October 2011 – Page 4 – William M. Briggs

Why Yom Kippur Is Sacred To This Priest — Guest Post by Father Brian Jordan

Father Brian Jordan is a Roman Catholic priest, a Franciscan formerly of St. Francis of Assisi Church in New York City, where everybody, just everybody, knows him. He does most…

Philosophy Statistics

Robert Heinlein And Evolving Probabilities

Writer Stephen Dawson, a long-time participant at this blog, wrote and asked the following: In his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein had his intelligent computer calculate the…

Statistics

The Implications Of Yesterday’s Global Warming Post

There was nothing in the world wrong with my scientific paper "Global Warming Increases Disastrous Music: A Scientific Paper." Nothing, that is, that isn't wrong with any paper which seeks,…

Statistics

Global Warming Increases Disastrous Music: A Scientific Paper

A scientific paper in a grand tradition (notice the scientific formatting and use of p-values): the custom is to read only the Abstract; only the brave and bored should venture…

Culture Philosophy Statistics

Are Humans As Violent As In The Good Old Days?

If we had records of massacres as we have meteorological records, don't you think we might discover their internal laws, after several centuries of observation? --- Joseph de Maistre. There…

Book review

America’s Security and Taiwan’s Freedom — Guest Post by June Teufel Dreyer

We return to a topic which is of more importance than you want it to be: the possibility of Chinese belligerence. June Teufel Dreyer is a political science professor at…

John M on AI: The Earth Is Spinning Faster & Slower (Because “Climate Change”)January 14, 2026
I asked an AI: if the big bang theory is true, where is the center of the universe? The answer…
hudbwu on Confirmation Bias In The Minneapolis ShootingJanuary 14, 2026
@R W Pearson: Okay good, we're talking about it. If I understood Correia correctly, he offers the following defence: "the…
Tim on AI: The Earth Is Spinning Faster & Slower (Because “Climate Change”)January 14, 2026
Absolutely true! After rephrasing or submitting more factual information, I get even more dismissive replies. Yeah, there are certainly "No…
John M on Confirmation Bias In The Minneapolis ShootingJanuary 14, 2026
I think law enforcement needs to revisit how they respond to vehicles. If a vehicle is classified as a deadly…
Rudolph Harrier on AI: The Earth Is Spinning Faster & Slower (Because “Climate Change”)January 14, 2026
One actually useful feature of public LLMs is to see what questions the establishment doesn't want you to ask. If…