Category Archives: Bad Math

Lottery Probabilities and Clueless Reporters

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A simple, silly, but entertaining example of mathematical illiteracy by way of the Associated Press:

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The odds are against something this odd. But a Nebraska Lottery official says there was no mistake: The same three numbers in Nebraska’s Pick 3 lottery were drawn two nights in a row this week.

Lottery spokesman Brian Rockey said one of two lottery computers that randomly generate numbers produced the numbers 1, 9 and 6 — in that order — for Monday night’s Pick 3 drawing. Rockey says the next night, the lottery’s other computer produced the same three numbers in the same sequence.

The odds of such an occurrence? One in a million.

Close… Only off by three orders of magnitude…

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Can 20 People Stand on a Wing? Can a Conspiracy Theorist Be Stupid?

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I’m sure you’ve all heard about the airplane that ditched in the Hudson last week. (Just 30 blocks from my office!) When it happened, after we found out more about what caused the plane to ditch, I wondered how long it would take before the 911 Truthers came up with a conspiracy theory about it.

Not long. Via SkepticBlog comes news of a conspiracy theorist claiming that the ditching doesn’t make any sense. Brian Dunning at SkepticBlog does a good
job explaining what’s so stupid about this, but there were two things about
it that I thought were particularly interesting from the point of view of a math and computer science geek.

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Blaming Bush: This time, it wasn't his fault.

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And now for a short gripe from the other side of the political spectrum.

Normally, I like Media Matters. I personally think that the whole “left-wing media” thing
is a crock. The media has become so sensitive to the accusation of left-wing bias that they actually shy away from even dreaming of criticizing a conservative, and attack liberals with great fervor as a way of showing that they’re not being unfairly nice to them. In general,
I find Media Matters does a good job of showing how the modern press really works.

But the fact is, they are a biased organization, and you need to be very careful
to look at the details of what they write. Just like right-wing media-watch organizations,
they do look for interpretations of facts that support their bias, even if it requires
significant abuse of those facts to make the interpretation fit.

This morning, they provided an excellent demonstration of that. President Bush gave his final press conference this morning. The people at the conference showed a lot of deference to him, and let him get away with a lot. But one thing that Media Matters focused on
touches on math, and it’s bad.

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Social Security vs Ponzi Schemes

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Naturally, since this friday was the first time that the SB server has really been down since I start blogging (planned downtime, as it happens, for a major system upgrade), there
was spectacularly bad math in the local news here in NYC friday afternoon.

I’m not sure how long this has been the case, but Mayors of NYC have a radio show. It’s a mixture of them spouting off about whatever they feel like babbling about, and call-in questions. I don’t generally listen, but once in a while, if the mayor says something either particularly interesting or particularly insane, I’ll hear the segment repeated on the local NPR station.

In this friday’s show, he sprung a really shockingly stupid line. The supposed
topic was Bernard Madoff and his pyramid scheme. Bloomberg responded by saying
that “Madoff’s isn’t the biggest ponzi scheme ever. If you really want to see the
worlds biggest ponzi scheme, just look at social security.” He continued along
those lines for a few minutes.

This is, to put it mildly, bullshit. Incredibly, stupid, rampant, bullshit.

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Circling Around The Speed of Light

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One of the many great things about my readers is how you folks keep me up to date with any new crap that springs up, so that I don’t need to spend so much time hunting down the real good stuff. There’s a beautiful piece of crap on youtube that was pointed out to me by one of you guys. It’s really a wonderful bit of circularity.

Circularity is something that I find beautiful in math. What I mean by circularity is that because numbers are closed, you can run around in circles playing games with that closure. Another post that I’ve got in progress is talking about RSA encryption, which is a beautiful example of circularity. You start with a message, encoded as a number, M. Then you take a particular set of three numbers, N, D, and E. If you raise M to the Dth power modulo N, you get a new number. M’. If you raise M’ to the Eth power modulo N, you get the original M. You’re never taking roots – but the two exponentiations cancel each other out modulo N. It’s beautiful, and astonishing, and yet it makes perfect sense.

That’s a complicated example of circularity. A simpler one, also involving modulo arithmetic, is to look at the tempered music scale. Let A=0, Bb=1, B=2, C=3, Db=4, D=5, Eb=6, E=7, F=8, Gb=9, G=10, Ab=11. Now, start at A, and follow through musical fifths – that is, go from A(0) to E(7). Then E(7) to E+7=14 mod 12 = 2 = B. Then B to Gb(9). Then Gb to Db(4). Then Db to Ab. Then Ab to Eb. Then Eb to Bb. Then Db to F. Then F to C. Then C to G. Then G to D. Then D to A. You’ve taken twelve steps of fifths, and wound up where you started. So by following through one of the natural musical elements of harmony, you’ve got a circle that visits each note exactly once. Looked at mathematically, it’s trivial. But it’s still pretty cool.

