When I was taking an online course on reasoning and constructing good arguments (which I never completed, but that’s another post,) there was one interesting tidbit that was covered: some conclusion might be perfectly correct, but the argument leading to the conclusion could be flawed or unsupportive.
Tag: confirmation bias
Marvel of design
Walkabout podcast – Marvel of design
I delayed this one slightly to serve as my Darwin Day post ;-)
I freely admit that there are some really stunning things to be found in nature – in fact, that’s what many of my ‘Too Cool‘ posts are intended to highlight. Predator/prey relationships, highly
Grecian troublemakers
This is a revisit of a subject that I first broached in this post, which I felt needed more examination. So let’s return to that radical concept of Phi.
Phi is a mathematical ratio that, curiously enough, has more than a few close representations in nature. It is an irrational number, one of those decimals that go on forever, but usually shortened to 1.618. If you create a rectangle
Seneca Falls, we have a problem
All right, I admit that title might be a little confusing, since not too many people are familiar with the hamlet of Seneca Falls, New York, but on top of it being only 12 km from where I grew up (which is well worth remembering,) it was the location of the first Convention on Women’s Rights in 1848. We’ve come a long way since then – unfortunately, the direction has become
Attorney for god
Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne featured a comment from a reader giving very precise criteria for his/her own conversion to believing evolution. Provided with several examples, however, said reader suddenly became intently interested in the fine print and actual wording of both their own statement and those of the responses. Why am I not surprised?
I guess it’s because I’ve
Superstitious?
During a phone conversation with a friend the other night, I admitted to holding some senseless superstitions, and got (rightfully) berated for it. As punishment, he assigned me a five hundred word essay on superstition, so don’t be blaming me if this is boring – it’s his assignment. I’m just not sure I can keep it down to five hundred words…
Superstition actually appears
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