(and questions which miss the point entirely) The subreddit r/HermanCainAward is named after the late politician Herman Cain. …

I can’t take credit for appropriating the idea of a false summit. Read this first. Now, Olav is a nice man, and an excellent neuroscientist, but I find it advisable to ignore any neuroscience written in the newspaper. No matter who says it. But the concept of a false summit…

Thought experiment: imagine you are a sensible, sober kind of person. Or, perhaps, a scared little child who is forced to cosplay as such a person due to circumstance. Like a senior academic, for instance. Additionally, imagine that you are offering a fairly detailed comment on a topic that is…

Images matter. I am a data person. I gravitate towards aggregated measurements. I use words like ‘gravitate’ and ‘aggregated’ when I do it. I am delighted when these measurements explain something useful. I complain when they are incorrect. Sometimes the complaining has been loud, and then someone writes about me…

INTRODUCTION — People are claiming their COVID-19 vaccines are making them magnetic, and they’re out there in the digital world sticking stuff to themselves to prove it. So, let’s think that through, It’ll be a laugh. GETTING PAID REAL MONEY TO BREAK SHIT I worked as a circus strongman for a while. …

… In Producing Unreliable Research — I found this one in the archives. I think I never bothered to publish it because it felt a bit … mean spirited. I know people who work at OSU. I trust them. I’d read their work out of reflex. I don’t like the damned-by-association aspect of this at all. …

The stupid coda to a stupid story — September ‘20: I wrote this god knows how long ago and never published it. Presumably after this dreadful, glib Inverse.com article was published, which was … mid ’19 I believe. As I’ve said before, this happens frequently. …

I do peer review and I want you to pay me four hundred and fifty dollars. I’ll even say please. Introduction It’s amazing how quickly a perspective can change. I thought I’d be an academic forever, maybe longer. That was Plan A. For all its ridiculous foibles, and the resulting incipient…

The COVID Files #2 July, ’20: Written a few months ago and not published, as usual, because it felt meaner than I had intended when I started. …