I am naturally somewhat of a skeptic, but it is hard to not read something and think about how smart the scientists are, and how much they know, and what will soon be possible. One of the things that is really interesting is brain research. Suppose we could know how we work?

All kinds of new tools allow researchers to “watch” your brain work. Or can they? How do they “know”?

Here some interesting reading about the difficulties in measuring, knowing and statistics.

Here is another that makes you think twice when we assume that science is a clean process that follows a straight line to the truth, getting it right along the way.

And here’s a cartoon view of how this works (or doesn’t work).

This cartoon site has quite a bit of “geek” humor, so I like it. It also has an interesting feature where if you move the mouse over the cartoon, a hidden message appears. This one has a comment about “the mother of all sampling biases.” It may not seem funny, but it is a really great example. Some of his other cartoons are pretty good. This one makes me wonder about teaching statistics.