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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: information theory
If you regularly follow comments on this blog, you'll know that I've been having a back-and-forth with a guy who doesn't know much about information theory, and who's been using his ignorance to try to assemble arguments against the...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 12:55 PM • 25 Comments •
Category: Debunking Creationism
As lots of you have heard, William Dembski and Robert Marks just had a paper published in an IEEE journal. In the last couple of days, I've received about 30 copies of the paper in my email with requests...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:08 PM • 80 Comments •
Category: Numbers
In my Dembski rant, I used a metaphor involving the undescribable numbers. An interesting confusion came up in the comments about just what that meant. Instead of answering it with a comment, I decided that it justified a post...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:41 AM • 92 Comments •
Category: bad math
Like a lot of other bloggers, I often get annoying email from people. This week, I've been dealing with a particularly annoying jerk, who's been bothering me for multiple reasons. First, he wants me to "lay off" the Christians...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 12:38 PM • 26 Comments •
Category: information theory
Since my post a couple of weeks ago about NASA and the antenna evolution experiment, I've been meaning to write a followup. In both comments and private emails, I've gotten a number of interesting questions about the idea of...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:49 AM • 23 Comments •
Category: Debunking Creationism
Someone sent me some questions about information theory; or actually, about some questions raised by a bozo creationist arguing about information theory. But the issues raised are interesting. So while I'm nominally snarking at a clueless creationist, I'm really...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:17 AM • 62 Comments •
Category: intelligent design
Both in comments, and via email, I've received numerous requests to take a look at the work of Dembski and Marks, published through Professor Marks's website. The site is called the "Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory". Before getting to the paper,...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 9:00 AM • 178 Comments •
Category: Fractals
While reading Mandelbrot's text on fractals, I found something that surprised me: a relationship between Shannon's information theory and fractals. Thinking about it a bit, it's not really that suprising; in fact, it's more surprising that I've managed to...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 2:31 PM • 45 Comments •
Category: Basics
Multiple people have written to me, after seeing yesterday's algorithms basics post, asking me to say more about sorting algorithms. I have to say that it's not my favorite topic - sorting is one of those old bugaboos that...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:30 PM • 52 Comments •
Category: intelligent design
I haven't taken a look at Uncommon Descent in a while; seeing the same nonsense get endlessly rehashed, seeing anyone who dares to express disagreement with the moderators get banned, well, it gets old. But then... Last week, DaveScott...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:30 AM • 57 Comments •
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