2014 – Page 2 – William M. Briggs

NYC Protesters: ‘What Do We Want? Dead Cops!’ What They’ll Get Is Something Else

https://twitter.com/NYCityAlerts/status/543987028166455296 "Comedy" (or perhaps "farce") is a good word to describe the human predicament given events like Sony (the hacked company which revealed emails with lame jokes) studio head and…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: Nothing Is Predicated Univocally Of God & Other Things

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. Perhaps a…

Culture Fun

The Reimaginings Of Exodus And Noah Inspires Moviemakers—And You!

https://twitter.com/mattstat/status/543559693592182785 John Nolte doesn't like Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings. ...Scott makes a fool of himself. DeMille used the ancient biblical tale to tell a universal story about human…

Culture Philosophy Podcast Statistics

Podcast: Peer Review, Bob & Ray Do Statistics, Academic Calls For Killing Of (Post-Birth) Babies

[podcast]https://www.wmbriggs.com/audio/wmbriggs_com_12dec2014_0006.mp3[/podcast] Show Notes Wired's PubPeer article. PubPeer.com itself. PubPeer's discussion of "Macroscopic Observability of Spinorial Sign Changes under 2π Rotations". Bob and Ray can be found at, inter alia, the…

Philosophy

Pascal’s Pensées, A Tour: III

Since our walk through Summa Contra Gentiles is going so well, why not let's do the same with Pascal's sketchbook on what we can now call Thinking Thursdays. We'll use…

Statistics

On The Attribution Of A Single Event To Climate Change

Rained yesterday here in the city of cities. Must be because of climate change, right? Hey. The climate did change and it did rain. What more evidence do you want?…

Culture

Columbia Law School Kiddies ‘Traumatized’, Exams Postponed: Update Harvard Joins

There's a story in John Toland's magisterial The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire (volume two) which depicts a Japanese ship transporting Western prisoners in conditions…

Statistics

The Philosophy Of Rock Paper Scissors

Way my dad and I used to play is that when somebody won they got to grab the hand of the loser and then, with the fore- and middle-fingers only,…

hudbwu on Over-Certainty Of Polygenic ScoresJune 11, 2025
I stopped midway to write this comment. What exactly is the difference between polygenic scores and two-layer neural networks? Other…
NLR on AI & The Dilemma Of TechnologyJune 11, 2025
It's not just that the effects of technology are complex, it's that there's no guarantee that the results will fit…
Cloudbuster on AI & The Dilemma Of TechnologyJune 10, 2025
"Anyway, murder is illegal, too, yet murder is still with us. So it shouldn’t be strange that forbidding scientists to…
Mike Wooly on Cosmic Radiation, Clouds, & Global WarmingJune 10, 2025
The IPCC report that anthropogenic warming is around 0.2 degrees C per decade. That's two hundredths of a degree C…
Chaeremon on AI & The Dilemma Of TechnologyJune 10, 2025
IMHO the dot ai bubble, as direct follower of the dot com bubble, is trying to instantiate Gödel's incompleteness theorems,…