Transportation secretary Ray LaHood and a congressional committee have recently been pushing the notion of a mileage tax (instead of a gas tax) to raise dollars for highways. This is such a bad idea, I’m having trouble understanding how it could garner so much support. The problem is that Americans are driving more [...]

Imagine that you’re a sociologist studying childhood conflict, and you want to know what kinds of parenting techniques are most likely to calm fighting children down and get them to play nice. So you set up an experiment. You put pairs of siblings in different rooms, and then when they start to fight [...]

When I think about my own education, there are half are four courses in particular that stand out to me as having the greatest impact on my daily life. My undergraduate introductory statistics course taught me about the nature of probability and data. My high school theory of knowledge course taught me about [...]

What would a realistic proposal to eliminate the federal budget deficit look like?
This year’s budget deficit is going to be astronomical–probably topping $1300 billion (I’m using billions instead of trillions to make things more easily comparable). That’s the whole point of an economic stimulus package: to run a massive budget deficit and thereby inject [...]

I hate wow stats.
A new anti-stimulus ad is making some buzz right now because it claims that if someone were to have spent $1 million dollars every day for the two thousand years since Jesus were born, that that person still would not have spent as much as Obama’s stimulus package will cost this year [...]

The auto industry is back in the news again, as they go back to Washington to ask for more money. I’ve been thinking about the auto industry, and realized that GM is only partly to blame for their problems. A lot of the fault just as to do with a fundamental flaw in [...]

What does it mean to be “bipartisan”? I ask in the wake of Obama’s signing of the stimulus package, which is widely seen as a failed attempt at bipartisanship. Some want to blame the failure of bipartisanship on Obama; others blame the failure on the GOP. Some want to claim that Obama [...]

This is an unusual post, I admit it. But today I overheard somebody comforting a widow with the phrase “he will live on in our memories” and it got me thinking. Sure, the people we know will live on in our memories after they die. But what about when we die; who [...]

This whole Judd Gregg thing just doesn’t add up. Gregg is a pretty conservative Republican Senator from New Hampshire. He accepted Obama’s nomination for Commerce Secretary, and there is some indication that he had even lobbied for the job. He accepted it after Obama had introduced his economic stimulus package, and after [...]

Today a court ruled that there is no compelling evidence that the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) Vaccine causes autism. Thankfully. Of course, that won’t stop concerned parents from attacking the decision and once again going over the same correlations that lead to the MMR-Autism myth in the first place. Parents are paranoid; I get [...]