Science After Sunclipse

. . . Come Again?

Category: Bad Math

There I was, quietly trying to get work done, when somebody e-mails me a link to a New York Times piece, "S.E.C. to Seek Ban on Flash Orders, Schumer Says". When buy or sell orders are submitted to marketplaces like...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:01 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Chicken Tikka Masala No Longer National Dish of United Kingdom?

Category: Bad Math

The Independent serves up a spicy samosa of stupid. Under the headline "Oodles of noodles: Britain prefers Chinese to curry", we see the following figures backing up that assertion, emphasis mine: In a poll, 83 per cent of adults liked...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:35 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Exponent FAIL Redux

Category: Bad Math

So, I was poking through the US/LHC blogs to see if they had anything to say about the new Higgs boson results from the Tevatron, and I noticed that Steve Nahn had noticed another case of exponent fail. Last time,...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 7:56 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Exponent FAIL: Or, the Difference a Few Zeros Can Make

Category: Bad Math

Dave Bacon points to a retrospective piece by the American Physical Society, "The Top Ten Physics News Stories of 2008", and he indulges in a little nitpicking. Well, N can play at that game! Look at this summary, under the...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:36 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

It Takes a Village to Crack a Genome

Category: arXiv

I really like the arXiv. It's a stupendous heap of papers in the physical and quantitative sciences, growing by the day. Scientists and mathematicians upload preliminary versions of their articles to the arXiv servers, so that their community can take...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 10:21 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Two Lessons in Arithmetic

Category: Bad Math

I don't know where we found examples of amusing and/or horrifying mistakes before the Internet....

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:50 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Shorter Elsevier

The case of the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is a moderately long and troubling one; before I write anything else about it, I should try to compress what's happened so far. Yo, dudes, it's Elsevier. This journal we've got...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 11:49 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Knollity

Google Knol provides an interesting forum for the incoherent.

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:09 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

They Can DO That?!

Category: Calculus

The editors of Seed Magazine endorse Barack Obama. They give lots of high-minded reasons, but clearly, they just had their fingers in the interstellar wind. Oh, and um, guys: Today we stand at an inflection point in modern history, and...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 3:24 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The EmDrive Story, or How to Propel Pseudoscience

To a scientist, having an open mind is a virtue. However, scientists still get upset when they find a story in a "science" magazine which crowbars open the reader's mind so far that you can hear the brains sloosh out...

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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:44 PM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks