Category: Talk about Science

You take a quarter out of your pocket and idly start flipping it in the air.  Fifty flips in a row and it comes up tails.   Amazing.  Unbelievable.  Assuming it’s a legitimate coin, what is the probability that the next flip will come up heads?  Seems as though the odds of a head ought to be high, doesn’t it?  On the next flip it rolls behind a kitchen cabinet.  You go on with your life.

A hundred years later your great-granddaughter is remodeling the kitchen and finds the quarter. She flips the coin. What are the odds that the quarter will turn up heads? She, of course,assumes an even chance for heads or tails. So where did your perceived probability it is more likely be a heads go.

Continue reading “Wow! You’re So Lucky!”

In 1979 Carl Sagan said’, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Carl Sagan was addressing paranormal phenomena. Thomas Jefferson said, “A thousand phenomena present themselves daily which we cannot explain, but where facts are suggested, bearing no analogy with the laws of nature as yet known to us, their verity needs proofs proportioned to their difficulty.”

Today millions of social media posts we have never seen before present themselves daily, but if they are presented without reference to verifiable facts, claiming to be unusual, unbelievable, or abnormal, then they should not be accepted as true without independent and verifiable information.

Continue reading “Truth vs Conspiracy?”