Bad Math
goodmath | November 7, 2007 My fellow SBer Craig McClain sent me a link to yet another an example of how mind-bogglingly innumerate people are. At least, for once it's not Americans.
The British lottery put out a "scratch-off" game called "Cool Cash". The idea of
it is that it's got a target temperature on the card, and to win, you need uncover
only temperatures colder than the target. Simple, right?
Since Britain is on the metric system, they measure temperatures in Celsius. So naturally, some of the temperatures end up being below zero. And that's where the trouble came in. So many
people didn't know that below…
goodmath | November 5, 2007 Now, it's time for the final chapter in my "visits with old friends" series, which brings us
back to the Good Math/Bad Math all-time reader favorite crackpot: Mr. George Shollenberger.
Last time I mentioned George, a number of readers commented on the fact that it's cruel to pick on poor George, because the guy is clearly not all there: he's suffered from a number of medical problems which can cause impaired reasoning, etc. I don't like to be pointlessly cruel, and in general, I think it's inappropriate to be harsh with someone who is suffering from medical problems - particularly medical…
goodmath | October 8, 2007Checking In on Old Friends
As long-time readers of this blog know, there are a few crackpots who I've written about multiple
times. Those nutters have their fans, and people seem to want to hear about what they're up to. So today, I'll give you a brief look at what's going on with the three fan favorites: Gary Osborn (he of the
23.5 degree angle), the Lords Witnesses (the folks who keep making failed predictions about when the UN will get bombed), and of course, George Shollenberger (supposed God-prover and all-around genius). We'll start with Gary, and then talk about the Witnesses and old…
goodmath | September 26, 2007As of 2/24/2008, Sewell has just responded to this, pretending that he just noticed it. To make discussions easier to follow, I have responded with a new post here, and I would appreciate it if comments could be posted there, to keep it all in one place.
My SciBling Mark Hofnagle over at the Denialist blog wanted me to take a look at the pseudo-mathematical ramblings of Granville Sewell. It actually connects with some of the
comments in the thread about the paper by Dembski and Marks - Sewell uses part of the article to make
the same kind of quantum nonsense claims that showed up here.…
goodmath | September 12, 2007 Via Atrios, I found this article at the American Prospect, which demonstrates an example of a very
common and very serious math error that's constantly made in the media: unit errors. If you want to
compare two numbers, you need to make sure that they're actually numbers that can be compared. You can't meaningfully compare height in inches to height in centimeters; you can't compare income in dollars
to income in Euro's - to do a meaningful comparison, you need to convert to a common unit.
The specific error pointed out the by Prospect was in the New York Times. The Times published an…
goodmath | September 9, 2007
If you remember, a while back, I wrote about a British computer scientist named James Anderson, who
claimed to have solved the "problem" of "0/0" by creating a new number that he called nullity. The
creation of nullity was actually part of a larger project of his - he claims to have designed a computing
machine called the Perspex machine which is strictly more powerful that the Turing machine. If
this was true, it would mean that the Church-Turing thesis is false, overturning a huge part of the theory
of computer science.
Of course, just overturning the theory of computer science isn't…
goodmath | August 8, 2007 Once upon a time, I wrote about a jackass who was criticizing his college math instructor, because the instructor couldn't explain what made the calculus class christian, or why it was different from what would be taught in a math class at a secular college.
That kind of thinking is quite strong in certain segments of the conservative christian community, and that disgusts me. Let me show you an example, and then I'll explain why is annoys me so much. A reader
send me a link to the math curriculum for a Baptist high school, and it seriously bugs me.
Here's their explanation of a high…
goodmath | August 6, 2007
There's one piece of bad math that I've encountered relatively frequently in conversations. It's
incredibly frustrating to me, because it's just so crazy - but the way we teach math and physics, far to many people just don't have enough of a clue to see how foolish it really is.
This comes up in conversations with lay-people whenever a new space probe is launched. It's generally presented in the form of a question; something like "That TV announcer said something about a point between the earth and the moon where gravity cancels, so there's no gravitational pull towards either the earth…
goodmath | July 21, 2007 After seeing PZs comments on Stuart Pivar's new version of his book, titled "Lifecode: From egg to embryo by self-organization", I thought I would try taking a look. I've long thought that much of the stuff that I've read in biology is missing something when it comes to math. Looking at things, it often seems like there are mathematical ideas that might
have important applications, but due to the fact that biology programs rarely (if ever) require
students to study any advanced math, they don't recognize the way that math could help them. So, hearing about Pivar's book, which claims to…
goodmath | July 14, 2007Yesterday's Wall Street Journal has a *spectacular* example of really bad math.
The WSJ is, in general, an excellent paper with really high quality coverage of economic issues. But their editorials page has long been a haven for some of the most idiotic reactionary conservative nonsense this side of Fox News. But this latest piece takes the cake. They claim that this figure is an accurately derived Laffer curve describing the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues for different countries; and that the US has the highest corporate tax rates in the world.
There's an idea in…
goodmath | May 10, 2007 In the comments on my DMCA post, a reader asked me to comment on this piece of silliness. I try not to disappoint my readers, so here's my take. It's a pile of silliness with the distinct aroma of astrotur - silliness mixed with a bit of deliberate stupidity in order to obscure things.
