Researchers from Brazil's Universidade Estadual de Campinas used a computer simulation to confirm paleontologist Stephen J. Gould's prediction that it is evolutionarily advantageous for cicadas to emerge at intervals lasting a prime number of years.

Crunch, Crunch, Crunch, Crunch, Crunch,… That’s the sound of me banging my head against a concrete wall to relieve the pain I suffered on reading the latest pearl of wisdom that world famous astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGasse Tyson … Continue reading →

Recently Rattle posted a wonderful mathy poem by Diana Rosen entitled "Mathematics and Molé." Here's the first stanza:      Mathematics and Molé     by Diana Rosen     Numbers flicker in front of my eyes as     I give him my full attention.     Differential geometry explains the black hole, he says.     It’s very obvious.     I lean forward to catch his […]

Hamdan Azhar writes: I came across this graphic of vaccine-attributed decreases in mortality and was curious if you found it as unattractive and unintuitive as I did. Hope all is well with you! My reply: All’s well with me. And yes, that’s one horrible graph. It has all the problems with a bad infographic with [...]The post uuuuuuuuuuuuugly appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

I find the following to be a good methodological principle. If your view of the world commits you to the proposition that the dominant philosophers between (and including) Kant and Hegel were naive and unsophisticated, then YOUR ARE DOING IT WRONG. This to me is the most irritating thing about...