August 2014 – Page 3 – William M. Briggs

It Makes No Sense To Say You’re More Likely To Die Of Bee Sting Than Shark Bite

The National Journal says: "The odds of being killed by a shark are about 1 in 3.7 million. The odds of being killed by a sting from a bee, wasp,…

Statistics

Decline Of Participation In Religious Rituals With Improved Sanitation

Answer me this. Earl at the end of the bar, on his sixth or seventh, tells listeners just what's wrong with America's science policy. His words receive knowing nods from…

Philosophy Statistics

Comments On Dawid’s Prequential Probability

Phil Dawid is a brilliant mathematical statistician who introduced (in 1984) the theory of prequential probability1 to describe a new-ish way of doing statistics. We ought to understand this theory.…

Philosophy Statistics

Explanation Vs Prediction

Introduction There isn't as much space between explanation and prediction as you'd think; both are had from the same elements of the problem at hand. Here's how it all works.…

Philosophy

Philosophic Issues in Cosmology V: What Measurements Tell Us—Guest Post by Bob Kurland

Bob Kurland is a retired, cranky, old physicist, and convert to Catholicism. He shows that there is no contradiction between what science tells us about the world and our Catholic…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: God Has No Passive Potentiality

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT. Previous post. We started…

Culture Philosophy

Gibbon (And O’Brian) On Too Many Lawyers

This is Gibbon, quoted in Patrick O'Brian's The Reverse of the Medal by the character Dr Stephen Maturin, who then speaks: '"It is dangerous to entrust the conduct of nations…

Statistics

Missing Global Warming Close To A Solution?

I can't tell you where I obtained a photocopy of the note below. I can tell you that I am in Washington DC (at the lovely and recommended Morrison Clark…

Johnno on Funding Increases To Foster Even More Cheating In ScienceAugust 14, 2025
Briggs you fool... what you so outdatingly call cheating, I prefer to see as a more progressive healthy open relationship…
hudbwu on Lying Increases Trust In Science, Says AcademicAugust 14, 2025
To be fair, the center of this article (that I looked at from the link provided) is a reduction-to-absurd argument…
hudbwu on Funding Increases To Foster Even More Cheating In ScienceAugust 14, 2025
I love how the scale in the last graph is *LoGaRithMic_!
hudbwu on Compulsory Moral Bioenhancement Should Be Covert Says Academic Who Says Ticks Should Be Genetically Modified To Stop You Eating MeatAugust 14, 2025
Do you remember the time when craving loonies posted these things not in peer-reviewed journals, but on Internet fora? Man,…
NLR on Funding Increases To Foster Even More Cheating In ScienceAugust 13, 2025
From the link at the end of the post: On the one hand, we have the fabricated research of an…