfgang Smith For EveryoneJuly 28, 2026
I caught a small portion your interview with Ken Craycraft on my car radio yesterday, but didn't realize it was…
shawn marshall on Wolfgang Smith For EveryoneJuly 28, 2026
I'm not able to digest a lot of your essay but able to glean some fuzzy notions of the points…
JH on Death By Organ DonationJuly 27, 2026
Here they have no authority: none whatsoever. Is this an appeal to authority used in reverse? It seems that Dr.…