Statistics – Page 189 – William M. Briggs

What That Spurious Correlation Website Tells Us About Statistics

Many (thanks!) readers sent links to Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations, whose motto is "Discover a new correlation - an interesting spurious correlation each day!" My favorite is tying the yearly…

Fun Statistics

Godzilla’s Changing Height: A Statistical Analysis

I grew up watching Channel 50's Creature Feature and Channel 7's 4 pm Monster Week movies, many of which featured Ultraman, Rodan, Gamera, Gargantua, and, of course, Godzilla. Too, I…

Philosophy Statistics

Frequentists Are Closet Bayesians: Confidence Interval Edition

Actually, all frequentists and Bayesians are logical probabilists, but if I put that in the title, few would believe it. A man might call himself an Anti-Gravitational Theorist, a science…

Statistics

William M. Briggs Sez: Keep That Impressive Middle Initial

You can take it from William M. Briggs, and also from the Today show: sporting a middle initial is a mark of sophistication, intelligence, and rugged manliness---or womanliness, as the…

Statistics

Researchers: Calling Girls Fat Makes Them Fat

Whatever you do, don't call somebody a "researcher". It could condemn them to a nasty, brutish, and short-tempered life. The kind where most of their time is spent scrambling for…

Statistics

Time Series And Causality: Global Warming Example

Temperature causes Here is an atmospheric monthly average temperature series: T = (61, 69, 69, 70, 72, 65, 63) (all F). What caused the temperature to take the value T1…

Statistics

Time Series Aren’t Easy: Tornado Deaths Example

Time series are the most abused statistics in the physical sciences. (It's an endless, raucous, peer-reviewed contest for the worst in the "soft sciences.") The Mann problem (is that a…

Philosophy Statistics

Physical Probability Doesn’t Exist

There have been many attempts to tie probability to physical chance. Here, briefly and for discussion, is why I think all of them fail. Ontology does not recapitulate epistemology Let…

McChuck on Use The Tools The Left Created Against ThemSeptember 13, 2025
@Michael Dowd - Crawl back under your rock, you filthy communist.
McChuck on The Various Solutions To Black Crime AnalyzedSeptember 13, 2025
@John - If you don't know already, you haven't been paying attention for, oh, your entire life. But you probably…
John Pate on The Various Solutions To Black Crime AnalyzedSeptember 13, 2025
I need a bit more of an explanation about "woke whites" - what exactly they are and what motivates them.…
cdquarles on The Various Solutions To Black Crime AnalyzedSeptember 12, 2025
Where I grew up, in the last days of Jim Crow, no-one really cared that much about skin color. It…
cdquarles on The False Expectation Of PermanenceSeptember 12, 2025
If the definition of an ice age, geologically speaking, is a large mass of perennially persistent ice over a substantial…