Bad Software
goodmath | March 1, 2010 In my post yesterday, I briefly mentioned the problem with simulations
as a replacement for animal testing. But I've gotten a couple of self-righteous
emails from people criticizing that: they've all argued that given the
quantity of computational resources available to us today, of course
we can do all of our research using simulations. I'll quote a typical example
from the one person who actually posted a comment along these lines:
This doesn't in any way reduce the importance of informing people about
the alternatives to animal testing. It strikes me as odd that the author of
the…
goodmath | April 15, 2009 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…
goodmath | March 8, 2009 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…
goodmath | January 2, 2009 I've been getting a lot of emails asking about the so-called "Z2K9" problem.
For those who haven't heard, the software on a particular model of Microsoft's Zune music player froze up on New Year's eve, because of a bug. Apparently, they didn't
handle the fact that a leap year has 366 days - so on the 366th day of 2008, they froze up for the day, and couldn't even finish booting.
Lots of people want to know why on earth the player would freeze up over something like this. There was no problem with the date February 29th. There was nothing wrong with the date December 31st 2009. Why would…
goodmath | October 2, 2007 I've been getting a lot of requests from people to talk about the recent Excel bug. For those of
you who haven't heard about this, in Excel 2007, floating point calculations that should result in
a number very, very close to either 65,535 or 65,536 are displaying their result as 100,000.
It's only in the display though - the underlying number is actually represented correctly, so if you subtract 2 from 65,536, you'll get the correct answer of 65,534 - not 99,998.
I can't give you the specifics - because without seeing the Excel code, I can't tell exactly what they got wrong. But I've got…
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 | May 5, 2007 I came across a link to an excellent article that provides an example of one of my professional bugaboos: the truly awful way that we often design software in terms of how the implementer thinks of it, instead of how the user will think of it.
Take a look at that link to see what I mean. The short version of it is: xerox produces a copy machine that includes a billing system. Attached to the copier is a little card reader. You can't use the machine without inserting a card into the reader telling it who should pay for the paper/toner you use. The card reader's software is implemented as if…