"Say, Elbert. What's the name of that there hurricane that's fixin' to pounce upon us?" "Lolita, I think." "What? Lolita!? I ain't evacuatin' nowheres! Not for no fee-male 'cane. Gimme…

Can sniffing a sticky stained organic tote bag that has seen one too many trips to Whole Foods turn you into the kind of activist that haunts street corners and…

You can take it from William M. Briggs, and also from the Today show: sporting a middle initial is a mark of sophistication, intelligence, and rugged manliness---or womanliness, as the…

Whatever you do, don't call somebody a "researcher". It could condemn them to a nasty, brutish, and short-tempered life. The kind where most of their time is spent scrambling for…

Temperature causes Here is an atmospheric monthly average temperature series: T = (61, 69, 69, 70, 72, 65, 63) (all F). What caused the temperature to take the value T1…

Time series are the most abused statistics in the physical sciences. (It's an endless, raucous, peer-reviewed contest for the worst in the "soft sciences.") The Mann problem (is that a…

Michael "State of Fear" Crichton once proposed that UFOs were responsible for global warming. Why not? After all, something caused that record amount of snow in Detroit yesterday. Don't get…