“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 that there […]
William M. Briggs Sez: Keep That Impressive Middle Initial
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 case may […]
Can A Disgusting Smell Turn You Conservative And Against Gay “Marriage”?
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 says, “Excuse […]
Judgments About Fact And Fiction By Confused Researchers
Good news first. The peer-reviewed “Judgments About Fact and Fiction by Children From Religious and Nonreligious Backgrounds” by Kathleen Corriveau, Eva Chen, and Paul Harris in Cognitive Science is so awful that […]
Disbelief In Free Will Causes Disbelief In Free Will
Never was the West’s wholesale flight from philosophy and a classic education more evident than in the title of this peer-reviewed paper: Prosocial Benefits of Feeling Free: Disbelief in Free Will Increases […]
Researchers: Calling Girls Fat Makes Them Fat
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 grants, position, […]
Foreclosures Causing Suicides?
Remember our discussion of the Spurious Correlations website, nicely paired with the Regression Isn’t What You Think post? The two keys points of both are the (a) “statistically significant” correlations, even nonsensical […]
Regression Isn’t What You Think
We’ve done regression a hundred times, but it isn’t sticking. That means my explanations are failing. Let me try again. Everybody knows normal distributions, i.e. bell-shaped curves: in shorthand N(m,s), where the […]
Recent Comments