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The End of Science

How's that for a dramatic title? I am actually here talking not about the cessation of science, but rather its purpose. Bruce Charlton wrote another thought provoking editorial, Conscience in Science. Charlton takes his theme from C. S. Lewis' essay, First and Second Things. In that essay,

Possibility in Nature

James Chastek has a brief post on Two meanings of "chance" that is very brief, but has revealing comments, including this one: There is a very long history of denying the reality of chance, and there is some force to it- the sciences not infrequently find causes for

Non-rational Choice Theory

Last week I criticized Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa for his approach to explaining voting in terms of rational choice theory. This week, I would like to agree with Kanazawa, people really are irrational. I thought of this especially because of a piece by David Warren about how so many homeless people

Non-theistic Intelligent Design

Note that is non-theistic, not a-theistic. If you've never heard of such a thing, read this book review of Signature in the Cell by John Walker, and see what you think. I've never been a fan of intelligent design of either variety, but Walker is a

Fermi Problems

Fermi Problems

Geoff Canyon has a post about Google's tricky interview questions. Microsoft is also known for asking these kind of questions during interviews, and you can run into them anywhere in the technical world. Also known as Fermi problems or back-of-the-envelope calculations, I ran into these a lot during

Rational Choice Theory and Experimental Philosophy

Satoshi Kanazawa has a blog post up at Psychology Today about rational choice theory. Voting, he claims, is irrational, because each vote, especially in national elections, counts for so little. I especially like the part where Kanazawa pooh-poohs the idea that voting might be a civic duty as magical thinking.

Stats Package Comparison

A fun post exploring the differences between a number of statistical computation packages. As one of the commenters said, this is an awesome flame war! The comments are very informative, with all sorts of historical information explaining how and why certain packages turned out the way they are. I use