Briggs

Tim Tebow’s Super Bowl Ad and the Washington Post Editorial

Very delicate ground, here. I want to be as precise as I know how in discussing the language used in today's Washington Post editorial about the upcoming Tim Tebow ad,…

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Welcome-to-Saturday Links

My heart soared like a hawk this week after several readers sent in fascinating stories. Here are a few of them. Reader Sara C sent in a wonderful example of…

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R Lecture 4: Help & Plotting

This is the fourth in a series of lectures on R. 10 minutes is a shockingly short period of time! Today, we learn the R way to create comments: start…

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R Lecture 3: Our First Program!

This is the third in a series of lectures on R. (DAV, I kept the intro for one last time.) Open the myRcode.R file we saved in our myR folder.…

Culture

Two-and-a-Half Millennia Don’t Change Much

Herodotus begins his history by telling us that some Phoenician traders came to Argos, Greece and, on a whim, abducted the king's daughter Io and took her to Egypt. Later,…

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Create Tax Refunds That Must Be Donated To Political Parties?

In the State of the Union address, President Obama thought it would be pleasant to slam the Supreme Court, shaming them for their recent Citizens United v. FEC decision. Our…

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R Lecture 2: Prepping a Folder

Main page for R Lectures. This is the second in a series of lectures on R. R is command-line software. We need to type in commands. These commands should be…

Culture

State of the Union Snippets: Live Blog (update continuously)

Started by intimating: It's bad now, but when it was bad before, it got good. "Answer history's call." "These struggles are why I ran for President." Thought: It's tough to…

PonderPoints on A New Physics Arises: Irreducible by Federico Faggin ReviewedJuly 17, 2026
You argue that Faggin is right to reject mechanistic emergence but wrong to award consciousness to every field or “seity,”…
John Pate on University of California Prof Tries To Save System From DIEingJuly 15, 2026
I don't believe China to be hampered by such nonsense or, for that matter, much of S.E.A. in general.
Rudolph Harrier on My Horrible Interaction With AIJuly 15, 2026
I don't find LLMs to be particular bad at D&D in comparison to other things. For example, I queried an…
JohnK on Hume’s Guillotine, Euclid’s Catapult: Induction, Axioms, and Objective EthicsJuly 15, 2026
Does one detect the sea-captain's lurking circularity in this "we" who "need air, gravity, food..." etc.? And don't "we" also…
hudbwu on Hume’s Guillotine, Euclid’s Catapult: Induction, Axioms, and Objective EthicsJuly 15, 2026
Hume: "People saying things doesn't translate into rules for living." Stultes: "OMG I can do whatever I want!" If only…