"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…

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…

Friday, time to relax. From reader Ken Steele comes a link to io9's "10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing" which will be fun to peruse. Can…

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…

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),…

Today's evidence is not new; is, in fact, well known. Well, make that just plain known. It's learned and then forgotten, dismissed. Everybody knows about these kinds of mistakes, but…