Book review – Page 8 – William M. Briggs

Uncertainty: The Soul of Models, Probability & Statistics. Chapter Abstracts

This post originally appeared right before the Uncertainty did. Now that we're 1.5 years out, it's time for a re-post. Buy it now, but it today, and buy it again…

Take Burnham’s Test To See If You’re A Progressive: <em>Suicide of the West</em> at 50

Book review Culture

Take Burnham’s Test To See If You’re A Progressive: Suicide of the West at 50

This classic column appeared in July 2015. Besides some editing, I would now change 'liberal' to 'progressive', which I have done in the title. I made no other change. See…

Book review Culture

Glubb Pasha’s Experiences With American Democracy

[The image above flashed by on the interwebs, and it struck me as humorously apt, though I can't now recall where I first saw it. If the picture has any…

Book review Philosophy

Why Not Only Us? Men Speak, Animals Make Noise

A review of the book Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky. Everybody knows, or used to know, that only men speak. Animals make noise,…

Book review Statistics

Math: Old, New, and Equalitarian — A Review

I have a new paper out in Academic Questions, a review, "Math: Old, New, and Equalitarian." Springer is charging a mere pittance for viewing it. Only $39.95. But I think…

Book review Philosophy

The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski

A modified version of this article ran 14 April 2008. There are a recent number of books seeking to either demonstrate, scientifically, that God does not exist, or to show…

Book review

Sean Carroll’s “The Big Picture” Reviewed: Why “Poetic Naturalism” is an Oxymoron — Guest Post by Bob Kurland

Another version of this article first appeared at Kurland's site. Scientism, the belief that science can explain everything about the world and ourselves, is a religion, although not formally expressed…

Book review

Austin Ruse’s ‘Fake Science: Exposing the Left’s Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data’

Austin Ruse kindly sent me a copy of his new Fake Science: Exposing the Left's Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data, a book readers of this blog will take…

John Pate on The Biggest Mistake In Science Applied To Universe As SimulationDecember 8, 2025
…another way of putting it, more succinctly: consciousness does not have the halting problem.
John Pate on The Biggest Mistake In Science Applied To Universe As SimulationDecember 8, 2025
The most straightforward indicator that computers don't have minds is that computers don't exist in the eternal now. They have…
gareth on Class 73: How To Tell If You Have Bad DiceDecember 8, 2025
Well, having made it all the way through, my takeaways were: 1. The answer to the question, "what is the…
NLR on The Biggest Mistake In Science Applied To Universe As SimulationDecember 8, 2025
It can't be simulations all the way down because a simulation needs an underlying reality to simulate. But also, in…
McChuck on The Biggest Mistake In Science Applied To Universe As SimulationDecember 8, 2025
There is only one reality. Our perceptions of it may differ. Reality is real. The map is not the territory.…