Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
Finding the fun in good math; Shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it.
Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer. My professional interests center on programming languages and tools, and how to improve the languages and tools that are used for building complex software systems.
Category: Bad Statistics
This past weekend, my friend Orac sent me a link to an interesting piece of bad math. One of Orac's big interest is vaccination and anti-vaccinationists. The piece is a newsletter by a group calling itself the "Sound Choice...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 9:46 PM • 27 Comments •
Category: Bad Statistics
I've been writing this blog for a long time - nearly four years. You'd think that after all of the bad math I've written about, I must have reached the point where I wouldn't be surprised at the sheer...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 1:08 PM • 40 Comments •
Category: Bad Statistics
Here's a quick bit of obnoxious bad math. I saw this myself in a link to an AP article via Salon.com, and a reader sent me a link to the same story via CNN. It's yet another example of...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 1:35 PM • 154 Comments •
Category: bad math
An alert reader just sent me, via "Media Matters", the single dumbest real-life video clip that I have ever seen. In case you've been living under a rock, Bill O'Reilly is a conservative radio and TV talk-show host. He's...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 2:27 PM • 70 Comments •
Category: Bad Statistics
Yet More Deceptive Graphs As you've probably heard, there was a horrible incident in Pittsburgh this weekend, in which a crazed white supremacist who believed that Obama was coming to take his guns shot and killed three policemen. Markos Moulitsas,...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 1:40 PM • 16 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
I wasn't going to write about this, because I really don't have much to add. But people keep mailing it to me, so in order to shut you all up, I'll chip in. As everyone knows by now, we're...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 5:10 PM • 50 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
I'm behind the curve a bit here, but I've seen and heard a bunch of people making really sleazy arguments about the current financial stimulus package working its way through congress, and those arguments are a perfect example of...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:45 AM • 19 Comments •
Category: Bad Statistics
One of the most common sleazy tricks used by various sorts of denialists comes back to statistics - invalid and deceptive sampling methods. In fact, the very first real post on the original version of this blog was a...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 4:01 PM • 43 Comments •
Category: Bad Statistics
Yet another reader sent me a link to a really annoying article at a site called "Daily Tech". The article has been more than adequately debunked by Darksyde at Daily Kos, but it's a very typical example of a...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:12 PM • 46 Comments •
Category: Bad Statistics
I've been getting a lot of mail from people asking for my take on the news about the Washington GOP primary. Most have wanted me to debunk rumours about vote fixing there, the way that I tried to debunk...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 12:03 PM • 31 Comments •
