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...

Line-ups are both eminently civilized and—really annoying! The first in first out ( FIFO ) principle is inherently egalitarian and respect for it is a sign of social order. But there's something crazy about using our bodies as place keepers in a queue , sometimes for hours on end. Inevitably, after waiting some time in a lineup, someone will need to step out for a while. Rather than lose one's priority in the sequence, the convention is to ask someone (a complete stranger if need be), "Could you keep my place in line?" The language here is metaphorical and indirect. The request is not really about keeping a place . It's about promising on the return of the person to vouch to any potential challengers that indeed this particular person was previously in line at this particular point in the sequence. The fact is, complete strangers generally do agree to "keep your place in line". And that's a further sign of civil behaviour. Maybe line ups aren't ...

There's been quite a lot of reaction to a New York Times op-ed by Paul Davies titled Taking Science on Faith . (I read about it first on Adventures in Ethics and Science .) Davies argues that, like religion, science is ultimately based on faith. My main interest is not in his argument per se (but see here for some scathing critiques). What struck me about Davies' essay was his use of the term scientific law . He uses it again and again, whereas he refers to a theory only twice, and not once does he refer to a model . If there are laws, then presumably there's a lawmaker, and the obvious candidate would be God. If we are able to discover these laws, then we have identified Truth. Who can then disagree? Who can go against the law? This seems to me a very arrogant notion. In fact the history of science is littered with "laws" that have subsequently been overturned or shown to be special cases or approximations. For instance, Newton's laws of motion (one of whi...