Following heated debate over the Kinnick Stadium’s pink visiting locker rooms, UI President David Skorton abruptly ended the university’s involvement and said the school will not further investigate the issue. For now, it appears, the locker room will keep its pink walls. Skorton on Thursday announced his decision to take no action toward investigating alleged sexism and homophobia in the locker room’s hue, after meeting with the University Steering Committee […]
There weren’t many readers before, I suspect, and not posting for three weeks won’t increase their numbers. But boy do I have excuses … the kids, their homework, my work, French classes, bills, chores, etc. So, some updates: Regarding this post, sure enough, there has been a ton of heartbreak among Hawkeye fans. A painful 23-3 loss to in-state rival Iowa State (aka Moo U), followed by a crushing 31-6 […]
Those of you who know me know that I’m a bit of a computer nerd, or maybe more appropriately a computer nerd wannabe. As further evidence, I discovered the other day that it is possible to download and burn a bootable CD that will run the free Linux operating system on your computer. It takes a little bit of work (the download is over 650 MB and I had to […]
For those of you who enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy this proof of God’s existence, sent in response to the post via e-mail from my mother: “Your Mother believes in God, therefore He exists.” Hey, those Presbyterians have some fight in them! I will note, though, that I suspect that for a lot of people, this probably is an accurate proof. Thanks, Mom.
This week’s Economist contains an interesting article on a study evaluating the accuracy of published medical research articles. The conclusion: When Dr Ioannidis ran the numbers through his model, he concluded that even a large, well-designed study with little researcher bias has only an 85% chance of being right. An underpowered, poorly performed drug trial with researcher bias has but a 17% chance of producing true conclusions. Overall, more than […]
The SSSBlog apologizes for the lack of recent posts. The adjustment to the first week of school got in the way. But, coming soon are two posts, one about baseball, the other about science. The Grump also has a brief post.
I subscribe to a publication called New Scientist, a British science magazine. It’s a little pricey (because it’s a weekly, unlike Scientific American), and my friend the Grump sometimes gets annoyed by its unabashed leftist political slant, and it’s a bit uneven at times (for example, the current issue has a large “alternative history” section with some questionable speculations about what would have happened if (for example) Newton had not […]
I feel like I’m cheating when write a blog post about somebody else’s page, but this one is too funny to pass on. Check out the web page “Over Three Hundred Proofs of God’s Existence” for some clever, funny, and even thought-provoking (in a very negative sort of way) “proofs” of the existence of God. So, with apologies to my mother…. here are some of them. They range from the […]
Since coming back from Paris, I’ve slowly fallen back into my normal routine. Routines are very helpful. They keep us from having to rethink our schedule of activities anew every single day. If every work day I get up at the same time, drink coffee and read the paper for the same amount of time, shower and get dressed in the same amount of time, I can be safely assured […]
It seems the SSSBlog has inspired the New York Times! A good opinion piece appears today making one of the points made earlier in this blog, that people can’t really comprehend the vast time scales necessary to make evolution work.