Bad Math

On Pharyngula, PZ Myers criticizes the stubborn obfuscations of Michael Behe, who refuses to yield his illogical calculations. Behe says (rightly) that a certain mutation necessary for drug resistance in the malaria parasite has about a 1 in 1020 chance of occurring. But the mutation is also detected in 96% of malaria patients who respond well to the drug; it proliferated widely because, by itself, it had no impact on the parasite's fitness. The parasite needed another mutation, occurring at a later date, to develop resistance to the drug. Behe rests his case for divine intervention on the…

A bunch of people have been asking me to take a look at href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.4433">yet another piece of Cantor crankery recently posted to Arxiv. In general, I'm sick and tired of Cantor crankery - it's been occupying much too much space on this blog lately. But this one is a real prize. It's an approach that I've never seen before: instead of the usual weaseling around, this one goes straight for Cantor's proof. But it does much, much more than that. In terms of ambition, this thing really takes the cake. According to the author, one J. A. Perez, he doesn't just refute…

So, remember back in December, I wrote a post about a Cantor crank who had a Knol page supposedly refuting Cantor's diagonalization? This week, I foolishly let myself get drawn into an extended conversation with him in comments. Since it's a comment thread on an old post that had been inactive for close to two months before this started, I assume most people haven't followed it. In an attempt to salvage something from the time I wasted with him, I'm going to share the discussion with you in this new post. It's entertaining, in a pathetic sort of way; and it's enlightening, in that it's one…

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 known for doing a lot of really obnoxious things, ranging from sexually harassing at least one female employee, to sending some of his employees to stalk people who he doesn't like, to shutting off the microphones of guests on his show if he's losing an argument. In short, he's a loudmouthed asshole who gets off on bullying people. But that's just background. As a…

I'm trying to get back into my routine, after being really devastated by losing my dog. To people who don't love dogs, it probably seems silly to be so upset over an animal, but he was really a member of the family, and losing him really knocked me for a loop. I'm trying to first get caught up on my book schedule, so I haven't had time for any substantial blog posts. But while I was bumming around, a comment showed up on one of my old posts. For background, several times in the past, I've written about the Lords Witnesses, a Jehovah's Witness spinoff group that claims to have discovered a "…

Remember a while back, I wrote about a crackpot who pestered me both about converting to Christianity, and his wonderful, miraculous compression system? He claimed to be able to repeatedly compress any file, making it smaller each time. Well, he's back pestering me again. Repeatedly asking him to leave me alone, shouting at him, etc., hasn't worked. (His current claim is that he doesn't know how to delete me from his gmail contacts list.) So I'm resorting to another round of public humiliation, which I hope will be informative and entertaining as well. To remind you of the relevant…

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 (because if I don't, God's gonna get me). Second, he wants to convince me to become a Christian. And third, he wants to sell me on his brilliant new compression scheme. See, aside from the religious stuff, he's a technical visionary. He's invented a method where he can take a source document, and repeatedly compress it, making it smaller each time. This is a stupid…

An alert reader sent me a link to a really dreadful piece of drek. In some ways, it's a rehash of the "Nullity" nonsense from a couple of years ago, but with a new spin. If you don't remember nullity, it was the attempt of one idiot to define division by zero. He claimed to have "solved" the great problem of dividing by zero, and by doing so, to be able to do all manner of amazing things, such as to build better computers that would be less prone to bugs. Today's garbage is in the same vein: another guy, this one named Jeff Cook, who claims to have "solved" the problem of division by zero.…

I'm sure you've all heard about the airplane that ditched in the Hudson last week. (Just 30 blocks from my office!) When it happened, after we found out more about what caused the plane to ditch, I wondered how long it would take before the 911 Truthers came up with a conspiracy theory about it. Not long. Via SkepticBlog comes news of a conspiracy theorist claiming that the ditching doesn't make any sense. Brian Dunning at SkepticBlog does a good job explaining what's so stupid about this, but there were two things about it that I thought were particularly interesting from the point of view…

People keep sending me links to this, so I'll make a short post about it. In the hubbub surrounding the Obama inauguration, there've been all sorts of incredulous press pieces discussing the supposed outrageousness of the costs of this inauguration compared to others. I've personally heard this reported on the BBC world service, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. In these reports, the cost of the Obama inauguration is generally reported as between 150 and 160 million dollars. When they provide a contrast, they talk about how Bush's second inauguration cost $40 million. The problem is, this is a metric…

