Lots of people were intrigued by my reference to my editor project. So I’m sharing the current language design with you folks. I’m calling it Apex, as a homage to the brilliant Acme, which is the editor that comes closest to what I’d like to be able to use.
So. The language for Apex is sort of a combination of TECO and Sam. Once the basic system is working, I’m planning on a UI that’s modeled on Acme. For now, I’m going to focus on the language.
I’ve written recently about several different crackpots who insist, for a variety of completely ridiculous reasons, that 
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the pitfalls of writing this blog is that I get a lot of mail from crazy christians. I’m not sure why it’s just the christian crazies that come after me, but that’s the way it is.
Anyway, yesterday, I got a fresh one which is really quite bizarre. I can’t figure out what the heck the dumbass is trying to get at, so I thought I’d share.
It all starts yesterday at 2:30 or so, when I got the following, under the title “To Marcus From a Christian Physician Mathematician”. I put it in a pre-format region, in order to give you the full experience. This is exactly how it appeared in my inbox. I’ve done my best to preserve the exact formatting, so that you get the full sense of looniness.
Mark , The Lord has helped me and all I need from you is to help write a manuscript in math language. I have developed a new mathematics -1 tangent, very hard to communicate and very difficult , but by a simple computer program we have placed and sieved all prime numbers ( Please examine our site ) . Basically the mathematics creates a tangent over the original primordial universe , tangents used are 1/6 and 5/ 6 at Inverse 19 and if you can solve this simple equation a help from my lord from my lord then work with me. No PHDs have been able to solve this, and no one has been able to understand the mathematics. My papers were accepted as assignment by the worlds top Physics journal , and they said they have a hard time understanding the tangents, write it better X- 0.5=(0.5X)/10 ( The lord parted the waters) What is the rational value of X ( Least whole number ratio) You may write these papers with us in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. We will give you that site if you acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ that stilled the waters.
My first thought was the usual annoyance at being pestered by one of these twits. My second was “perhaps the reason why no one has been able to understand the mathematics is because you’re making absolutely no sense at all. And my third was to be really annoyed, because the moron sent me a request to “look at his site”, without even bothering to give me a URL!
So… I responded. I know that I shouldn’t have, but I can’t resist a good crank. A couple of quick and mostly nonsensical exchanges occured, which just aren’t worth the effort of copying. But one thing that I did say to him was:
If you send me your stuff, I’ll take a look at it. But you should understand that if, as I suspect, it turns out to be nothing but garbage, then I’m going to post it on my blog, with an appropriate amount of mockery of you and your work.
There were a couple of stupid back and forths… including his explaining that the reason that he sent this to me was because I’ve written about christian mathematicians on by blog. From this, I conclude that the guy’s reading comprehension is about as good as his writing, because the only times that I’ve mentioned the religion of anyone (except myself) that I’ve written about, it’s to mock them. (Like, for example, I’ve frequently mocked Dembski’s, and the way that he substitutes christian apologetics for actual math.)
Anyway, the first thing with any actual substance to it in our exchange, was this:
What ever , is fine, my Paper as I say was accepted as assigned by the AIP Journals and it is not accepted for publication because it is sloppy and poorly written in different mathematics. The reason I will only give you the prime number placement and the Computer program because you will not understand -1 tangent or some of the mathematical statements like ” A divisor of Space must be 2* a tangent ( a tangent always has a midline. Divisor 19 is exactly 1:3 (1/6+1/6) . That is it , do you solve or understand X-0.5= (0.5X)/10
Attached is a very tiny snippet slow prime number sieve/placement Program that no one has seen or understood yet but “each prime number is connected to each prime number and is continuous program” so unlike all the yobos prime number sieve out there , this one is different . It does not need a proof . We have done a billion and it is already copywrited to our site . Attached is the source code and the sample prime numbers by gaps and placement. It is my gift to you, and if you understand this then I will show you the rest of the mathematics, and why I can help you and you me .
Dont you dare call it Garbage, because then I can do the same to you , what is garbage is current mathematics understanding of prime numbers etc. I have a Phd education too, so it do not matter, I am a fellow of the royal college of Surgeons . See only the rest at your risk , you will not get it, because it is -1 tangent mathematics. It is copy righted ten times over.
V.C.
