Now on ScienceBlogs: Dr. Rolando Arafiles: Antivaccine rhetoric, colloidal silver for the flu, and Morgellons disease
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: Basics
I've got a bunch of stuff queued up to be posted over the next couple of days. It's been the sort of week where I've gotten lots of interesting links from readers, but I haven't had time to finish...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 1:21 PM • 86 Comments •
Category: Basics
After my post the other day about rounding errors, I got a ton of requests to explain the idea of significant figures. That's actually a very interesting topic. The idea of significant figures is that when you're doing experimental...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:55 PM • 15 Comments •
Category: Basics
Another alert reader sent me a link to a YouTube video which is moderately interesting. The video itself is really a deliberate joke, but it does demonstrate a worthwile point. It's about rounding....
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 9:32 PM • 18 Comments •
Category: Basics
One thing that I've been getting a lot of requests about is the ongoing mortgage mess in the US. I wrote a bit about it a while ago, explaining what was going on. But since then, I've gotten a...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:38 PM • 39 Comments •
Category: Basics
I haven't written a basics post in a while, because for the most part, that well has run dry, but once in a while, one still pops up. I got an email recently asking about proofs by contradiction and...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:26 AM • 78 Comments •
Category: Basics
This is something that came up in some of the comments on the recent "nimbers" post, and I thought it was worth promoting to the front, and getting up under an easy-to-find title in the "basics" series. In a...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 2:58 PM • 36 Comments •
Category: Basics
I've used the term innumeracy fairly often on this blog, and I've had a few people write to ask me what it means. It's also, I think, a very important idea. Innumeracy is math what illiteracy is to reading....
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 5:01 PM • 48 Comments •
Category: Basics
For the basics, I wrote a bunch of stuff about sorting. It seems worth taking a moment to talk about something related: binary search. Binary search is one of the most important and fundamental algorithms, and it shows up...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 12:08 PM • 14 Comments •
Category: Basics
This came up in a question in the post where I started to talk about π-calculus, but I thought it was an interesting enough topic to promote it up to a top-level post. If you listen to anyone talking...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 6:33 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Basics
Today's bit of basics is inspired by that bastion of shitheaded ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor. In part of his latest screed (a podcast with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute), Egnor discusses antibiotic resistance, and along the way, asserts...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:29 AM • 73 Comments •
starts with a bang! 02.08.2010
the world's fair 02.09.2010
the white coat underground 02.08.2010
living the scientific life (scientist, interrupted) 02.08.2010
