Hillary Clinton is taking some heat for using her own private email account for her State Department email. I haven't been following the story very closely, but I have a few random thoughts:I keep hearing that she turned over 55,000 pages of email. Pages? Who measures email in pages? People who use email either talk about the number of messages, or they talk about how many … [Read more...] about Random Thoughts About Hillary Clinton’s Email
Science
Experts and Quackery
Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall is blogging about a recent British Medical Journal study of TV medical talk shows which found that, basically, Dr. Oz is talking out of his ass. Jack makes a good point, but this throw-away line caught my eye: For some reason medical experts have waited over a decade to actually check out the snake oil Dr. Oz has been selling to credulous … [Read more...] about Experts and Quackery
Mother Jones’s Weak Math
Steve Marmel posts this infographic he apparently got from Mother Jones magazine that purports to show institutionalized racism in Ferguson, Missouri:[Image reads: Institutional racism by the numbers. In 2013 in Ferguson: 483 black people were arrested, 36 white people were arrested, 92% of searches and 86% of car stops involved blacks.]I wonder if either Marmel or … [Read more...] about Mother Jones’s Weak Math
Considering a Geiger Counter
It probably says something about me that I'm thinking of buying a Geiger counter.It's not that I really have a need to detect radioactivity, exactly. But you know all those CSI shows where they pull out the UV light and shine it around a crime scene to find suspicious stains? If you tried that at home, the ultraviolet light would probably find all kinds of messes -- where … [Read more...] about Considering a Geiger Counter
How Bill Nye Debates Creationism
When word got around that Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) was going to debate Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum, I was skeptical because just understanding the science of evolution is not good enough, you also have to understand and be prepared for all the creationist criticisms of evolution, and most scientists have no reason to learn about those.Among other things, … [Read more...] about How Bill Nye Debates Creationism