Archives for bblais on the web

Mon 04 November 2024
Energy Balance Revisited
Sun 27 October 2024
Leon Cooper passes away
Mon 09 September 2024
Reproducing Richard Carrier's Calculations
Mon 22 January 2024
A poor introduction to Bayesian Reasoning
Sat 02 December 2023
What would I expect to be in the Bible?
Sun 19 November 2023
"Why I became an atheist" Part 1 and Part 2- John Loftus & Peter May - 05 April 2008, 12 April 2008
Thu 16 November 2023
Some More Comments on Undesigned Coincidences
Wed 15 November 2023
Can Science Explain Everything?
Tue 14 November 2023
How NaNoWriMo Got Me Back to the Gym
Wed 18 October 2023
What Does Probability have to do with God?
Tue 17 October 2023
Richard Bauckham and the Distribution of Names
Mon 14 August 2023
Bible in a Year
Fri 14 July 2023
Why the fine tuning argument is not convincing to me
Thu 11 May 2023
Claims are not (always) evidence
Tue 02 May 2023
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
Thu 23 February 2023
Probability and the Independence of Testimony
Sat 04 February 2023
Walking through 6 Ways to Use ChatGPT to Learn Code
Tue 08 November 2022
One Rule to Rule Them All
Tue 01 November 2022
Miracles with Brian Blais
Sat 23 July 2022
The "God" of the Philosophers Is Empty
Wed 13 July 2022
Bad Apologetics on Bayes - Part 3
Tue 12 July 2022
Bad Apologetics on Bayes - Part 2
Mon 11 July 2022
Why undesigned coincidences are not compelling to me
Tue 14 June 2022
Sometimes more testimony is worse.
Tue 31 May 2022
Why do we need double-blind studies?
Wed 30 March 2022
Bad Apologetics on Bayes - Part 1
Wed 23 March 2022
A long discussion about miracles
Mon 07 February 2022
Miracles are rare except when they aren't
Thu 03 February 2022
Sometimes there really isn't enough evidence to believe a claim
Mon 24 January 2022
Ongoing Conversation with Jonathan McLatchie
Tue 18 January 2022
Bad Apologetics
Mon 17 January 2022
Proton Decay and the Resurrection of Jesus
Fri 14 January 2022
Chemical Reaction Dynamics
Fri 07 January 2022
Simulating Stochastic Processes
Thu 09 December 2021
Science as a metal detector
Sun 29 August 2021
Bad Apologetics Ep 18 - Bayes Machine goes BRRRRRRRRR
Wed 11 August 2021
Stats 101 Examples with MCMC Part 4
Mon 17 May 2021
Convert mp3 files to audiobook for Apple Books
Thu 13 May 2021
Stats 101 Examples with MCMC Part 3
Wed 28 April 2021
Stats 101 Examples with MCMC Part 2
Thu 15 April 2021
Stats 101 Examples with MCMC
Fri 09 April 2021
Gravitational Attraction
Mon 22 March 2021
Fitting parameters in dynamics systems
Sun 28 February 2021
Bayes vs Apologetics
Mon 03 August 2020
A Simple Physics Problem Gets Messy
Thu 09 July 2020
Skepticism and Dubious Medical Procedures
Fri 03 July 2020
Something Satisfying About Building Pelican Themes
Sun 28 June 2020
Talking Bayes
Fri 29 May 2020
Jonathan and Brian in conversation
Mon 18 May 2020
Advocating for Bayesian Inference
Mon 24 February 2020
Common Python Pattern - Building Up Lists To Plot
Sun 16 February 2020
What is Panpsychism?
Tue 07 January 2020
Becoming Superman - a review
Tue 03 September 2019
Probability of the Resurrection
Fri 19 July 2019
Unbelievable? Is faith about belief or trust? And why does it matter?
Mon 15 July 2019
A Measure of Faith - Probability in Religious Thought
Sun 16 June 2019
Probability - It's Not Just about the Math
Fri 17 May 2019
Why Christian Apologetics is Faulty Science and Faulty History
Wed 15 May 2019
Useful Fictions
Sun 24 March 2019
An Interesting Twist on the Gambler's Fallacy
Mon 11 February 2019
Book Review - "Unbelievable?" by Justin Brierley
Tue 29 January 2019
If at first you don't succeed (for 50 times) you might reconsider
Mon 14 January 2019
Dynamical systems with pyndamics
Mon 14 January 2019
Stats for Everyone
Sun 13 January 2019
Models of Learning and Memory
Tue 11 September 2018
Bryant Faculty Spotlight
Mon 18 June 2018
10 dogmas of science dismantled
Thu 24 May 2018
There is more than enough time
Tue 22 May 2018
A Cookbook Response to Jordan Peterson
Fri 18 May 2018
Exploring the Idea of Scrum
Wed 07 March 2018
Your Lack of Imagination Can Kill You
Tue 06 March 2018
Life from non-life and other conundrums
Mon 05 March 2018
Top Reasons for Belief
Mon 26 February 2018
Physics Lab Ideas - Structure or No?