The basic idea of it is: how dare we complain about the idea of copyrighting numbers! After all, everything you can do on a computer is ultimately stored in a form that can be interpreted as a great big number! So we're always copyrighting numbers: every book, every article, every poem, every story that's…
goodmath | April 24, 2007 When I'm bored, I'll periodically take a look at the blogs published by
the bozos at the Discovery Institute. I can generally find something good for a laugh. So I was doing that tonight, and came across yet another example of how they try to distort
reality and use slimily dishonest math to try to criticize the evidence for evolution. This time, it's an article by "Logan Gage" called What exactly does genetic similarity demonstrate?.
Francix X. Clines, an excellent writer for The City Life and Editorial Observer sections of The New York Times, today (April 23, 2007) repeats what may be…
goodmath | April 21, 2007 As I mentioned a while back, I was loaned the Library of Congress discard of George
Shollenberger's book. Since he's made such a big deal about how unfair I've been by
not reading and considering his argument, I've actually forced myself to read it.
(See what I'm willing to do for you, my faithful readers?)
It's worse than I expected. Based on reading George's writing before, I was expecting
something bad, very bad. This is beyond mere badness: this is "please oh please stab my eyes out with a rusty steak-knife so that I don't need to read anymore of it" bad.
After reading this book, I'm…
goodmath | April 4, 2007 Apparently, Michael Egnor just can't get enough of making himself look like an idiot. His latest screed is an attack on me, for criticizing his dismissal of evolution as a tautology.
My observation that "Natural Selection" is a tautology, and therefore useless to modern medicine, seems to have set off quite a few Darwinists. Prominent Darwinist blogger Mark Chu-Carroll took me to task here, and comes up with an approach that he believes gets "Natural Selection" off the tautological hook: he asserts that all scientific theories are reducible to tautologies! Mark writes:
And this brings…
goodmath | April 2, 2007 A couple of weeks ago, I revisited George Shollenberger, the creator the alleged "First Scientific Proof of God", and commented on his pathetic antics on amazon.com, trying to explain just why no one had bothered to post a single review of his book. (If you'll
recall, according to George, it's because everyone is too busy considering the impact that his proof is going to have on their activities.)
Normally, I wouldn't revisit a two-bit crank like George after such a short interval, but he showed up in the comments again to specifically point at a post he made on his own blog, which he…
goodmath | March 29, 2007 So over at the DI whiners blog, Egnor is, once again, trying to pretend that he's actually making a case for why evolution is irrelevant to antibiotic resistance. It's really getting silly; he repeats the same nonsense over and over again, desparately doing the rhetorical version of sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "La La La! I can't hear you!":
The Darwinist assertion that random variation and natural selection (chance and necessity) account for all biological complexity has nothing to do with the mundane observation that it's unwise to unnecessarily expose populations of…
goodmath | March 17, 2007 So the Discovery Institute's most recent addition has chosen to reply to my post about
tautologies. (Once again, I'm not linking to him; I will not willingly be a source of hits for the DI website when they're promoting dangerous ingorance like this.) Typically, he manages to totally miss the point:
Darwinist blogger and computer scientist MarkCC (why don't they use their real names?) called me a lot of names a couple of days ago. The most profane was that I am a 'bastion of s***headed ignorance.' Profanity seems to be a particular problem with the computer-math Darwinists. A dysfunctional…
goodmath | March 16, 2007 My fellow SBer Craig Hilberth at the Cheerful Oncologist writes about a
meta-analysis that purports to show the positive effect of intercessory prayer. Neither Craig
nor I have access to the full paper. But what we know is that the claim is that the meta-analysis
shows a result of g=-0.171, p=0.015.
This really ticks me off. Why? because g=-0.17 is not significant. Meta-analysis generally considers g=0.20 to be the minimum cutoff for statistical significance.
Briefly, what is meta-analysis? The idea of it is, suppose you've got a bunch of studies of the same topic. Meta-analysis lets you…
goodmath | March 13, 2007 In the comments to another post, Blake Stacey gave me a pointer to a really obnoxious article, called "A New Theory of the Universe", by a Robert Lanza, published in the American Scholar. Lanza's article is a rotten piece of new-age gibberish, with all of the usual hallmarks: lots of woo, all sorts of babble about how important consciousness is, random nonsensical babblings about quantum physics, and of course, bad math.
Lanza's "theory" (if one wants to be generous enough to call it that) is that life is a fundamental, in fact the fundamental guiding force of the entire universe. His…
goodmath | February 21, 2007 Many of my fellow SBers have been mocking the recently unveiled Conservapedia. Conservapedia claims to be a reaction to the liberal bias of Wikipedia. Ed, PZ, Afarensis, Tim, John, and Orac have all piled on already. But why should they get to have all the fun?
Conservapedia has an extensive list of what they claim to be examples of the liberal bias of Wikipedia. My SciBlings have already covered most of the nonsense to be found within, but one point is clearly mine to mock: grievance number 16:
Wikipedia has many entries on mathematical concepts, but lacks any entry on the basic…