cheapesthostings2

Consider the following sentence: " You ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained." What is odd about it is that ordinarily, when we say "X because of Y" we mean "Y is the cause of X". For example, "The window broke because the baseball hit it" means that the baseball hitting the window caused it to break. But in this case, the sentence surely doesn't mean that your fingers being stained caused you to eat the blueberries. Now one might object that it's a weird sentence, and that instead it should be " I believe you ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained. " But the original version is not confusing to an English speaker, and people sometimes do speak this way. Language is a complicated business. And language about causality is particularly tricky. It is well known that correlation does not imply causation . But when scientific studies are reported in the media, this dictum is often forgotten. Professor...

In an op-ed in today's issue of the Los Angeles Times, Michael Shermer wrote about the rush "to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events", with reference to the shooting in Tucson, Arizona and the recent mass bird deaths. Shermer made some good points, but parts of his argument were flawed. For example, he cited statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health to argue that unbalanced people are not uncommon, and Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme tea party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun control laws are in this or that state. By chance — and nothing more — there will always be people who do the unthinkable. In other words, he is pointing out what he sees as an inevitability, and then attributing it to chance. But an inevitability is the opposi...