Sun 18 February 2018
Getting the Definitions Right
Mon 12 February 2018
The Truth of a Story
Sat 10 February 2018
Your Lack of Imagination Can Kill You — But You Can Be Saved by Math
Fri 09 February 2018
The Power of a Story
Wed 07 February 2018
Sea Slug Brains
Tue 06 February 2018
3 Reasons Why Belief In God Makes Sense
Mon 05 February 2018
Facts are Not Enough
Fri 02 February 2018
More than Enough Time
Thu 01 February 2018
Happy Groundhog Day!
Wed 31 January 2018
Matter, Energy, and the Spirit
Mon 29 January 2018
Cool theorem - angle bisector
Mon 22 January 2018
Naturalism Defined
Wed 17 January 2018
Lessons from Jon Acuff's book Finish
Tue 16 January 2018
How to be productive - Part 2 - Methods
Mon 15 January 2018
How to be productive - Part 1 - Apps
Thu 11 January 2018
I'm not a Denier, I'm a Skeptic
Wed 10 January 2018
Art, Scientific Reductionism, and the New Neuroscience
Tue 09 January 2018
Where probabilities and theology meet
Mon 08 January 2018
Happy New Year (again)!
Tue 24 October 2017
Push Back Against Bayes
Tue 05 September 2017
Not all Extraordinary Claims are Equal
Wed 07 June 2017
Do Skeptics Underestimate the Case for the Resurrection?
Fri 05 May 2017
Does Art Lead Math?
Mon 10 April 2017
Four Types of Bayesian-Frequentist Comparisons
Fri 31 March 2017
Twitter, Zombies, and the Fate of the World
Fri 24 March 2017
Mind Reader and Skepticism
Fri 17 March 2017
Do we really need algebra 2 and calculus?
Sat 11 March 2017
Are there serious problems with evolution?
Fri 03 March 2017
Philosophy of science and the burden of proof
Fri 24 February 2017
Pascal's Wager Again
Fri 17 February 2017
Climate Change
Sat 11 February 2017
Can you guess my sign?
Fri 03 February 2017
Even if determinism were true it wouldn't matter
Fri 27 January 2017
Free Will On My Mind
Thu 24 November 2016
Jaynes vs Gelman
Thu 17 November 2016
Probability Does Extend Logic
Tue 06 September 2016
Mapping Worldview to Probability
Fri 19 August 2016
Is Science a Self-Sealing Process?
Fri 29 July 2016
What Makes an Explanation Bad?
Mon 28 March 2016
Laplace and Twins
Fri 15 January 2016
Student Course Evaluations
Mon 11 January 2016
Philosophy and Science
Sun 03 January 2016
Incompetence or Nervousness?
Sat 02 January 2016
Argument is Not Evidence
Fri 01 January 2016
Happy New Year!
Mon 21 December 2015
End of a long semester
Wed 07 October 2015
Disagreeing with Neil deGrasse Tyson
Fri 11 September 2015
Answering Unanswerable Questions
Sun 23 August 2015
The Giunta-Dillahunty debate
Mon 10 August 2015
Deduction, Induction, and Abduction, Oh My!
Tue 28 July 2015
Evidence vs Argument
Fri 03 July 2015
Pluto, Pluto, Here We Come
Wed 24 June 2015
Football Physics
Mon 18 May 2015
We find God "not guilty" of existing
Wed 13 May 2015
On Miracles
Tue 12 May 2015
It's not the New Atheists that are Arrogant
Sat 09 May 2015
Expressing Ignorance
Tue 05 May 2015
Priors vs Likelihoods
Thu 23 April 2015
Superseding the $t$ test
Tue 03 March 2015
Simple Questions that Get to the Heart of the Matter
Sat 21 February 2015
Misquoting Hume
Wed 04 February 2015
Testing the Supernatural
Fri 23 January 2015
How to Deflate a Football Deflating Story
Tue 20 January 2015
Demo vs Experiment
Mon 05 January 2015
We should all be biased
Wed 31 December 2014
LaTeX vs Word
Tue 23 December 2014
The Longest Night Ever
Mon 15 December 2014
Why Python is the language everyone should learn
Tue 02 December 2014
Evolution and Morality
Tue 25 November 2014
Objective Morality Defined
Fri 21 November 2014
Objective Morality
Fri 21 November 2014
Statistical Inference for Everyone (sie)
Tue 28 October 2014
Something from Nothing
Tue 14 October 2014
What is AI?
