Woo
goodmath | August 16, 2007 My friend and blog-father Orac sent me a truly delectable piece of bad math today. It's just
astonishing: a supposed mathematical model for why homeopathic dilution works, and for why the
standard dilutions are correct. It's called "The octave potencies convention: a mathematical model of dilution and succussion", and I got a copy of it via the Bad Science blog. The only part of it that's depressing is the location of the authors: this piece of dreck was published by someone from the Harvard medical school.
To give you an idea of what you're in for, here's the abstract:
Several…
goodmath | July 11, 2007
This is a short one, but after mentioning this morning how woo-meisters constantly invoke
fractals to justify their gibberish, I was reading an article at the 2% companyabout Allison DuBois, the supposed psychic who the TV show "Medium" is based on. And that
led me to a perfect example of how supposed fractals are used to justify some of the
most ridiculous woo you can imagine.
So, I was reading the article about Ms. DeBois. And since there's nothing more fun than a good smackdown of woo promoted by some slime-drenched
liar, so I wound up reading their full series on Ms. DuBois, and found…
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 | November 25, 2006PEAR is gone. Yes, I know I'm late with this news; folks like [PZ](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/shhhdont_tell_deepak.php), [Orac](http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/11/news_too_good_to_confine_to_j…) and [Jeff Shallit](http://recursed.blogspot.com/2006/11/pear-has-finally-rotted.html) reported this
great news days ago. But I wanted to add my two bits, by explaining just why this is good news. So I'm going to take this news as an opportunity to remind you just what PEAR was, what they did, and why it's so good that they're gone.
PEAR was the "Princeton Engineering Anamalies…
goodmath | November 15, 2006As [PZ](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/chopra_go_play_with_steve_ir…) pointed out, Deepak Chopra is back with *yet another* of his clueless, uninformed, idiotic rants. This time, he's written [an article trying to "prove" that there is an afterlife](http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2006/11/what_happens_af.html). Normally, when PZ comments on something like this, I have nothing to add; he does such a good job fisking
credulous morons. But this time, I actually have something to add.
We'll start with the trivial, and move on to the egregious:
>Thousands of patients have died,…
goodmath | November 8, 2006While waiting for I was innocently browsing around the net looking at elementary math curriculums. I want to be able to teach my kids some fun math, just like my dad did with me when I was a kid. So I was browsing around, looking at different ways of teaching math, trying to find fun stuff. In the process, I came across woo-math: that is, incredible crazy woo justified using crazy things derived from legitimate mathematics. And it's not just a bit of flakiness with a mathematical gloss: it's big-time, wacky, loonie-tunes grade woo-math: the [Rudolph Steiner Theosophical version of…
goodmath | July 12, 2006This is a repost from GM/BMs old home; the original article appeared
[here][old]. I'm reposting because someone is attempting to respond to this
article, and I'd rather keep all of the ongoing discussions in one place. I also
think it's a pretty good article, which some of the newer readers here may not
have seen. As usual for my reposts, I've fixed the formatting and made a few
minor changes. This article was originally posted on May 29.
I've been looking at PEAR again. I know it may seem sort of like beating a dead
horse, but PEAR is, I think, something special in its way: it's a group of…
goodmath | June 20, 2006I'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 that I wasn't really sure what I had to add.
Then I came across something that was new to me.
As I've mentioned before, I'm a New Yorker. I live just north of the city in one of the Westchester suburbs. The anthrax attacks that happened a few years ago were a very big deal in my area - in particular,…