December 2016 – Page 3 – William M. Briggs

Eastern Michigan To Install Zampolit In Every Classroom To Maintain Ideological Purity

Maintaining ideological purity requires constant vigilance. The Commissars in the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics knew this well. This is why they assigned zampolit, or political officers, to serve…

Statistics

Don’t Use Statistical Models (When You Don’t Have To. Which Is Nearly Always)

Today, a convincing argument proving the current practice of probability and statistics is mostly wrong, or wrong-headed. The picture above does---and does not---show herbicide use in several countries by year…

Culture Statistics

Science Asks: Why Are Angry Atheists Annoying?

What's more annoying than an atheist who harangues passersby about "rationality"? Easy answer: a scientist who announces a discovery about human behavior that was known by everybody since Adam. Our…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: More On The Possible Intellect

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're still…

Philosophy

Vatican Analyzes The Difference Between Humans And Robots

Soon a robot will ask you if you want fries with that. Computer screens already do, in some locales. How does that make you feel? Hungry? That could be taken…

Statistics

Scientific People Understand Reality Less, New Research Didn’t Study

Headline: Religious people understand the world less, study suggests, which derives from the peer-reviewed paper "Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs?" in Applied Cognitive Psychology…

Culture

Seventy-Five Years After Pearl Harbor

Holy moly. Shinzo Abe is going to visit Pearl Harbor "on Dec. 26-27 to pray for the dead". Who saw that coming? According to the linked report: "We must never…

Culture Philosophy

Do I Exist?(Does Russia) Part II — Guest Post by Ianto Watt

Read Part I here. So God has already acted. There is no potentiality left in Him, as Aquinas would say. After all, He's already done everything. There's nothing left to…

Cary D Cotterman on Climate Change Increases Risk of Even Slower World Cup Games!June 10, 2026
82.5 degrees Fahrenheit isn't even "hot", let alone "extremely hot". American football is played in summer, by guys wearing thick…
Tars Tarkas on Climate Change Increases Risk of Even Slower World Cup Games!June 10, 2026
I seriously doubt 82.4 degrees hampers the action in any event. These are young male world class athletes in the…
spetzer86 on Climate Change Increases Risk of Even Slower World Cup Games!June 10, 2026
If they wanted temperatures below 82F in the American mid-West they should've scheduled for Nov-Feb. Imagine a Twin Cities game…
Tony Cooke on Climate Change Increases Risk of Even Slower World Cup Games!June 10, 2026
Maybe they should move all the games to the tropics. That would slow things down to the point of such…
Briggs on The Ultimate IQ Test: Guessing the Author’s Mind and Escaping the Infinity of AnswersJune 10, 2026
JH, You are very rare. A lot of teachers are strict. Of course, we are all constrained by Nature's Author…