Category Archives: Bad Math

The Chevy Volt Gets 230 mpg? Only if you use bad math.

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Here’s a quick bit of obnoxious bad math. I saw this myself in a link to an AP article via Salon.com, and a reader sent me a link
to the same story via CNN. It’s yet another example of what I call a metric error: that is, the use of a measurement in a way that makes it appear to mean something very different than what it really means.

Here’s the story. Chevy is coming out with a very cool new car, the Volt. It’s
a hybrid with massive batteries. It plugs in to your household electricity when you’re home to charge its batteries. It operates as an electric car until its batteries start to get low, and then it starts running a small gas motor to power a generator. It’s a very cool idea. I’m honestly excited about cars like the volt – and Google helped develop the technology behind it, which biases me even more in its favor. So you’d expect me to be very supportive of the hype around it, right? I wish I could. But GM has decided that the best way to promote it is to use bad math to tell lies to make it look even better than it really is.

Chevy has announced that for city driving, the Volt will get gas mileage of 230 miles per gallon.

That’s nonsense. Pure, utter rubbish.

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I am the antichrist. No, really!

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I normally try to ignore things like this, but this is just too funny.

In general, I find arguments like this to be extremely silly. This is, basically, like
playing with gematria – only instead of doing real gematria (which can be quite silly enough),
it’s like our friend “Gotcha” – mixing systems and screwing things up until you get the results
you want.

Lots of the particularly crazy strain of Christians really, desperately want to believe
that Barack Obama is the antichrist. They want an explanation for how this black man with
a muslim name could possible have actually been elected – they don’t believe it could possibly
have happened honestly. And their doctrine requires the antichrist to come soon. Combine
those two, and you’ve got what, for them, is a sort of perfect storm.

Which gives us things like this. For more mockery, see beneath the fold.

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Bill O'Reilly on Life Expectancy: Dumbest Man on Earth?

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An alert reader just sent me, via “Media Matters”, the single dumbest real-life
video clip that I have ever seen. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Bill O’Reilly is
a conservative radio and TV talk-show host. He’s known for doing a lot of really obnoxious
things, ranging from sexually harassing at least one female employee, to sending some of
his employees to stalk people who he doesn’t like, to shutting off the microphones of
guests on his show if he’s losing an argument. In short, he’s a loudmouthed asshole who
gets off on bullying people.

But that’s just background. As a conservative commentator, he’s been going off on
the evils of Obama’s supposedly socialist healthcare reform. That’s frequently
taken the form of talking about how horrible medical care is under Canada’s
socialized health system. One of his viewers wrote in to him about this. And
the insanity follows.

The question came from a viewer named Peter from Victoria, BC, who asked: “Has anyone noticed
that life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?”

Bill’s response:” Well, that’s to be expected Peter, because we have 10 times
as many people as you do. That translates to 10 times as many accidents,
crimes, down the line.” Delivered, of course, in BillO’s trademark patronizing
style.

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Bad Healthcare Cost Models Produce Silly Results (anyone surprised?)

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This morning, my good friend Orac sent me a link to an interesting piece
of bad math. Orac is the guy who really motivated me to start blogging; I
jokingly call him my blogfather. He’s also a really smart guy, not to mention
a genuinely nice one (at least for a transparent box of blinking lights). So
when he sends me a link that he thinks is up my alley, I take a look at
the first opportunity.

Today, he sent me a link to a guy who claims to have put together
a mathematical model showing that it’s impossible to create a national
healthcare system without rationing. The argument is a great example
of what I always say about mathematical modeling: you can’t just
put together a model and then accept its results: real mathematical models
must be validated. It’s easy to put together something that looks
right, but which produces drastically wrong results.

The common way of saying it is “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. I personally
don’t like that way of describing it – because in the most convincing examples
of this, it looks like what’s going in isn’t garbage.

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Crossword Guy just doesn't get math

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One of my pet peeves about people and math is that most
people don’t really have a clue of what math is. I’ve been writing
this blog for something over three years, and by the standards of
a lot of people, I’ve almost never written about math.

Yesterday, my son’s kindergarten class had a picnic. On my way home,
I was listening to the local NPR station, which was interviewing some
crossword puzzle writer whose name I cannot remember; I will therefore refer
to him as “crossword-boy”. (It was not Will Shortz; Shortz is much smarter than the
guy they were interviewing.) At one point, they asked him something about
Sudoku.

His response was a bit disjointed – he couldn’t decide whether to talk about
the history of Sudoku or about his opinion of it. His opinion is that it’s
incredibly dull and pointless, and that designing good Sudoku doesn’t require as
much creativity as designing good crosswords. (Just that much is annoying: I’m
a Sudoku addict, and I’ve definitely noticed dramatic differences in Sudokus
from different places. Will Shortz’s Sudoku books have great ones; most computerized
Sudoku games generate rather boring ones; the ones in most newspapers are
obviously computer generated.)

In the course of babbling about how uninteresting, non-creative, and
unsatisfying Sudoko puzzles are, he let loose with the real stupidity: “You know,
Sudoku doesn’t even have to use numbers, it can use any 9 symbols. It’s not a
mathematical puzzle at all.

Because it doesn’t rely on arithmetic, according to crossword-boy,
it’s not mathematical at all. He went on to say that it’s
just a logic puzzle, not a math puzzle at all.

