Book review – Page 24 – William M. Briggs

The limits of statistics: black swans and randomness

The author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has penned the essay THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS over at Edge.org…

Book review

Transforming American Military Policy

Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy by Frederick W. Kagan, 2006. Encounter Books. Recommendation: read This book is an excellent accounting of the theories that have gripped…

Book review

Calculated Risks: How to know when numbers deceive you: Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd Gigerenzer, Simon and Schuster, New York, 310 pp., ISBN 0-7432-0556-1, $25.00 Should healthy women get regular mammograms to screen for breast cancer? The surprising answer, according to this wonderful…

Book review

“The Future of Everything” by David Orrell

The Future of Everything by David Orrell. Thunder's Mouth Press, New York. I wanted to like this book, which was supposed to be an examination of how well scientists made…

Book review Philosophy

The Algebra of Probable Inference: Richard T. Cox

This is a lovely, lovely book and I can't believe it has taken me this long to find and read it (November 2005: I was lead to this book via…

Book review Philosophy

The Rationality of Induction: David Stove

Is deductive logic empirical? No. Is inductive logic also empirical? No. Is induction justified and, if so, is it just an extension of logic? Yes. These are Stove's conclusions as…

JH on PFAS and Preservatives: Entrenching Chemophobia through Everyday Stuff — Guest Post by Jaap HanekampSeptember 16, 2026
The alternative to preserved clay is, sooner rather than later, mouldy clay… Does this mean to create fear? There are…
Cary Cotterman on PFAS and Preservatives: Entrenching Chemophobia through Everyday Stuff — Guest Post by Jaap HanekampSeptember 16, 2026
Growing up in the late 1950s, I played with modeling clay almost every day. Who knows, back then it was…
Phil R on PFAS and Preservatives: Entrenching Chemophobia through Everyday Stuff — Guest Post by Jaap HanekampSeptember 16, 2026
I'm no expert but I think it's a little over the top comparing PFAS with Agent Orange. PFAS, for the…
Tars Tarkas on PFAS and Preservatives: Entrenching Chemophobia through Everyday Stuff — Guest Post by Jaap HanekampSeptember 16, 2026
None of this should change the fact that chemical companies like 3M actively covered up the PFAS problem in the…
Ray on Politicians Demand “Right” To Be Protected Against AISeptember 16, 2026
As far as I can tell, AI is nothing but a computer with a big data base and some fancy…