Posted inCulture
The Beauty Contest
Update We'll leave this on top for another day. No theories thus far are correct. The sun was now a steady companion, only occasionally obscured by clouds. The snow was…
Iowa Professor Shocked To Discover He’s In Iowa
Stephen Bloom is a long-time professor of journalism ("Double spacing has twice as much space as single spacing", "On-line journals are called 'blogs'") at the University of Iowa. Bloom thinks…
What’s Funny About Tbilisi Ordinands? Hitchens, Stalin, and Buckley
The (we hope eventually) prodigal son of William F. Buckley said in his New Yorker obituary on Christopher Hitchens: As for the wit...one day we were talking about Stalin. I…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Ten Politically Incorrect So-Called Truths About Human Nature: 6 – 10
See 1 - 5 here. 6. Beautiful people have more daughters And are thus more likely to divorce? And thus less likely to have fewer kids than the ugly people…
Posted inFun Statistics
Top 10 Sure Things: Which NFL Games Were The Easiest To Pick?
Today's post is over at Edgehogs. I wanted to see how extreme bookies would go in making NFL picks, as judged by the probabilities of home-team wins as derived from…
Posted inFun Statistics
How To Find True Love: The Marriage Problem
MEB + ARK, a.k.a. the Haystack Hunters, wrote the following: As fans of your work in real life probability and breaking the law of averages, we were hoping you could…
Posted inStatistics
Hurricane Predictors Admit They Can’t Predict Hurricanes
My heart soared like a hawk1 after learning that Messieurs Philip Klotzbach and William Gray have admitted in print the hardest thing scientists can ever confess. That they were wrong.…
Posted inPhilosophy
Is Free Will an Illusion?
Tis the season to ask the title question, as it was rhetorically asked by Shaun Nichols, an academic "experimental" philosopher at the University of Arizona. Nichols has sympathy with those…