therandomtexan
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Do You Spell FAIL with Green Letters?
More and more of all this hippy-dippy green energy bullshit we’re saddled with is turning out to be a collection of Really Bad Ideas: corn likker for yer car is destroying more land and polluting more water than all the frackers in Christendom, and starving folks in Latin America solar power arrays and wind turbines Read more
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The Beginning of the End for 5%
My students repeatedly ask about setting the critical values or interpreting p-values in statistical hypothesis testing. My stock answer is they should do their tests at the 5% level, since this is the most common and accepted practice in the biomedical community (my translation: it’s what all the KooL KiDz do.) But now some upstart Read more
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The Folly of Scientism
What he said. Read the whole thing, I especially enjoyed the discussion of evolutionary biology. Personally, I think the field is pure bunk. My favorite question for eBiologists is “What were the evolutionary pressures that modified dogs so that they all enjoy riding in cars with their heads out the window? Does it go back Read more
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Stop watching me!
Oliver Stone and some celebrity buddies want the NSA to stop watching them. Good idea. I stopped watching Oliver Stone years ago. Tip from Drudge, who is allergic to permalinks. Read more
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Website Status: OPEN
This is just mean, but it couldn’t happen to a more deserving band of grifters. Tip from the Instapundit, who says APPLY NOW. Read more
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National Debt for Dummies
This graph needs to become the National Elephant in the Room: Instead, we get fed a constant stream of circumlocutions and wonk porn like this: Tip from the Instapundit. Read more
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Vote for ObamaCare?
Looks like the implementation of the Affordable* Care Act is on its way to being all things to all people. The Obamacare exchange website is complicated to use and has seen more than a few glitches since it officially opened on October 1st, but the MacIver Institute has found that once you get through the Read more
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The mark of truth
“It is a mark of truth that the same truth can be approached by many roads.” —Gene Wolfe I ran across this early this morning, and followed the link to Wolfe’s 2001 essay, “The Best Introduction to the Mountains.” Wolfe describes his discovery of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and what he learned from it. Read more
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Pathological Altruism
Add the term to your vocabulary. From James Taranto’s ever-amusing Best of the Web Today, read about the work of Barbara Oakley, an associate professor in engineering…defines pathological altruism as “altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm.” A crucial qualification is that while the altruistic actor fails Read more
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The inherent contradiction in the system
Here’s the US government webpage telling me that another US government webpage (nasa.gov) is unavailable. It’s like the national parks, in cyberspace. A$$holes. Read more
The Random Texan 