Tue 30 September 2014
Naturalism of the Gaps?
Tue 23 September 2014
Three Years of Weather
Mon 22 September 2014
Will the Sun Rise Tomorrow?
Thu 18 September 2014
Theism vs Atheism
Tue 26 August 2014
What's the Harm in Alternative Medicine?
Fri 15 August 2014
What evidence would it take?
Tue 05 August 2014
What Sane Climate Discussion Looks Like
Tue 29 July 2014
What is Science?
Mon 28 July 2014
Is Faith the Same as Trust or Baseless Belief?
Thu 24 July 2014
Faith, Trust, and Evidence
Thu 19 June 2014
Bayesian vs Frequentist Perspectives
Wed 11 June 2014
Statistical Heresies - The Movie
Mon 09 June 2014
Turing Test Passed
Fri 06 June 2014
It's Unreasonable to Believe Some True Things
Wed 04 June 2014
Free, or Not-So-Free, Will
Tue 03 June 2014
Do healing miracles happen?
Thu 29 May 2014
A Good Bet Lost
Wed 28 May 2014
Pennies!
Thu 22 May 2014
Statistical Heresies
Fri 16 May 2014
Supporting Dualism
Wed 14 May 2014
Siblings and Astronomy
Mon 12 May 2014
Spurious Correlations
Thu 08 May 2014
"Skeptics" vs "Realists"
Tue 06 May 2014
Dualism, Naturalism, and other Isms
Wed 19 March 2014
Noah and the Flood - did it happen? - 16 February 2008
Thu 13 March 2014
How to Dodge the Consequences of Belief
Mon 10 March 2014
A Foreshadowing of the End of the World?
Wed 26 February 2014
Is Astrology Scientific?
Wed 12 February 2014
Scientific Knowledge
Thu 06 February 2014
Creationism Laid Bare
Fri 31 January 2014
Anyone using the term "scientific proof" doesn't know science
Wed 29 January 2014
Did Christians steal Christmas? - 22 December 2007
Sat 25 January 2014
Unbelievable Project: Did Jesus Exist? Bart Ehrman Q&A - 18 August 2012
Fri 24 January 2014
Properly Basic Obscurantism
Wed 22 January 2014
Physics and the Flash Mind Reader
Tue 21 January 2014
Philosophy and Science - What's the Difference?
Fri 17 January 2014
Chess, Morality, and Well-Being
Wed 15 January 2014
The Cover Art for Statistical Inference for Everyone (sie)
Tue 14 January 2014
Statistical Inference for Everyone - Book Announcement
Tue 14 January 2014
New Year and New Website
Mon 13 January 2014
Why the new website?
Fri 10 January 2014
New Website
Mon 06 January 2014
A New Year and a Deepity
Wed 18 December 2013
Religion and the Illusion of Moral Authority
Sun 01 December 2013
A story of humanity...
Thu 21 November 2013
Life, Meaning, and Entropy
Tue 19 November 2013
The Trinity and Coherency
Tue 12 November 2013
Science as Entertainment
Thu 24 October 2013
Knowledge, Faith, and Belief
Wed 09 October 2013
Nobel Prize - The "Higgs" and Predictions
Thu 26 September 2013
The Fallacy of All-Natural
Wed 25 September 2013
MOOCs and Treadmills
Thu 19 September 2013
What to do when you're not an expert
Fri 13 September 2013
Origins of Religion - Two Hypotheses
Wed 04 September 2013
The Supernatural and the History of Cosmology
Mon 02 September 2013
God in the head
Fri 30 August 2013
Presuppositions and Science
Tue 20 August 2013
Textual Transmission Bottlenecks
Mon 19 August 2013
Trying to figure out fiction I like - Game of Thrones semi-fail
Sat 27 July 2013
What would it take for me to believe the Resurrection?
Sat 13 July 2013
A question for theists: why do you not believe UFOs are alien spacecraft?
