Epidemiology can’t blame the victim
CBC’s The Sunday Edition had a parade of cancers researchers on the show through November and early December in an attempt to satisfy a continuous stream of outraged listeners. It started out as a conversation about why cancer screening recommendations have been reduced prompting irate listeners to wrote in saying their daughter was getting every [...]
Football and healthcare–watch me make the connection
You should watch me write these posts. I had no idea this post was going to end up talking about healthcare. Jesse Galef of Measuring Doubt caught ESPN writer Pat Yasinkas making a classic mistake called outcome bias. Talking about the Atlanta Falcons who tried and failed on a fourth and inches attempts: When Mike [...]
Earth seen at night from the International Space Station
I can’t remember who I was talking to, but I had an interesting discussion the other day about how people might–I said might–think of humanity and the Earth as a whole once commercial flights to space became commonplace. Here’s a video from the International Space Station that might give us a glimpse into what that [...]
Can we move onto what we’re going to do about climate change yet?
I thought I’d take a couple seconds while I’m waiting for a model to run to pass on two links I thought were interesting: The first is that a study aiming to measure the Earth’s temperature increase over the past 60 years, and funded in part by people who have been vehement climate change deniers, [...]
Poor does not equal lazy
I’ve been seeing the image on the left popping up in different places. When I just saw it on facebook, I snapped. There are people at the occupy sites who are whining sissies. There are whining sissies everywhere you go. Left-wing, right-wing, youth, elderly, everywhere. That doesn’t mean there’s no issue to be discussed. There [...]
Richard Feynman on Beauty
Still buried under the demands of a thesis. Came across a side project from the Sagan series. Richard Feynman was clearly simultaneously insane and brilliant:
Ben Goldacre on the trouble with epidemiology
If you watched The Trouble with Experts yesterday, you caught a couple glimpses of Ben Goldacre talking about his dead cat. If you read this blog, you know Goldacre does a lot more than that. He is very critical of much of epidemiology and so when I watched his recent talk at TedGlobal, I felt [...]
The only thing in this world that is singularly bad is seeing a grey world in black and white
Black or White–Michael Jackson It’s easier to keep track of your personal convictions when they’re simple, black and white, propositions: huge corporations are bad, any product with the word natural or organic on it is good and if the Canadiens would have won game 7 last season against the Bruins they would have won [...]
The trouble with experts
I know there’s an answer–The Beach Boys I never know quite what to think about experts. In one sense believing an expert is putting your faith in their knowledge or expertise, but how are you supposed to judge an expert from a non-expert? Based on someone else’s word? Based on how many books they’ve [...]
