Commentary

The lottery is a way to assign disproportionate rewards (or punishments) fairly. Procedural fairness—equal chance of selection—provides legitimacy to this system of disproportionate allocation. Given the purpose of a lottery is unequal allocation, it is essential that we seek informed consent from the participants, and that we only

Procrastination or delaying without reason, doing something that one has to do, makes little sense. If the voluntary delay also causes anxiety, which in most cases it does, it may be particularly pointless. Yet, a lot of people procrastinate at least some of the time. Why? One can make a

Those who don’t read this blog are its biggest fans. No surprise there. Here below is a selection of comments left by spam-bots. Spelling and grammatical ‘errors’, likely deliberately put in by spammers, have been left untouched. The word ‘errors’ has bunny ears because you can’t really call

We have all read about beautiful women undressing to raise awareness about cruelty to animals (less handsome women just don’t care about the animals), men and women strutting on runways wearing fashionable clothes to raise awareness about global warming, intrepid souls sailing across vast oceans to raise awareness about

For the unfamiliar, the BBC guide to Muslim veils. The somewhat polemical: Assuming that God has recommended that women wear the burka, assuming that burka has no impact on a woman’s ability to communicate or quality of life, as has been suggested by its supporters, then here’s a

The following article is by a regular contributor to the blog, Chaste. The article is a comprehensive analytic exploration of the extent of the problem that we face in Pakistan, and a considered exploration of the possible alternatives. I will first sketch the history of and the situation in Pakistan,

A tribute to Charles Darwin on his 200th birth anniversary Some say that science should be absent from discussions about God is because while science concerns itself with the material, God concerns himself with the ‘spiritual’ ‘nonmaterial’ realm. But there are a number of theories of God that explicitly deal