My Mother’s Proof of the Existence of God

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.

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Inaccurate Scientific Medical Studies

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 […]

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Outsourcing to Bots?

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 […]

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Spoofs of Proofs of God’s Existence

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 […]

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The Routine

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 […]

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Heartbreak Dead Ahead

It’s almost football season, and that means the SSSBlog will be living and dying each Saturday with the Univ. of Iowa Hawkeye football team. During my time in Iowa City they went 3-8, 3-8, 5-6, 5-6, and 2-9 … ah, those were the good old days. But the past three years they’ve finished in the top ten nationally, and last year in their last game they beat defending champion L.S.U. […]

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Intelligent Design and The Anthropic principle

More follow up to the earlier post on intelligent design: The New York Times published this article today discussing the substantive arguments made by the proponents of intelligent design. Also, the fundamental idea isn’t new. Various forms of the so-called “anthropic principle” have been around for many years. The principle tries to answer the question of why so many fundamental physical constants in our universe are precisely what they have […]

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Grump Wants His Own Blog

Give somebody a post, and all of a sudden they want everything their own way. My friend the Grumpy Moderate is feeling too big for his breeches and has decided he needs his own damned Blog. Well OK then. His political/current events comments will migrate to a new blog, The Grumpy Moderate. My less serious, more eclectic posts will remain here on SSSBlog. He was already getting on my nerves, […]

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