Bruce's blog

A retelling of a Taoist parable

In a valley lived a farmer. He was not rich, but neither was he poor. He had food enough for his family. He had fields that yielded a decent harvest year after year. And he had a very fine work horse.

One morning the farmer discovered that his horse had run away during the night. His sympathetic neighbors said, "What bad luck!" But the farmer simply replied, "Good, bad, who knows how it will turn out in the end?"

Don’t swallow Jade Helm conspiracy theories

But it seems to me beyond argument that in the philosophical struggle for the soul of conservatism, [Timothy McVeigh] lost the battle and won the war. Much of what now passes for conservatism proceeds from extremes of government loathing that would have stunned Ronald Reagan himself.

The world reached a milestone last month. Or maybe the month before. Or at the beginning of the year. Or possibly last year.

We're in the Process of Decimating 1 in 6 Species on Earth

The result is alarming: One out of every six species could face extinction if global warming continues on its current path. The picture is less dire if we manage to curb climate change, dropping to only 5.2 percent of species if warming is kept within the internationally-agreed upon target of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

In these days, when Republican presidential candidates are proud to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the Republican chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee is leading denier in all of Washington, it might be hard to remember the time a leading Republican spoke these words:

The issue of climate change respects no border. Its effects cannot be reined in by an army nor advanced by any ideology. Climate change, with its potential to impact every corner of the world, is an issue that must be addressed by the world.

Simpson's paradox is named after statistician Edward Simpson, who first described the effect in a 1951 paper titled The Interpretation of Interaction in Contingency Tables. Simpson described a scenario where the results of a scientific study appear to support one conclusion, but when the results are split to account for a particular variable, the results show a different conclusion.

If Black People Lived As Long As White People, Election Results Would Be Very Different

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 8.5 million black people died during that 35-year period. But if the mortality rates had been comparable, an additional 2.7 million black people would have been alive, and of those, an estimated 1 million would have cast votes in the 2004 election.

It's been fifteen months since Ken Ham debated Bill Nye over the viability of creationism as a model of origins (video link). Ham has spent most of those 15 months embroiled in a different sort of controversy.

Love Is the Primary Energy to Amend Climate Change

It my seem odd to look to a colonial Quaker as the model for amending climate change — I say amend because we have already changed the climate; the best goal now is to stop further change and amend our way of live — but his model/witness may be the exact model/witness we need.

California is dry. Really dry. Historically dry. Life-alteringly dry. Dry enough to bring out the political extremists, as if they had crawled up through those cracks in the ground.