Winter’s Haven

Here’s an important bulletin on “rescission” (the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies) from the it’s-much-much-worse-than-we-ever-imagined department.
the probability of having your [health insurance] policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two.
Assuming for the moment that that is correct, there’s really only one word to properly describe individual [...]

I’ve been playing around with Wolfram Alpha, which is fun and potentially useful. I was a bit disappointed, however, that my first attempt to trip it up succeeded. Asking it “What is the length of the coast of Iceland?” produces an answer, 4970 km, which is precise, definite, and largely meaningless.
The problem is that the [...]

This post is devoted to refuting an impressively lame epistemology paper. John Turri presents a novel line of reasoning which, he claims, allows one to gain a priori knowledge of contingent facts. The relevant section begins on page 19:

Sam considers whether the most unlikely possible event is not presently occurring. By ‘the most unlikely possible [...]

The Economist magazine, who really ought to know better, wrote that

A study by the Centre for Science in the Public Interest showed that soft drinks were the single biggest contributor to calories in the American diet…

This sentence conveys no information whatsoever. An example will serve to illustrate the problem. Suppose that every day I drink [...]

You absolutely must read Jeff Atwood’s article describing Swoopo.com. What is Swoopo? Commenter Septomin provides an eloquent summary: “someone read about the dollar auction and decided to turn it into a business plan.”. It’s a business model that will make every casino owner envious.
Lastly, I’d like to highlight a comment by Jacob (not me), [...]

…when you’ve got a financial engineer?

Hat tip to Greg Mankiw.

Apparently, some people really can’t tell the difference between a donut and a coffee mug, although I doubt this particular crackpot is any sort of professional topologist.
Hat tip to The Quantum Ponitiff for finding this hilarious video (or should that be a mitre tip?).

[Video from YouTube illustrating a crackpot "the earth is growing" theory, [...]

What. The. Fuck.
Police in Orlando, Florida claim “a typical prostitute that’s HIV-positive could potentially infect more than 18,000 people a year.”
Taking into account HIV transmission probabilities, Classically Liberal estimates that SuperProsti would have to serve at least “9 million customers [per year]. Disney World only manages 27 million.”

Some people think that scientists doing theoretical work can use mathematics to prove things about the real world a priori of any empirical investigation. This is wrong. Allow me to explain.
It is true that the results of pure mathematics do follow from whatever axioms one starts with a priori of any empirical observations. Indeed, empirical [...]

There has been far too much religion and politics on this blog lately. Here are a few sciency links to freshen things up.

Several groups have found different ways to use the Casimir effect to levitate objects. The New Scientist has a nice summary; specific papers can be found on arXiv.org.

Mike Dunford, The Questionable Authority, gives [...]