July 2009 – Page 2 – William M. Briggs

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,…

RANDOM TIDS & BITS- Thu 3/20/24- – WAXX on The Sports Illustrated curse and regression to the meanNovember 6, 2025
[…] Illustrated” once determined that their cover is a JINX 37% of the time. So about two out of every five…
Uncle Mike on Class 71: Never Trust ‘Research Shows’ Headlines: We Bring Cause To DataNovember 6, 2025
Homework discussion re Utts: It may be useful to note that syncretic hermeticism begins with the Egyptian god Thoth who…
Hagfish Bagpipe on Diversity Patrol Scanning Citations For VictimsNovember 5, 2025
"Consider this article one man addressing it." And doing such a fine job that none of your adversaries dare address…
Cary D Cotterman on Diversity Patrol Scanning Citations For VictimsNovember 5, 2025
When I was writing papers and technical reports, I cited the papers from which I got the information I needed.…
Lab Rat on Diversity Patrol Scanning Citations For VictimsNovember 5, 2025
Most of the time papers only have the first initial in the citation author list - how the heck am…