goodmath

I just received some email that would seriously worry me if it weren't for the fact that I'm not an idiot. WARNING! TERRORISTS are going to ATTACK NEW YORK! There is NO TIME to waste! Go read http://www.truebiblecode.com/nyc.html!!!!!! Going there, I find: We are now 98% confident that the UN…

Before I dive into the depths of todays post, I want to clarify something. Last time, I defined categorical products. Alas, I neglected to mention one important point, which led to a bit of confusion in the comments, so I'll restate the important omission here. The definition of categorical product…

On my way home from picking up my kids from school, I heard a story on NPR that included a line from one of the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, which I thought was worth repeating here. They were discussing an article in this month's NEJM about [vioxx/rofecoxib][nejm]. The article…

In the comments to one of my earlier [Demsbki][demsbki-info-theory] posts, I was responding to a comment by a poster, and realized that what we were discussing was probably interesting enough to promote up to a front-page post. A poster named [Garote][garote] said: >I think PaulC said exactly…

Here at SB, we use Google analytics for getting info about how many people are reading our blogs, and how they get here. I also have a SiteMeter monitor on GM/BM. One thing that I get a kick out of is taking a look at my hits, and seeing what kinds of interesting connections come up. Sometimes it'…

Back when I first started this blog on blogspot, one of the first things I did was write an introduction to information theory. It's not super deep, but it was a decent overview - enough, I thought, to give people a good idea of what it's about, and to help understand why the common citations of it…

I recently got a real prize of a link from one of my readers. He'd enjoyed the [Swinburne][swinburne] article, and had encoutered this monstrosity; an alleged [probability of christianity][prob] argument *significantly worse* than Swinburne. [swinburne]: http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/mind-…

Dirty Three, "Some Summers they Drop Like Flies". I've mentioned the Dirty Three before. Just go get their CDs and listen. Amazing stuff. Broadside Electric, "The Gardener". Broadside is a local electric fold band. Great music, really nice people. Tony Trischka Band, "Feed the Horse". The first…

Just a reminder: the ScienceBloggers DonorsChoose challenge is not over yet. 10 GM/BM readers have already contributed over $1100. I can't even begin to say how terrific I think that is. 9 of the proposals that I picked for the challenge have been fully funded! Just to try to motivate other folks…

It's that time of the week again, and a new "Ask an SBer" question is out. The question is: "What makes a good science teacher?" As usual, since I'm the only math blogger around here, I'm going to shift the subject of the question a bit, to "What makes a good math teacher?". The answer is similar…

Sorry, but I actually jumped the gun a bit on Yoneda's lemma. As I've mentioned, one of the things that I don't like about category theory is how definition-heavy it is. So I've been trying to minimize the number of definitions at any time, and show interesting results of using the techniques of…

Off topic, but can't resist commenting, for reasons that will become clear. Over at Sadly No, Brad discusses a review of Glenn Reynold's latest book, which includes some babble about "Transhumanism". The very first comment? I was watching a show on the History Channel on Star Trek's influence on…

Harald Hanche-Olsen, in the comments on my earlier post about the Principia Mathematica, has pointed out that this months issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society is a special issue in honor of the 100th anniversary of Kurt Gödels birth. The entire issue is available for free…

Off topic, but as a proud New Yorker, I can't resist. Over on Feministe, zuzu posted a link to an article about New Yorkers, and how when it comes to genuine helpfulness, NY is the best city in the world.. Basically, Readers Digest did a series of experiments, where they actually observed people…

I know this is outside my usual subject area, but I just saw a spectacularly stupid quote from moronic conservative, and I just had to mock it. From AllThingsConservative, an explanation of why we should thank god that Ronald Reagan was president: If not for Ronald Reagan, and his vision and…

I've been meaning to write something about homeopathy at some point, because it's just so wretchedly stupid. But until now, I haven't sat down to actually do it, because it can seem rather like beating a dead horse: it's just so over-the-top goofy, and the goofiness of it is so well documented…

The thing that I think is most interesting about category theory is that what it's really fundamentally about is structure. The abstractions of category theory let you talk about structures in an elegant way; and category diagrams let you illustrate structures in a simple visual way. Morphisms…

I was glancing at the comments on the post that I linked to about "0.999...=1". And one of them was such a wonderful example of crap numerology, which I enjoy laughing at, that I just had to repost it here: VERY GOOD. But there's a couple tricks you missed. First, simple pattern completion 1/9 = .…

Finally, I have found online, a copy of the magnificent culmination of the 20th century's most ambitious work of mathematics. The last page of Russel and Whitehead's proof that 1+1=2. On page 378 (yes, three hundred and seventy eight!) of the Principia Mathematica.. Yes, it's there. The whole…

I don't want to get too NPR-ish, but: Just a quick reminder about our SB charity thing. GM/BM readers have donated almost $1000 dollars to help get desparately needed supplies for math teachers. And our benevolent Seed overlords are matching up to the first $10,000 worth of contributions through…

Just saw a nice post at another math blog called Polymathematics about something that bugs me too... The way that people don't understand what repeating decimals mean. In particular, the way that people will insist that 0.9999999... != 1. As a CS geek, I tend to see this as an issue of how people…

The Stills, "In the Beginning". I accidentally downloaded this from Salon this morning. I know absolutely nothing about the band. Planet X, "Digital Vertigo". PlanetX is quite a strange group. All instrumental, something like a cross between bebop and heavy metal. Great group, highly recommended…

Right after finishing my post about how Dembski has convinced me that he is not a competent mathematician, I find PZ linking to a Panda's Thumb post about Dembski, which shows how he does not understand the meaning of the mathematical term "normalization". Go look at the PT post: Something rotten…

I was recently sent a link to yet another of Dembski's wretched writings about specified complexity, titled Specification: The Pattern The Signifies Intelligence. While reading this, I came across a statement that actually changes my opinion of Dembski. Before reading this, I thought that Dembski…

As usual for this time of the week, the seed folks have tossed out a new "Ask a Science-Blogger" question for us to answer. This weeks is particularly easy. The question: How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary…

Janet over at Adventures in Ethics and Science has gotten a bunch of us SB folks to get involved in raising money for school science programs. As the only current resident math geek around here, I'm expanding it from just science to also math. What we're doing is trying to get people to donate to…

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to repost a few of my critiques of the bad math of the IDists, so that they'll be here at ScienceBlogs. Here's the first: Behe and irreducibly complexity. This isn't quite the original blogger post; I've made a few clarifications and formatting fixes; but the…

While perusing my sitemeter stats for the page, I noticed that I'd been linked to in a discussion at creationtalk.com. Expecting amusement, I wandered on over to see who was linking to me. Someone linked to my index of articles debunking Dembski and Berlinski. The moderator of the creationtalk…

As readers of GM/BM at the old site know, one of the things that I love to shred is trashy numerology. I also have a great dislike for the tendency of many modern pseudo-researchers to insist that ancient people were hopelessly naive or stupid. I've found a delightful little article about…

Let's talk a bit about functors. Functors are fun! What's a functor? I already gave the short definition: a structure-preserving mapping between categories. Let's be a bit more formal. What does the structure-preserving property mean? A functor F from category C to category D is a mapping from C…