Every time that there is a major doping scandal associated with sports, like the recent one in which Lance Armstrong was portrayed as essentially a drug kingpin who “didn’t just take drugs: he was the enforcer of a small mafia within professional cycling that moved ruthlessly against anyone who threatened to expose him or his collaborators. He bullied and threatened team-mates, journalists and fellow cycling professionals and officials”, calls emerge that maybe we should simply allow it. [Read more…]
As The Daily Show points out, there does seem to be any limit on how insane your views can be and still get elected to federal and state government. [Read more…]
The Neanderthals are an interesting species though unfairly treated. They are frequently portrayed as knuckle-dragging idiots, serving as a metaphor for people with retrograde views, especially with respect to gender and sexuality, though there is no reason to think that they were any worse than the ancestors of our own species at that time. [Read more…]
I have been writing about the problems of misconduct in research with academics having to resign as a result of misconduct. [Read more…]
[Sorry about the confusion about the posts! I accidentally posted the text of one post under the heading of the other!]
The comments on last week’s post on some students protesting the new nutritious food guidelines for school lunches were quite lively. So I went back and tried to find some data to see if that might clarify the situation. [Read more…]
[Sorry about the confusion about the posts! I accidentally posted the text of one post under the heading of the other!]
So I ended up watching the first debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
I thought the format was much better than previous ones that I have seen. It allowed for much freer exchanges between the candidates and more time for direct exchanges and thus was more like a real debate. In the process, both speakers ended up running rough-shod over the moderator Jim Lehrer and some may accuse him of having lost control. But that was better than in some ‘debates’ from years past when the moderator acted like a circus ring master cracking the whip at the candidates. The less we see and hear of the moderator the better. [Read more…]
As I said earlier, journalists will use every device to persuade us that elections are closer than they are, in order to keep interest high. One of the things they do is to assert that if the difference between the predicted votes for two candidates is smaller than the margin of error of the poll, then the two candidates are in a statistical tie. This gives the impression that it is a toss-up, i.e., 50-50 chance, as to who is ahead. This is simply not true and worth reiterating during the election season, like I did back in 2008 around this time. [Read more…]
Religious people (at least the sophisticated ones) have abandoned trying to argue as evidence that god provides explanations for how things work. They have realized that this is a losing strategy as science has made god redundant as an explanation for anything, and that signs of god’s power seem to show a notable inverse correlation to the advance of science. [Read more…]