Sorry pal, but logic is math.

Sudoku is an incredibly mathematical puzzle. It’s not an
arithmetic puzzle, but it’s a highly mathematical one.
In computer science terms, it’s a moderately
complex constraint-solving puzzle.

Math is more than arithmetic. It’s more than numbers. Math
is really the formal study of logic and structure. Numbers and arithmetic
are one kind of structured system described using logic which can be
studied and understood using math. But pretty much everything
with a precise, formal structure to it has at least an element of
mathematics. The structure of crossword-boy’s crossword puzzles
is fundamentally mathematical.

Dembski Responds

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Over at Uncommon Descent, Dembski has responded to my critique of
his paper with Marks. In classic Dembski style, he ignores the
substance of my critique, and resorts to quote-mining.

In my previous post, I included a summary of my past critiques of
why search is a lousy model for evolution. It was a brief summary of
past comments, which did nothing but set the stage for my
critique. But, typically, Dembski pretended that that was the entire
substance of my post, and ignored the rest of it. Very typical of
Dembski – just misrepresent your opponents, create a strawman, and
then pretend that you’ve addressed everything.

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Dembski's Latest: "Life's Conservation Law", and why it's stupid

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So. William Dembski, the supposed “Isaac Newton of Information Theory” has a new paper out with co-author Robert Marks. Since I’ve written about Dembski’s bad IT numerous times in the past, I’ve been getting email from readers wanting me to comment on this latest piece of intellectual excreta.

I can sum up my initial reaction to the paper in three words: “same old rubbish”. There’s really nothing new here – this is just another rehash of the same bankrupt arguments that Dembski has been peddling for years. But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that Dembski has actually accomplished something with this paper: in his attempt to argue that evolution can’t possibly outperform random-walks without cheating, he’s actually explained exactly how evolution works. He attempts to characterize that as cheating, but it doesn’t work.

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Moronic Probability and Stupid Physics

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Via the Bad Astronomer comes one of the most pathetic abuses of
probability that I’ve ever seen. I’m simply amazed that this idiot was willing
to go on television and say this.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
Large Hadron Collider
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Economic Crisis First 100 Days

The crank in question is Walter Wagner, the moron who tried to use a lawsuit
to stop the LHC from being activated. (Just that much, already, is amazingly silly;
he sued in Hawaii, but the LHC is in Geneva, Switzerland. How does a Hawaiian court
have any jurisdiction?)

Anyway… Wagner claims that the LHC could destroy the earth. See, there’s a tiny theoretical chance that the right collision in the LHC could create a microscopic black hole. According to Wagner, if that happens, the black hole will swallow the entire earth.

That claim is, itself, based on some pretty bad math. The only theory that predicts
that it’s possible to create a microscopic black hole also predicts that such a black
hole would evaporate – that is, would completely disappear in a burst of energy – immediately. The
exact same math that predicts that you could create a black hole in a high-energy collision also
predicts that the hole would be destroyed before it had time to do any damage. If you tweak it so that the black hole lasts longer, the energy requirements change so that it’s no longer possible to create it in the LHC. To make the black hole last a microsecond is absolutely beyond the
energy of any collider that we could ever build on the earth.

But let’s skip that – demonstrating that is pretty complicated. To get an idea of
the level of understanding of the guy who claims that there’s a real danger, let’s just
take a look at what he says.

When asked what the probability of the LHC destroying the earth is, he says 50%. Why?
Because either it could happen, or it couldn’t – therefore, there’s a 50% chance of it happening.

You could argue that that’s naive Bayesian reasoning – but if you did, you’d be an idiot. Classic Bayesian arguments about stuff like this would say that you use 50/50 as an initial prior in the absence of any other information; then you adjust that based on whatever
other information you have available. For Mr. Wagner’s stupid argument, it’s based on
a complex physical theory – a complex physical theory which provides lots of information
which you can use to update your probability estimate.

Mr. Wagner’s 50/50 claim is based on the fact that he’s absolutely clueless about how any of
this stuff works. He clearly doesn’t understand probability, and he clearly doesn’t understand
physics.

But he’s awfully funny.

Yet Another Bible Code Bozo

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I’m trying to get back into my routine, after being really devastated by losing my
dog. To people who don’t love dogs, it probably seems silly to be so upset over an animal, but
he was really a member of the family, and losing him really knocked me for a loop.

I’m trying to first get caught up on my book schedule, so I haven’t had time for any
substantial blog posts. But while I was bumming around, a comment showed up on one of my old
posts. For background, several times in the past, I’ve written about the Lords Witnesses, a
Jehovah’s Witness spinoff group that claims to have discovered a “bible code” by which prophecies
are embedded in the bible. They’ve been predicting that Manhattan will be hit by an atomic bomb.
They’ve proposed somewhere around 20 different dates. Their latest prediction was April 4th of
this year.

My last post about the Lord’s Witnesses and their goofy prophesies was back in 2006. But this week, a new comment on that post showed up.

It’s an amusing comment. The gist of it is that he has discovered the
one true bible code; that everyone else who’s found bible codes is really just being
duped by Satan, and that anyone who doesn’t accept the truth of his one true
bible code is an agent of Satan.

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The Return of the Compression Idiot

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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.

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