Briggs

The Lady Tasting Tea: Bayes Versus Frequentism; Part III (update)

Read Part I, Part II. The text has again been expanded and corrected. We have our model in hand. "Has the ability", our model, says (see Part II) that the…

Philosophy Statistics

The Lady Tasting Tea: Bayes Versus Frequentism; Part II (update)

Read Part I: Again, the text (up to this part) has been corrected and expanded. Recall our overarching---our only---goal. We want to know whether the sweet old lady "has the…

Philosophy Statistics

The Lady Tasting Tea: Bayes Versus Frequentism; Part I (updated)

Since the subject arose yesterday, and for other reasons which I'll explain later, I thought we should revisit this series, which ran a year ago. I have edited and expanded…

Statistics

Dawkins On The Double-Blind Experiment

The Edge every year asks top science celebrities a penetrating, yet fun, always fun, question. Last year's was "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?" One of the correspondent…

Philosophy Statistics

Statement Of Teaching Philosophy

Regular readers will know that I have been searching for (continuous) employment as a teacher. Most colleges and universities ask applicants to supply "a statement of teaching philosophy", while a…

Philosophy Statistics

The Jeffreys-Lindley Paradox Isn’t

Background A paradox is a mistake in thinking; an artificial, human creation which usually arises because a conclusion which follows from a set of beloved premises is itself unloved. Twitter…

Culture Fun Statistics

Oscar Predictions: Money, Men, & Maturity Make The Difference

Last year, my number two son1 and I created a model to predict the Oscar winning movie (the original post, and the follow up). We found the following characteristics most…

Fun Statistics

Scratch-off Lottery Tickets: Expected Payouts, A Hidden Benefit?

Update See the comments, but thanks to readers' arguments I believe I was wrong in an essential calculation. I've reworked the text to correct my error, which was small in…

Cary D Cotterman on UFO Reports About To Blast Off!April 27, 2026
You can google the rarest of all animal species, some of which have only a few known living examples on…
Philip Rogan on UFO Reports About To Blast Off!April 27, 2026
"To Serve Man."
Zundfolge on UFO Reports About To Blast Off!April 27, 2026
I've been saying for some time that the public is being primed for a faux First Contact scenario (ala Project…
NLR on UFO Reports About To Blast Off!April 27, 2026
If there really were a species that could travel here from another planet, that would be something totally outside the…
Economist Says the Quiet Part Out Loud: High Energy Prices are ‘Good for the Climate’ | Progress with God on The Consensus That Wasn’t: Less Than 1%, Not 97%April 26, 2026
[…] economist would recognise as market-based. Yet we are told, with straight faces, that the ‘97% consensus‘ demands we accept…