http://phys.org/news/2014-03-chemical-ghosts-dinosaurs-reveal-secrets.html

We're having the big tree at the end of our driveway taken down today. We love the thing, but it's deeply unhealthy and sooner or later (probably sooner) it would have fallen on our neighbor's house. It's been part of the character of the place since we moved in, seven years ago, and we'd hoped it would be here for years or decades to come ( Read more... )

"Free head-squashing for your birthday. Head-pulling-back-into-shape ... yeah, you're still gonna have to pay for that."


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I disagree sharply with some of this, and am ambivalent about some of the rest, but there are some excellent points here. The skeptic community, to the degree such a thing can be defined, has real problems with sexism, intellectual incestuousness, and off-putting smugness, and if it refuses to address those problems or even acknowledge that they ( Read more... )

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics." It's coming up again with depressing frequency, being used as an argument instead of a snide observation ( Read more... )

More on how the "In the 1970s they were predicting global cooling, hah hah stupid 'scientists'" meme got started ( Read more... )

A conversation on The Other Social Media Site got me thinking about people who try to classify themselves and others by Greek letters. This is something I try not to think about as much as possible, but sometimes I can't avoid it ( Read more... )

I'm glad to see this kind of criticism. As a biostatistician working in bioinformatics, I'm well aware of both how powerful and how dangerous "big data" can be--powerful because it can tell you things you couldn't discover any other way, dangerous because it will tell you all kinds of things that aren't true unless you're very, very careful with ( Read more... )

http://torrentfreak.com/bsa-pirates-busted-140322/

Technically, of course, "MAFIAA" only refers to the RIAA and MPAA. There ought to be a word to describe organizations that practice this kind of thuggery in general. "IParasites," perhaps?

... we're going to have to deal with the fact that we're not the only thinking species on the planet. If tuna, of all things, can learn from experience and pass that knowledge on to others, what does that say about animals with much larger and more organized brains? Leave a comment