21 July 2010 (pm)

Free will? It doesn’t seem to jibe with science. Jerry Coyne and friends discuss here.

Frankly, I see “free will” (whatever that means) as a decent approximation to what we have but not much more than that and nothing precise.

Democrats: note that many of the cut-backs to social safety nets are/were done by Democrats. So, what will happen with the Social Security retirement age? We’ve talked about this here; I’ve pointed out that “expected life remaining” at age 65 and 70 to be the more relevant statistic. But Mano Singham takes it a bit further; he points out the variation in this statistic and also that those who work at physically demanding jobs might need to retire earlier than those of us with white collar occupations. For example, one of my math department colleagues retired at 80 and only reluctantly.

Mathematics and statistics: yes, “rare coincidences” occur frequently. Think about it: suppose there are, say, 20 independent events that occur say, with probability of .001 on a given day. So the probability of two events has happening is: C(20,2)*.001^2*.999^18 = .0001866. So “not 2 events” is .999813. So, in a 1000 day period (less than 3 years), the chances of two of these rare events happening on the same day is 1 – .15385 = .84614. In other words, there is about an 85 percent chance that we’ll get at least one coincidence in a 1000 day period. Now imagine more than 20 events that could be coincidental.

Financial Reform:

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