Volume 2, Issue 2 · December 2025

Winter 2026

Old evidence, read carefully. Greenland ice used as an epidemiological instrument for children who died two thousand years ago, and a volcano that last erupted 250,000 years ago and is still visibly breathing.

6 articles, in the order the club meant them to be read.

1. 1

   ExplainerStatistics

   What a P Value Actually Means, and the Four Things People Think It Means Instead

   A p value measures your data against a pretend world, the one where the effect you are hunting does not exist. The number describes data, given a hypothesis. Swap those two around and every misreading in this article follows. We define the thing properly, then take apart four beliefs the club has had to argue with at its own table: that p is the probability the hypothesis is wrong, that a smaller p means a bigger eff

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2. 2

   MethodsWinter 2026

   The Treatment That Works Because You Picked the Worst Cases

   Take a population, measure everybody, keep the worst tenth, do absolutely nothing to them, and measure them again. In our simulation they improved by 0.8760 0.0013 standard deviations. The instrument was a program the club wrote, so the computation is the experiment and no person, patient or pupil entered the study at any point. Across a grid of six selection thresholds ((p = 0.50) down to (0.01)) and seven noise

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3. 3

   MethodsWinter 2026

   Building a Dataset Where Every Group Trends Up and the Whole Trends Down

   Simpson's paradox is usually shown once, with one famous table, and then left alone as a curiosity. We treated it as a piece of engineering instead. The club wrote a generator that takes a target within-group slope and a target pooled slope of the opposite sign and returns a dataset hitting both, by solving for the required between-group slope rather than searching for one. Across eight specifications the worst devia

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4. 4

   Original ResearchWinter 2026

   How Many Reasonable Choices Does It Take to Find a Result That Is Not There

   Two groups of numbers drawn from the same distribution cannot differ. We drew them 50,000 times and then analysed them the way data actually gets analysed, making one defensible choice after another with the numbers already in front of us. With no choices at all the false positive rate came out at 0.0504 0.0010 , a 95% interval of 0.0486 to 0.0524 that covers the nominal 0.05, and that single number is the check whic

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5. 5

   Data StoryEnvironmental Archaeology

   An Empire's Air Pollution, Measured in Greenland Ice and in Roman Children's Blood

   Three Arctic ice cores hold a dated record of the smoke that European silver smelters put into the air two thousand years ago. In January 2025 a team led by Joseph McConnell at the Desert Research Institute ran that record backwards through an atmospheric transport model to recover annual emissions, then forwards again to map lead concentrations across Europe, then through two published epidemiological regressions to

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6. 6

   Paper AnalysisVolcanology

   A Volcano That Has Been Dead for 250,000 Years Is Still Breathing

   Uturuncu is a 6,008-metre dacite volcano in southwest Bolivia whose last eruption was 250,000 years ago, give or take five thousand. For three decades it has impersonated a mountain about to go off. The ground above it has been rising at roughly a centimetre a year over a broad dome, that dome sits inside a ring of slow subsidence reaching past 70 kilometres, and small earthquakes fire underneath it most days. In Apr

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