Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Truth be known, I don’t know if John Cook is a real skeptic or not – or rather, to what degree and in what situations he is a skeptic. I follow his blog on Google Reader, but my schedule has allowed me very little time for reading since I subscribed to him. So, [...]

Very nice piece from miller explaining blind analysis – a method for avoiding tricks of human psychology under certain circumstances. It’s very interesting and I think you should read it. I think so because I read the first paragraph, applied some models of goodness to it, then I read the rest and checked my [...]

Pretty cool
Stuff like this makes me want to take better care of myself and live a long, long time. I still get excited when I think about the world my great grandchildren will live in.
It won’t be perfect. It never has been and it never will be. But it is still pretty damned impressive.

All of us who read & write primarily in the non-scientific sub-spheres of the blogosphere are likely frequent victims of confirmation bias*… and when the subjects are veering more toward politics, the effect is likely enhanced.
This almost went in with the eye boogers – where, if you’re reading, you may have noticed [...]

The only reason I comment on this story about a correlation between horizontal eye exercises and increased creativity … is that I wonder if I have inadvertently gotten a hand up from the effect. About a year ago, I got a second monitor to extend the desktop on my computer at work. I am [...]

For students of human behavior and its relationship to politics, this is absolutely unsurprising.
The findings indicate that male voters exhibit biological responses to the realignment of a country’s dominance hierarchy as if they participated in an interpersonal dominance contest.

This is a fun article, if you bear in mind that it’s probably very silly. The LHC is something else, if evidenced only by the fact that it can elicit silliness like this from some pretty serious brains.

I noticed Chris Mooney’s enthusiastic post earlier this week where he relayed some Accommodationist sounding words from Richard Dawkins. I expected that it would draw some return fire, and now it has.
See, Dawkins made these statements that express one of the important notions of accommodationism:
No, I don’t think they’re incompatible if only because there are [...]

Ok… I’m not taking the day all the way off today. I’m going to ask for some feedback. This Sunday, I’m to be leading the religious education group for teens at church. We have a great curriculum this year, but no lesson plan for this Sunday. I’m supposed to bring my own [...]

Science Trivia. Meaningless, but fun – especially when you get a 100 like I did.
My opportunity to kibitz on the subject yet again… : Science, unlike many forms of “common sense” is a cultural tool. In other words, we don’t naturally learn the rules of science as part of our development process. [...]