Along with this, he included a PDF file that had Fortran-77 source code superimposed on background images…
Now, I have no idea of just what this twit is trying to get at. But he did at least send me a link to his website. He’s created his own “research institute” called hope research. And it’s an absolute gem of almost time-cube caliber insanity. He’s got a picture of a file of rocks, with a metal plaque on a pole above them, reading:
BY THE GRACE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, A FEW ORDINARY ATHENS RESIDENTS DISCOVERED "INVERSE 19 MATHEMATICS", AT TAN 19, 1:3 (1/6 + 1/6), WITH DIVERGENCE/CONVERGENCE AT 1 AND MINUS 1(0.999.), IN 2009-2010 WORLD RENOWNED MATHEMATICIAN PROFESSOR EDGAR ESCULTURA (PHD, MADISON WISCONSIN) ACKNOWLEDGED IN WRITING THE BASIC PREMISE OF TAN 19, AND ALSO IN WRITING HAS SAID "THAT IS IS A NEW NUMBER SYSTEM AND A NEW GEOMETRIC PLANE". THE FUTURE WILL HOLD THE REST THEOREM OF INVERSE 19- "A CIRCLE IS A SPACE CONSTRUCTED BY THE INVERSE OF PERFECT CONVERGENCE/DIVERGENCE OF 1 AND -1. 1=MUN 1(0.999.) AT NATURAL 1/3(1/6 + 1/6) DIVERGENCE OF NUMBERS. WHEN A CIRCLE IS COLLAPSED IT COLLAPSES NOT TO A NULL ZERO AS PER PRESENT MATHEMATICAL THEORY, BUT INTO A TANGENT CURVED SPACE 1,-1 AND 0.000166666667 (1/6X1/1000)
Try to make sense out of that, eh?
Looking at his web-page a bit, it’s an amazing jumble of incoherent rubbish. Most of it is just pure incoherence. But, as near as I can figure it out… the nugget, the basic idea at the center of it all, is:
CURRENT MATHEMATICS THEORY is wrong because it is based on a single square plane with a squared center, “a circle can never be squared”, vice versa, by a single mathematical plane, the mistake of Riemann, Euclid, Archimedes, and Einstein.
In somewhat more coherent terms: he believes that our number system is fundamentally defined by a square plane, and that all sorts of errors come from the fact that we always analyze things in terms of a “square space”. He believes that there are actually two overlapping spaces – one square, and one circular.
The “circle can never be squared” bit is really quite interesting, because it’s something that cranks constantly bring up, without ever bothering to understand what it means.
There’s an old traditional of geometry dating back to the ancient Greeks, which looks at things you can do using nothing but a straight-edge and a compass. You can do a lot of interesting things; for example, you can construct a perfect square without needing to measure any lengths or angles. Below is an animation of the process, from wikipedia.
Squaring a circle is a straight-edge and compass problem: if I give you a circle, can you draw a square which has the same area as that circle using nothing but a straight-edge and a compass? And the answer is: No, you can’t. When someone talks about “squaring a circle”, that’s all that they’re talking about: you can’t draw a square and a circle with the same area using nothing but a straight-edge and a compass.
People like our incoherent friend here believe that it means something much, much stronger: that you can never convert between circles and squares; that things that are round, and things that have right angles are completely, fundamentally incompatible. This is utter nonsense.
In fact, given a plane, we can identify points in the plane in two different ways: by picking a line and an arbitrary 0 point, we can then measure its distance from the origin in two directions (the rectangular coordinate), or we can measure its angle and distance from the origin and baseline (the polar or circular coordinate). And we can freely convert back and forth between those two representations.
He doesn’t understand that at all. He believes that the cartesian plane is actually rectangular, and believes he’s made some brilliant discovery by inventing a circular form of a plane. (A plane isn’t rectangular or circular. It’s a plane.)
As far as his prime number stuff goes… I can’t make head or tail out of it. He seems to be using the word “tangent” in a novel way, and I can’t figure out what his definition of the word is. Without that, there’s no hope of rendering his babble into anything meaningful.
But for your entertainment… He claims that he’s got this program which somehow demonstrates his prime discovery. For you, my loyal readers, I have actually copied it out of his PDF file. This appears to some version of BASIC.. it’s amusing; his programming is just as incoherent as his english. I mean, look at it: there’s no way that this program can work. None. Nil. Zero.
I doubt that it’s even valid syntax. I can’t say that for certain, because there are so many different variants of BASIC, and so many of them are so wacky. But even if the syntax, by some miracle, is actually valid in some version of basic, it doesn’t work.
How can I say that? Just look at the program – you don’t need to look very far. Look at the line with line number 10: 10 IF PRIME(X)=0 THEN GOTO 1009. There is no line 1009. There are jumps to line 1014; there is no line 1014. There are statements that jump to line 2002; there is no line 2002.
