Introit Ever heard of somebody "simulating" normal "random" or "stochastic" variables, or perhaps "drawing" from a normal or some other distribution? Such things form the backbone of many statistical methods,…

Skepticism about induction happens only among academic philosophers, and only in print. Tell an induction skeptic to take a long walk off a short dock or hint that his health…

Proof Isn't All That The first section can be skipped for those who know what necessary versus conditional truth is. I recall an anecdote about John von Neumann which had…

This came up yesterday (again, as it does often), so I figure one more stab is in order. Because the answer isn't simple, I had to write a lot, which…

Thanks to reader Frank Kristeller we learn that the far left New York Times yesterday ran an article by F.D. Flam praising the rise of Bayesian statistics: The Odds, Continually…

In the comment section to an earlier piece of mine on Strange Notions, Richard Carrier invited me to "interact" with him through his article "Neither Life nor the Universe Appears…