As long time readers of this blog know, one of the things that drive me crazy - in fact, one of the things that led me to start this blog - is the rampant innumeracy of our society. The vast majority of Americans have no real knowledge or comprehension of numbers or mathematics, and what makes that even worse is that most really, truly, fundamentally don't care. A vivid example of that is demonstrated in a recent Supreme Court ruling in a case dealing with the use of sonar in submarine training by the US navy in waters inhabited by whales. The basic idea behind the case is that…

Writing this blog, I get lots of email. One of the things that I get over and over again is a particular kind of cluelessness about the idea of infinity. I get the same basic kind of stupid flames in a lot of different forms: arguments about Cantor's diagonalization; arguments about calculus (which I've never even written about!); arguments about surreal numbers; and worst of all, arguments about nullity. There's a fundamental bit of foolishness that underlies all of the flames. Infinity is not a number. It's a mathematical concept related to numbers, but it is not, not a number. The most…

Once again, there's a silly article somewhere, and everyone hammers me with requests to write about it. It's frankly flattering that people see this sort of nonsense, and immediately think of asking me about it - you folks are going to give me a swelled head! The article in question is a recent article from Wired magazine, titled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete". The basic idea behind the article is that now that we can retrieve and analyze truly massive quantities of data, that the whole scientific idea of trying understand why and how things work…

I'm a bit late to the party on this, but I couldn't resist saying something. A rather obnoxious twit by the name of Richard Vedder has set up a front-group called "The Center for College Affordability and Productivity". The goal of this group is purportedly to apply market-based mechanisms to the problems of higher education in America. When you take a look at their "research", you'll quickly recognize that this is astroturf, plain and simple. A typical example of this is described in an article Dr. Vedder recently wrote for Forbes magazine about a supposed research study done by his…

As you've hopefully all heard by now, the Mars Phoenix lander made a perfect landing over the weekend, and is already returning images. NASA managed to not only achieve a perfect landing, but to use Mars reconnaissance orbiter to catch a picture of the Phoenix descending with parachutes deployed! Alas, NASA's Phoenix press people aren't nearly as good as its technical people. As an alert reader pointed out, in their press release about capturing the photo of the probe with parachute deployed, that they said the following: Phoenix released its parachute at an altitude of about 12.6…

I just had to promote this to the top level of the blog. If you remember, way back in December, I posted something about Sal Cordova's new blog. (As an interesting sidenote, Sal started his blog after supposedly resigning from Uncommon Descent, claiming that he was returning to school, and that the evil darwinists would sabotage his academic career if he continued to be associated with UnD. But of course, now, he's back with the UnDs.) Anyway... I was mocking him because on his blog he was posting something about how math and physics were going to prove his young-earth creation rubbish.…

Yet another alert reader just sent me a link to this extremely humorous blog. It's not recent, but it's silly enough that it's worth pointing out even now. I'm not one hundred percent sure that this isn't a parody. Looking at the blog as a whole, I think it's serious. Pathetic, but serious. According to scientists, The French / Eurotrash "metric" system is in a state of crisis today, as scientists discovered that the weight of the "kilogram" is flip-flopping faster than John McCain at an episcopalian rally. The Kilo - a unit with an identity crisis: This is one of the approximately 30…

Look folks, I don't want to become an economics blogger! Stop sending me economics questions. I hate to disappoint my readers and not answer their questions, but this economics stuff is almost terminally dull to me. The mortgage posts have gotten an insane amount of traffic, which has in turn brought in a huge number of questions. Most of them are about details of the whole mortgage situation - and honestly, I can't answer those. I don't know the details, only the basics, and I can't explain what I don't know. On the other hand, a lot of people have used my down-to-earth explanation of the…

I've received an amazing number of requests in the short period of time since my last post to explain "Tranching". I mentioned it off-handedly, but a lot of people have heard about its role in the whole sub-prime mess, and wanted to know just what it means. I don't particularly like writing about economics; it's just not my bag. But enough people are asking that I feel like I need to answer the question. But this is it folks - no more of this nonsense after today! There are plenty of other people writing about this, who know more about it, and who are more interested in it, than I am. It's…

Reading the news lately, I've come across an amazing example of how ubiquitous bad math can be used. Most of you have probably heard about what's been called "the sub-prime crisis". Despite a lot of media hand-wringing about how complicated it all is, the sub-prime crisis is really a very simple phenomenon: basically, you've got a lot of banks that have loaned out money without worrying about whether or not it could get paid back, and now those loans aren't getting paid back, which is causing all sorts of grief to people who invested in them. In the beginning of the mortgage system, the way…