ICBS Everywhere

Until a few months ago, Nate Silver was a nerd hero. If you’ve never heard of him, perhaps you’ve heard of sabermetrics (or you’ve seen Moneyball, a movie about sabermetrics). Well, Silver is best known for applying sabermetric models to the study of politics, especially presidential races. The accuracy of Silver’s predictions for the 2008 […]

I really, really hate infographics. Really. They’re worse than memes. Well, I guess technically they are memes. They are notoriously inaccurate. They are usually agenda-driven and often spin facts to the point of wrongness. But mostly I just see them as click bait. I have less disdain for listicles, but they sometimes bug me, too. […]

A skeptical friend sent me an interesting link this week. The headline makes the bold claim that a study suggests that people who like black coffee are more likely to be psychopaths. I’m sure you can guess my initial reaction: skepticism. So let’s look at the research. First, the choice of singling out black coffee […]

Note: This post also appears on Insight, the official blog of the Skeptic Society. A few months ago I wrote about the psychology of vaccine denial. In the post I discussed two publications, one of which (

Today the Huff Post Weird News section reports that a man in Glasgow, Scotland has seen the face of God (the savior, to be precise) in a bathroom door. Of an Ikea. My last report on sightings of Our Lord and Savior was about 7 months ago, so I thought it was time for an […]