Books
Books that I have written.
Media Appearances
Podcasts and Videos in which I have appeared or which I have created.
pyndamics3
Dynamical systems simulation in Python. Includes both continuous and stochastic simulation.
Stats for Everyone
An introductory stats book from a Bayesian perspective, including Python software.
I am a Scientist, Skeptic, and Professor at Bryant University. My goal is to make technical subject matters widely accessible and to use my analytical and computational skills to assist anyone with their science-related problems.
Blog
Incompetence or Nervousness? defending your claims
I’ve been seeing a lot of talk about the supposedly incompetent response by “accident reconstruction expert”, as shown in this video. You can read one response in the opinion …
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Argument is Not Evidence
So the Mr. Deity video, part two of his new series has an interesting point. The point is that arguments are not evidence. He says that in all of the …
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Happy New Year! A Time for New Beginnings
I love the idea of New Year’s Day. It’s a time for reflection, contemplation, self improvement. I realize that it is technically just another day, and that one …
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End of a long semester
So, I've been off the blog because of new job duties that overwhelmed me for a while. I enjoy the new year as a way of starting again, clean slate …
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Disagreeing with Neil deGrasse Tyson and some spoilers for Interstellar
I was reading a list of things Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't understand about Interstellar and was reminded about some of the things I don't like about Neil deGrasse Tyson. Let …
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Answering Unanswerable Questions Reframing and Moving Beyond Implications
Introduction
There are a number of questions designed specifically to not have answers or statements designed to be imponderable. Some of them actually do have answers, it seems, when you …
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The Giunta-Dillahunty debate In the End it's just Magic
I was listening to the Giunta-Dillahunty debate, "Does God Exist?", and the subsequent appearance of these two on the Dogma Debate show and felt there was enough there that required …
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Deduction, Induction, and Abduction, Oh My! A Tour of Needless Philosophical Terms
As a scientist, I don't typically hold philosophy in that high regard. It has its uses, but can easily devolve into a word game with no real substance. My basic …
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Evidence vs Argument
I was listening to the Giunta-Dillahunty debate, "Does God Exist?", and the subsequent appearance of these two on the Dogma Debate show, and was struck by the structure of the …
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Pluto, Pluto, Here We Come
In anticipation of the New Horizons close flyby of Pluto in a little over a week on July 14, 2015, I read with interest the article "Calculating Pluto’s Mass …
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Football Physics Why I'm not Convinced the Patriots Cheated
In another post, I outlined how the drop in pressure was entirely consistent with what was measured with the laws of physics. That post was done when the only data …
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We find God "not guilty" of existing
As part of the Unbelievable Project, I was listening to the Unbelievable podcast on the definition of atheism, whether it is "lack in a belief in God" or "believing that …
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On Miracles Hume was right all along
After my post about the misquoting Hume and the miraculous, I was recommended to read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on miracles where it supposedly explains why "Hume was …
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It's not the New Atheists that are Arrogant
In a Salon article entitled "New Atheism’s fatal arrogance: The glaring intellectual laziness of Bill Maher & Richard Dawkins", Sean Illing outlines what he seems to think are knock-down arguments …
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Expressing Ignorance or why Bayes is not to be feared
I continue with my critique of the article Why I am not a Bayesian by Greg Mayer, where complains about the Bayesian approach to inference, and then espouses Maximum Likelihood …
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Priors vs Likelihoods or why Bayes is not to be feared
I was reading the article Why I am not a Bayesian where Greg Mayer complains about the Bayesian approach to inference, and espouses Maximum Likelihood methods. There is much to …
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Superseding the $t$ test A Bayesian comparison of means
There's a very nice paper, Bayesian estimation supersedes the t test. John K. Kruschke, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2013, v.142(2), pp.573-603. The methods described provide at …
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Simple Questions that Get to the Heart of the Matter
E. T. Jaynes wrote extensively about Bayesian inference, and one of his strategies was to use a "Galileo's telescope for statistics", such as outlined in his paper on Confidence Intervals …
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Misquoting Hume The problem with words over math
I recall a comment in E. T. Jaynes' book about Laplace, where he realized that most of the arguments against the claims of Laplace were arguments against things Laplace never …
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Testing the Supernatural How Science Deals with the Unknown
In an interesting paper entitled "Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews", Yonatan Fishman proposes an unusual answer of "yes". I've spoken to this issue here and again here, where I refer …
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How to Deflate a Football Deflating Story Why Science Should Trump Personal Opinion
So, it's all over the news, the Patriots cheated with deflating the football by 1-2 psi, and are lying about not knowing anything about it. There are even claims that …
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