It’s pretty easy to trick yourself with circularity of you’re not careful. You can find what appear to be amazing numerical coincidences, because you don’t realize that you’ve created a circle.

The target of this posts isn’t an example of that. It’s a really trivial circle.

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The Z2K9 Problem

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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 they even be counting the days of the year, much less being so sensitive to them that they could crash the entire device for a full day?

The answer is: I don’t have a damned clue. For the life of me, I can’t figure out
why they would do that. It makes absolutely no sense.

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Idiotic Gitt: AiG and Bad Information Theory (classic repost)

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I’m away on vacation this week, taking my kids to Disney World. Since I’m not likely to have time to write while I’m away, I’m taking the opportunity to re-run some old classic posts which were first posted in the summer of 2006. These posts are mildly revised.

Back when I first wrote this post, I was taking a break from some puzzling debugging.
Since I was already a bit frazzled, and I felt like I needed some comic relief, I decided to
hit one of my favorite comedy sites, Answers in Genesis. I can pretty much always find
something sufficiently stupid to amuse me on their site. On that fateful day, I came across a
gem called Information, science and biology”, by the all too appropriately named
“Werner Gitt”. It’s yet another attempt by a creationist twit to find some way to use
information theory to prove that life must have been created by god.

This article really interested me in the bad-math way, because I’m a big fan of information theory. I don’t pretend to be anything close to an expert in it, but I’m
fascinated by it. I’ve read several texts on it, taken one course in grad school, and had the incredible good fortune of getting to know Greg Chaitin, one of the co-inventors of algorithmic information theory. Basically, it’s safe to say that I know enough about
information theory to get myself into trouble.

Unlike admission above, it looks like the Gitt hasn’t actually read any real
information theory much less understood it. All that he’s done is heard Dembski presenting
one of his wretched mischaracterizations, and then regurgitated and expanded upon them.
Dembski was bad enough; building on an incomplete understanding of Dembski’s misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and outright and errors produces a result
that is just astonishingly ridiculous. It’s actually a splendid example of my mantra on this blog: “the worst math is no math“; the entire article pretends to be doing math – but it’s actual mathematical content is nil. Still, to the day of this repost, I continue
to see references to this article as “Gitt’s math” or “Gitt’s proof”.

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Fitness Landscapes, Evolution, and Smuggling Information

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Since my post a couple of weeks ago about NASA and the antenna evolution experiment,
I’ve been meaning to write a followup. In both comments and private emails, I’ve gotten
a number of interesting questions about the idea of fitness landscapes, and some of the things
I mentioned in brief throwaway comments. I’m finally finding the time to write about
it now.

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Once again, Egnor and Tautologies

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As you’ve probably heard from other ScienceBlogger’s, that paragon of
arrogant ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back at it again – and he’s abusing
the language of logic in a way that really frustrates me. I’ve written
about this before, but the general topic recently came up in comments, so
I thought I’d bump it up to the top, along with another slap aimed at Egnor.

For those who don’t know, Dr. Egnor is a brain surgeon at SUNY Stonybrook – an excellent school, and Dr. Egnor is, from all information I’ve heard, an outstanding surgeon. In his free time, he blogs for the Discovery Institute, using his
status as an accomplished brain-surgeon to try to boost the bullshit spewing out of DI.

One of Dr. Egnor’s favorite attacks in his anti-evolution screeds always makes me think of a line from one of my favorite movies: “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die”. Oops, no, not that one. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) The real line is “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”.

You see, what Egnor keeps doing, over and over again, is arguing that
evolution is just a tautology, and that therefore it’s meaningless. He
defines evolution as the statement “that which survives, survives”. He almost never gets through one of his posts without that accusation in one form or another: evolution is a tautology, and that implies that it’s meaningless and worthless as an explanation of anything.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that he mis-states the key premise of evolution. That’s a huge, obvious, and deliberate mistake, but let’s just ignore it for now. Instead, I’d like to just look at the problem with his statement about tautologies. What exactly is a tautology? And does
criticizing something as “just a tautology” actually make any sense?

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Another Bad Metric Error: Wages vs. Labor Costs

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It’s just been a week for metric errors. Via Media Matters comes an impressive list of stories in the media about the automobile companies financial problems, where they cite labor costs as a major issue. So far, so good. But in virtually every story about this, you’ll find a statement along the lines of: “union workers make $71 an hour in wages plus benefits”.

In many cases, they even go so far as to specifically compare that figure as wages to other companies. For example, this quote, from a conservative talking head:

“When you’re paying $73.73 an hour to those people with salary and benefits and your competition is paying $48 to its workers, you’re going to get your butt kicked in the marketplace unfortunately.”

Here’s the problem with that. The roughly $70/hour figure is a statement of labor costs, not wages. What’s the difference?

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