Monthly Archives: February 2012

intended, but this post by Daniel Finke seems to me to be so wrong on so many counts that it deserves demands a rebuttal.

This post (from a source I find sometimes interesting but often wrong) appears to take the simplistic (but common) position that the state of personhood which defines murder is discrete In addition to agreeing with commenter Alex Heyworth that “logical consistency … Continue reading →

William M. Briggs post The Jeffreys-Lindley Paradox Isn’t refers to this article at Science2.0 by Tommaso Dorigo Ina  sense both seem to be saying the same thing but perhaps for different reasons. Dorigo concludes that there is no paradox because … Continue reading →

Albert Einstein: “I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I—nor would I want to—conceive of an individual that survives his physical … Continue reading →

This article in  Smithsonian Magazine is not about the novel but is a nice clear exposition of a simple experiment designed to expose the process by which a swarm “decides” on where to locate its next hive. Human democracy is a … Continue reading →

Despite the self serving concept of  “noblesse oblige”,  this report (which came to me via 3QuarksDaily) shouldn’t really be too surprising. The title phrase “more likely to” doesn’t really suggest causation in either direction, but I suspect that it does actually … Continue reading →

This article at American Scientist was evidently not written in response to my Mythical Myth #3. Indeed, it exemplifies the unfortunate tendency of well-intentioned people whom I would like to agree with to sabotage their own position by overstating the … Continue reading →

3quarksdaily  excerpts from Peter Richerson’s  review in Nature of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution. They also link to a more critical view put forward by Michael Price in Evolutionary Psychology.

Colin Allen (in American Scientist) reviews a book by Robert Lurz which takes what I am inclined to call a typical philosopher’s miss-take on the issue. Apparently Lurz notes that an animal’s responses to another animal’s looking at food through a … Continue reading →

Statistical pundit William M. Briggs has written a piece for ‘Significance’ on Why Do Statisticians Answer Silly Questions That No One Ever Asks?. Briggs is right to object to instances where statisticians (or more often users of statistics) respond to silly … Continue reading →

Phil Plait, at Discover Magazine, objected to an article in the Wall Street Journal where a number of climate change skeptics claimed, among other things, that the last decade has seen no global warming. Plait asserted that this amounts to “blatantly misinterpreting … Continue reading →

This article by Razib Khan at Discover Magazine makes an important distinction which relates to my earlier post on the same topic (Mythical Myth #3). The fact that the strength of a concept can be widely misunderstood does not mean that … Continue reading →

The fact that, in the USA, having decent basic health insurance for all is dependent on some funny scheme involving employers is something that most of the “civilized” world finds hard to understand. But given that it is so dependent, … Continue reading →

These messages are not new but maybe there’s  now at least a chance that they’ll rise in volume sufficiently to overhwelm the mainstream censors: 3quarksdaily links to Why economic inequality leads to collapse and David Brin has some good words … Continue reading →

William M. Briggs, a climate change skeptic who has been in a recent running battle with the other side ever since getting a podium at the Wall Street Journal is having a go at clarifying his position on Time Series. … Continue reading →

This confession came to my attention via Michael Geist. Coincidentally this came at the same time via 3QuarksDaily, and I was also pleased to see that Neil Young has joined those who see the excessive criminalization of media sharing (and especially … Continue reading →

Sometimes a statement which is perfectly true is called a myth on the basis of a misstatement. A case in point is “Bad astronomer” Phil Plait’s treatment of the statement in the above title in the post at  Q&BA: Pound … Continue reading →