Fun – Page 44 – William M. Briggs

Bernie Madoff To Join Peter Gleick’s Pacific Institute: Work-Release Program

Perhaps we should file this under Nobody Saw This Coming. Here is a (second) press release issued in the dead of night from the Pacific Institute. Tip o' the hat…

Fun Philosophy Statistics

Gloom, Despair, Email Spoofing, And Kahan’s Science Literacy Paper

Somebody spoofed my Yahoo email address which I use for ordering, registrations and the like. Sent hundreds of emails to my contact list yesterday. Now I ordinarily run Linux, which…

Fun Statistics

Astrologers See Obama Victory

Alas, our great nation is in retrograde, with the House of Koalemos (Greek god of stupidity) rising, ever rising. Dark cosmic forces have aligned---perhaps maligned is a better way to…

Culture Fun Statistics

On The Murder And Death Of Classical Music

It is difficult to discover one word which adequately and non-misleadingly describes what is today called "music" and what used to go by that name a century or more ago.…

Culture Fun

The Last Cruise Of The USS Iowa

The USS Iowa on its last trip I was aboard the SS Jeremiah O'Brien yesterday when the USS Iowa was towed from its berth up San Francisco bay and…

Fun

From Homochirality In Amino Acids To Conquering Dinosaurs: How Journalists Report Science

Today, just a pointer to a hilarious story by Robert McHenry in The American of how a workaday paper in a chemical journal with the title Evidence for the Likely…

Fun Statistics

Scientists Discover Women Who Lick Their Lips Are Judged More Attractive By College Men

Hot or Not? First the good news. It's completely unrelated to what follows, but it is good news. Scientists say "Aliens 'wouldn't want to eat or enslave us' says ET-hunting…

Fun Statistics

Interest In On-Line Statistics Courses?

You might have heard what happened to when Stanford professor Andrew Ng put his machine learning (a practical kind of statistical modeling) on line. He expected mild interest. One hundred…

Brian (bulaoren) on Whoring For Climate ChangeSeptember 23, 2026
Some people don't know the difference between "an oracle" and "an orifice".
McChuck on Lady Academics Tire Of Being Judged By Peer ReviewSeptember 22, 2026
I have never seen a better example of why women should not be educated beyond the very basics necessary for…
Cary Cotterman on Lady Academics Tire Of Being Judged By Peer ReviewSeptember 21, 2026
Every time I think I've read about an academic paper at the very bottom of the abyss of idiocy, another…
Tars Tarkas on Lady Academics Tire Of Being Judged By Peer ReviewSeptember 21, 2026
"articulating that the checkboxes presume a reviewer who is an objective, disembodied expert untouched by power. " They aren't wrong…
Tars Tarkas on Lady Academics Tire Of Being Judged By Peer ReviewSeptember 21, 2026
Among the many flaws of peer review is the weaponization of peer-review for political purposes. Some academic offends the ladies,…