Posted inCulture
The Beauty Contest
Update We'll leave this on top for another day. No theories thus far are correct. The sun was now a steady companion, only occasionally obscured by clouds. The snow was…
Iowa Professor Shocked To Discover He’s In Iowa
Stephen Bloom is a long-time professor of journalism ("Double spacing has twice as much space as single spacing", "On-line journals are called 'blogs'") at the University of Iowa. Bloom thinks…
Posted inPhilosophy
Is Free Will an Illusion?
Tis the season to ask the title question, as it was rhetorically asked by Shaun Nichols, an academic "experimental" philosopher at the University of Arizona. Nichols has sympathy with those…
Posted inStatistics
Increasing Replication Of Un-Reproducibility In Science
Best science picture of the year, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal (and thanks to reader Dan Hughes): In just the last decade---ten mere years---the number of "peer-reviewed" journal articles…
Posted inFun
Muppets Offer Human Sacrifice!
Finally! I offer tangible proof that listening to the Beatles can drive one to evil. Prolonged, repetitious exposure to their music causes madness leading, in rare cases, to human sacrifice!…
Posted inFun Statistics
Counterfactuals And Woodchuck Probability Distributions
I have, with mechanical aid, again winged my way across the globe in search of treasure. I landed disoriented and would not trust myself to calculate even the integral of…
Posted inCulture
Banzhaf’s Assault Against Logic: Muslims Are Not Suing Catholic University
Lawyer John Banzhaf is thrilled and chagrined about the publicity he has received over the complaint he filed with the Washington DC Office of Human Rights. It has been widely…
Posted inStatistics
D.J. Keenan’s And My BEST Methodology Reviews
Doug Keenan was asked by The Economist to have a gander at the statistics developed by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. He did so. We must resist extensive…