Numeracy and innumeracy
jstemwedel | September 17, 2008There's a neat article [1] in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist (although sadly, this particular article seems not to be online) in which Brian Hayes discusses the Monty Hall problem and people's strong resistance to the official solution to it.
Now, folks like Jason have discussed the actual puzzle about probabilities in great detail (on numerous occasions). It's a cool problem, I believe the official solution, and I'm not personally inclined to raise skeptical doubts about it. What I really like about Hayes's article is how he connects it to the larger ongoing…
jstemwedel | July 26, 2008Today Chad has an interesting post about attitudes among academics toward math and science versus the humanities and arts. The general attitude Chad sees on display in his academic milieu is that a gappy knowledge of art history or music or literature is something to be embarrassed about, but when it comes to innumeracy or scientific ignorance, intellectuals have no shame.
Chad writes:
Intellectuals and academics are just assumed to have some background knowledge of the arts, and not knowing those things can count against you. Ignorance of math and science is no obstacle, though. I have…
jstemwedel | April 5, 2008Some screechy monkey or other tagged me on the song chart meme. The idea seems to be to come up with a visual/graphical representation of a song or some lyrical subset of it.
In other words, you can get your music-geek and your math-geek on at the same time.
I came very close to going through our entire record collection last night to pick the optimal song. But then I figured I'd just put up two suboptimal responses rather than laboring to determine what the optimal response would be. (Of course, because I'm a tremendous Luddite, both are hand drawn.)
First a histogram:
After which we…
jstemwedel | December 25, 2007The tradition in the Free-Ride family (passed down from my family) is that, on Christmas morning, no one gets to start opening presents until everyone is awake and ready to start opening presents. It doesn't matter how early the kids are awake. Until the last sleepy parent is ready, you just have to wait.
Santa does leave filled stockings on the foot of each bed, so there's something to keep you occupied, but that only keeps you satisfied for so long.
The fact that we are visiting the grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment introduces an interesting complication to the power struggle…
jstemwedel | August 30, 2007Dave Munger pointed me to an article in the New York Times that claims "switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry."
Dave is a critical consumer of information and notes that there is little given in this particular article (which appears in the "Media & Advertising" section) as far as numbers. As I'm not an agronomist, I don't have all the relevant numbers at my finger tips, but I'm happy to set up some equations into which reliable numbers can be plugged once they are located.
First, there's some unclarity in the sentence…
jstemwedel | December 13, 2006On my last post, Kristine commented:
My favorite "finals week activity" was defending to two students why they couldn't take the lab exams three weeks after all of their classmates took it, just because they realized now that they never showed up for class that week. Whew. Ten minutes each, and as emotionally draining as grading 100 exams.
I feel Kristine's pain. And, I think this raises the larger question of what the problem is that keeps these students from understanding that "course requirements" are things that are required for them to do.
Seriously, given all the time we academics…
jstemwedel | September 6, 2006A real nerd can combine love of math and poetry, like so:
{(12+144+20+3(4)^0.5)/7}+5(11) = 81 + 0
It's a true equation. And, it's a limerick. Read it out loud and you'll see:
A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square-root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Is nine squared and not a bit more.
(Actually, since it's not dirty, this might not officially qualify as a limerick.)
jstemwedel | September 5, 2006Sadly, this makes me think more kids should have been watching M&M commercials in December of 1999. As reported by the Gainesville Sun:
Proofreaders at the University of Florida appear to have failed the Pepsi challenge.
UF has called off a massive giveaway of Gator T-shirts, paid for by Pepsi, upon realizing that Roman numerals intended to denote the year "2006" on the shirts actually translated into "26" in standard Arabic numerals.
"The giveaway was halted," said Mike Hill, UF's associate athletics director for external affairs. "We identified the problem on the first day of…