Monthly Archives: September 2009

Brett Favre. Any questions? I thought not…

A very interesting day. I got word in the AM that Derick would be digging a trench across the Cabin property tomorrow, and as an archaeologist I could not possibly skip that, so I ripped a rotten board out of the porch as fast as I could, threw in some laundry, and watched the beginning of the football game.
Continue reading Brett Favre. Any questions? I thought not…

How to induce an abortion in your unfaithful wife/girlfriend

Guys. There may be times when you feel your wife or long-term girlfriend has been sleeping with another man. You may suspect she is even pregnant from this activity, and you are not the father. There is a way to fix this, using traditional medicines and some magic, so that your wife/girlfriend will have a spontaneous abortion if you are not the father of the child. You will need an ancient Canaanite or Hebrew priest to help mix up the concoction, and you have to go find The Lord himself (Plan ahead! He is not always available!) to help out as well, but overall, the procedure is not that difficult.

Below the fold.
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Beck, Hannity: Global Warming Called Off

What they are referring to is a paper by Mojib Latif in which he notes that the media often misrepresent global warming as a continuous, year by year increase in temperature. The truth, of course, is that annual temperature varies up and down but the baseline for this variation has been going continuously up.

Like a road going up a mountain. Often the road goes up and down and up and down cross the complex terrain of the mountain side. If, while driving up this hypothetical mountain, the road dips down for a moment, one does not say “Oh, we’re going home now. This whole driving up the mountain thing is over. We just dipped down. No more up. That’s the end of it.” and then turn around and drive home.

I mean, really, this is pretty freakin’ simple.

If you’d like to view Latif’s power point (as a PDF file) click here. Slide three is the one these morons are talking about.

Read more here at Media Matters.

Americans Who Don’t Identify with a Religion No Longer a Fringe Group

You’ve certainly heard of the ARIS 2008 survey from Trinity College. One of the more interesting aspects of the survey is the demonstration that there is a sex difference in patterns of religions identification. Below I give some links where this has been discussed, but I want to note that in many discussions one of the first things people say … quite reasonably … is that the differences seem small and potentially well within the normal sampling error of a survey.

The reason people think that is because they are accustom to survey data in relation to political polling where sample error is usualy 5% or 3% because of standard methodologies and sample sizes. The ARIS survey has a much lower error rate. The lower error rate does not mean the the conclusion is stronger than it might otherwise be. It means that it is less likely spurious than it might otherwise be. But, in this case, this certainly means that the differences between groups (mainly male vs. female) can not be written off as statistical artifacts. (Though they could easily be of little consequence. Or not.)

In order to help move this discussion beyond sample size questions, I am hereby reproducing salient portions of the Methodological Note for the recently widely discussed and blogged about survey “American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population.”

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