Thu 11 July 2013
Unbelievable Project: The Probability of the Resurrection
Sun 07 July 2013
Baseball and the Naming of the Gospels
Fri 14 June 2013
Rules for Criticizing Opponents
Thu 13 June 2013
The source of morality
Mon 10 June 2013
Christianity and morality
Fri 07 June 2013
Miscellaneous Christian topics - another counter to Marshall
Wed 05 June 2013
Model helicopter guided by power of thought....
Wed 05 June 2013
Evidence Of Other Universes
Thu 30 May 2013
Star Trek and Storytelling
Tue 21 May 2013
A little about miracles
Fri 10 May 2013
Creationist Math
Mon 06 May 2013
Design, the Origin of Life, and Creationism
Sun 28 April 2013
Consciousness in infants
Wed 24 April 2013
Some recent presentations
Sat 20 April 2013
10 signs of intellectual honesty
Mon 25 March 2013
A funny little probability problem - some closure
Sat 23 March 2013
A funny little probability problem - correct
Sat 23 March 2013
A funny little probability problem
Thu 21 March 2013
"Proof" that God exists
Mon 18 March 2013
Unbelievable Project: Miracles and healing - is it evidence for the truth of Christianity?
Fri 15 March 2013
Unbelievable Project: A "proxy" atheist explains why he can't believe
Wed 13 March 2013
Unbelievable Project: The "New Atheism" - Barry Duke and David Marshall Debate
Mon 11 March 2013
Unbelievable Project: John Lennox debates science and God - Has science buried God?
Fri 08 March 2013
Unbelievable Project: God Delusion debate - Deluded by Dawkins?
Wed 06 March 2013
Unbelievable Project: Atheist and Christian bloggers discuss
Mon 04 March 2013
Unbelievable Project: God's existence, free will and faith - The Big Questions
Fri 01 March 2013
Unbelievable Project: Does Christianity enslave? - Are we better off without belief in God?
Wed 27 February 2013
Unbelievable Project: A Non-Believer's Armchair Perspective on Six Years of Christian Debates
Fri 15 February 2013
Resurrection, Linear Regression, and the Art of Harmonization
Wed 13 February 2013
There is no population
Tue 11 December 2012
"Science Refutes God" Debate
Fri 07 December 2012
Logical vs Reasonable
Mon 26 November 2012
God does Not Exist, Clearly
Fri 09 November 2012
A few things about Carl Sagan
Tue 16 October 2012
Bayesian thinking
Tue 16 October 2012
Great Science Ads!
Fri 12 October 2012
Breaking news: Doctor hallucinates and is convinced that science is wrong
Thu 11 October 2012
Critical Thinking
Tue 25 September 2012
Naturalistic Bias? Presupposing Naturalism?
Fri 07 September 2012
Aliens!
Fri 31 August 2012
Statistics vs Probability
Sun 19 August 2012
Presuppositionalist arguments
Sun 03 June 2012
Lessons From Bayes' Rule
Mon 14 May 2012
Suppression of Ideas in Science
Mon 07 May 2012
Free Will and Entropy
Tue 20 March 2012
On Being Wrong
Tue 06 March 2012
Evolution and Rationality
Mon 05 March 2012
What is good in religion
Fri 27 January 2012
Best quote in a while about global warming...
Sat 14 January 2012
Bayes and Hiccups: Practical working solutions that no one seems to know
Wed 04 January 2012
Santa and other delusions
Tue 27 December 2011
Einstein and the Motives of Scientists
Thu 22 December 2011
The Bible Foreshadows Scientific Discoveries?
Tue 20 December 2011
Closed to the supernatural?
Mon 19 December 2011
Presuppositionalism vs evidentialism
Thu 15 December 2011
More fine tuning...NOT
Fri 09 December 2011
Things science can't explain
Tue 06 December 2011
Conversation with Steve Winsor
Tue 06 December 2011
What's wrong with this?
Tue 29 November 2011
Best evidence for...
Wed 09 November 2011
A sensible post on climate change...for a change
Mon 07 November 2011
Language of Science
Mon 07 November 2011
Offended by prayer on a mural
Sun 30 October 2011
The Florida problem - a new intuition
Sun 16 October 2011
Faster than light...a likely solution
Fri 14 October 2011
Faster than light...why the lawyer is wrong
Wed 03 August 2011
Mystery, Knowledge, Science and Television
Thu 28 July 2011
Climate and the Moon
Wed 27 July 2011
Knowledge and Belief
Tue 26 July 2011
Science and Attitudes Toward Criticism
Thu 02 June 2011
Reaping the benefits of science while hostile to science
Sat 28 May 2011
"Frivolous" research in science
Wed 09 March 2011
Energy Bracelet Experience
Tue 08 March 2011
Religion, Scripture, and the Source of Morality
Fri 25 February 2011
Wonders in Science
Thu 24 February 2011
A Reasonable Perspective on Global Warming
Wed 23 February 2011
Does Watson Think?
