« The Destroyers (perhaps)
Main
Get Real Work Done »
March 08, 2006
Good Math Bad Math
While I love math for its beauty and its power, I seldom blog on it. But like many beautiful and powerful things it is often misused. Now there is a new blog in the blogosphere, Good Math Bad Math , owned and operated by Mark Chu-Carroll, that addresses this exact issue. Here's a bit from Mark's first post,
. . . there's not nearly so much out there dedicated to math - and in particular to the misuse of math.I think that that's a damn shame, because in my experience, one of the most clear ways of identifying a crackpot is through math. No matter the specific subject, the crackpots always either avoid or screw up the math. Whether it's the "mercury causes autism" folks, the Velikovskians, creationists, alt-medicine quacks, republican pollsters, or scientologists - you can always recognize the crackpots by their math.
But its not all about bad math. Good math is also important to Mark.
Math is a wonderful, beautiful, fun thing. I want to spend some of the time here trying to help people see the beauty and the fun of good math.As a start, I'm going to try to put together a series of entries on something really interesting and fun, and which is all too often misused by crackpots: information theory. It's an area of math that was almost totally obscure until not too long ago, and one which is frequently misunderstood, even by people who mean well.
Go get a sample of Good Math Bad Math.
Posted by DuaneSmith at March 8, 2006 01:17 PM | Read more on Science - General |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://WWW.telecomtally.com/cgi-bin/blog/mt-tb.cgi/574
Comments
Post a comment
Please read Abnormal Interest's Comments Policy.