Tue 22 February 2011
Creationism and Strawmen
Fri 18 February 2011
Wonders in Science
Thu 17 February 2011
20 Years of Being an Atheist Ends Today
Wed 16 February 2011
The Role of Humanity into the Future
Tue 15 February 2011
Bill O'Reilly, Tides, and the God of the Gaps
Sat 12 February 2011
Why I Can't Support the Darwin Day Resolution
Fri 11 February 2011
The world is flat!
Sat 29 January 2011
A modest proposal about uncertainty
Sat 29 January 2011
The Economics of Religion: More good than harm?
Wed 19 January 2011
Rounds in Australian Open
Tue 18 January 2011
Predictions for the Australian Open
Fri 14 January 2011
Religion, Science, and Humility
Mon 10 January 2011
Francis Collins, Science and Religion: How Religion Halts Science
Thu 30 December 2010
A Moral Argument for God
Wed 01 December 2010
Are Science and Religion Incompatible?
Mon 22 November 2010
Is -x^2 positive or negative?
Mon 22 November 2010
Glenn Beck on Science
Sat 16 October 2010
A walk down memory lane
Fri 08 October 2010
Power UnBalance
Mon 27 September 2010
About
Sat 25 September 2010
Multiple Model Comparisons Revisited
Sun 12 September 2010
God and Hawking
Wed 01 September 2010
Why pseudoscientists like the chi-square test (and why it shouldn't be taught)
Tue 31 August 2010
Orthodox Statistics Conducive to Pseudo-Science
Sat 28 August 2010
The Non-Psychic Octopus
Sun 11 July 2010
A new and content-free model
Fri 25 June 2010
Pascal's Global Warming
Tue 08 June 2010
Religion and Scientists
Tue 08 June 2010
One last TV post, about Battlestar Galactica
Tue 08 June 2010
Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and Babylon 5: To Plan or not to Plan
Mon 07 June 2010
Lord of the Rings
Mon 19 April 2010
Nice talk about science and vaccination
Fri 26 February 2010
The Not-so-Hidden Flaw in this Climate Argument
Tue 23 February 2010
A bit of must-read economics
Mon 22 February 2010
Coin flips and names (Evil problems in probability continued)
Sun 21 February 2010
Magnetic therapy getting under my skin
Sun 31 January 2010
Economics
Sun 31 January 2010
Faith and Science
Tue 12 January 2010
A couple of interesting videos
Tue 12 January 2010
Creativity, Science, and the Brain
Fri 08 January 2010
Believing the unbelieveable
Thu 07 January 2010
A teachable moment...lost
Tue 05 January 2010
There once was a girl named Florida (a.k.a Evil problems in probability)
Tue 05 January 2010
Weird associations and the brain
Mon 04 January 2010
Cool little fact of the day...
Tue 22 December 2009
Polar Bears, Data, Opinions, and Global Warming
Tue 15 December 2009
Open Information, Reproducible Research, and Climategate
Sat 12 December 2009
Word of the Day: Micromort
Fri 11 December 2009
Climate Change Denial is not the same as Evolution Denial
Wed 09 December 2009
Climategate, oh my!
Sun 06 December 2009
Universality of Religion
Tue 01 December 2009
A great observation
Mon 30 November 2009
Information
Wed 18 November 2009
Autotune, Science, and Creativity
Sat 14 November 2009
Yet another reason to leave Iraq...dowsing for bombs
Mon 12 October 2009
Netflix prize
Sun 11 October 2009
Disturbing video misusing Einstein's name
Wed 16 September 2009
Recovery from Vision
Wed 16 September 2009
Probability Problems and Simulation
Thu 10 September 2009
Frequentist thinking, or just bad math?
Wed 02 September 2009
A nice series to look at
Wed 12 August 2009
230 miles per gallon!
Thu 30 July 2009
Free will
Fri 24 July 2009
neat way to introduce programming
Fri 24 July 2009
Silly challenge to silly statement
Mon 20 July 2009
A quick comment on error
Sun 19 July 2009
Laplace and the Divine
Sun 19 July 2009
Misunderstanding Laplace
Fri 10 July 2009
Homeopathic "Medicine"
Wed 08 July 2009
"Erroneous" Probabilistic Reasoning
Wed 08 July 2009
A Little Geometry
Tue 07 July 2009
Beginnings