DIM PRIME(100000)' HOW FAR DO YOU WANT TO GO
DIM RIME(100000)' HOW FAR DO YOU WANT TO GO
PRIME(X)=7
RIME(Y)=5
X=0
Y=0
5 A = A + 1
7 AA=0
[BB]
D=D+1
X=0
Y=0
10 IF PRIME(X)=0 THEN GOTO 1009
IF RIME(Y)=0 THEN GOTO 1009
20 IF BB/RIME(Y)=1 THEN GOTO 1999 ELSE IF BB/RIME(Y)=0
OR BB/RIME(Y)=INT(BB/RIME(Y)) THEN GOTO 2000
30 IF BB/PRIME(X)=1 THEN GOTO 1999 ELSE IF BB/PRIME(X)=0
OR BB/PRIME(X)=INT(BB/PRIME(X)) THEN GOTO 2000
40 IF INT(BB/2)<RIME(Y) AND INT(BB/2)<PRIME(X) GOTO 1999
X=X+1
Y=Y+1
GOTO 10
1999 AA=AA +1
2000 X=0
Y=0
[BA]
IF PRIME(X)=0 THEN GOTO 1009
IF RIME(Y)=0 THEN GOTO 1014
IF BA/RIME(Y)=1 THEN GOTO 2002 ELSE IF BA/RIME(Y)=0
OR BA/RIME(Y)=INT(BA/RIME(Y)) THEN GOTO 2001
IF BA/PRIME(X)=1 THEN GOTO 2002 ELSE IF BA/PRIME(X)=0
OR BA/PRIME(X)=INT(BA/PRIME(X)) THEN GOTO 2001
IF INT(BA/2)<RIME(Y) AND INT(BA/2)<PRIME(X) GOTO 2002
X=X+1
Y=Y+1
GOTO [BA]
2001 GOTO 2003
2002
AA=AA+2
2003 IF AA=1 THEN PRINT TAB(32); BB
IF AA=2 THEN PRINT BA
IF AA=3 THEN PRINT BA; TAB(32); BB
BB =BB +6
BA =BA +6
X=A
Y=A
LET PRIME(X)=BB 'BB
E=X
LET RIME(Y)=BA 'BA
F=Y
IF A = 100000 THEN GOTO [MEM] ' HOW FAR DO YOU WANT TO GO
IF D= 71 THEN GOTO [PAGE] ELSE GOTO 5
[PAGE]
D=0
B=B+1 'PAGE NUMBERS
PRINT TAB(45);"PAGE " ;B
C=C+A 'NUMBER OF LOOPS
' START NEXT LOOP
IF B=200 THEN GOTO [QUIT]
GOTO 5
[QUIT]
open "LOOP" for text as #1
print #1, "NUMBER OF LOOPS "; C
PRINT #1, "X ";E;" Y ";F
confirm "DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?"; answer$
if answer$ = "no" then [END]
GOTO [CONTINUE]
[CONTINUE]
CLOSE #1
GOTO 5
[END]
CLOSE #1
END
[MEM]
PRINT "OUT OF ALOTTED MEMORY A"
END
I wanted to give you folks a version of this that actually ran… to at least see if this was, in any way, shape, or form a prime number generator. I tried to translate it into Python… But I can’t make any kind of sense out of it. Even with all of the obscure and deliberately pathological languages I’ve learned, I can’t make this make sense. For example, BA and [BB] seem to branch targets. But they also seem to somehow be used as variable prefixes. I’m not sure what, if anything, that’s supposed to mean.
If you know the variant of BASIC that this is written for, and you can explain it to me, I’ll be glad to make another stab at rewriting it into a runnable program in Python.
To conclude.. Why should I bother to do this? According to my loony correspondent:
I feel that with our -1 tangent mathematics, and the -1 tangent configuration , with proper computer language it will be possible to detect even the tiniest leak of nuclear energy from space because this mathematics has two planes. I can show you the -1 configuration, it is a inverse curve
I reluctantly give you the raw very primitive site of the mathematics without the calculus , it is not written in modern math language,but we are sure of it the mathematics and the numbers placement. DO NOT ridicule us, and if you can help find a partner to write this mathematics with us , let us know, we will teach you the calculus
Yes, we’ll be able to detect the tiniest leak of nuclear energy using his prime number sieve! (Which, in so far as I can understand it, isn’t even a sieve.) And I’d better not ridicule him. Oops, too late.
Oh, and according to him, π is exactly 22/7.
In my oh-so-abundant free time, I’ve been working on my own little text editor. And one of my motivations is TECO: one of the oldest, and one of the very best, ever written. It’s both a text editor and a programming language – and, in fact, that’s exactly what made it such a brilliant tool. So much of the drudgery of programming is stuff that really could be done by a program. But we’ve spent so much time learning to be fancy that we’ve lost track of that. Nowadays, you can write an emacs lisp program to do the stuff you used to do in TECO; only it’s awkward enough that you usually don’t.
The problem, though, with just re-implementing TECO with a modern UI is that it was designed in a different time. When TECO was written, every byte was critical. And so the language, the syntax, the structure, it was completely ridiculous. And, as a result, it became the world’s most useful pathological programming language. It’s a glorious, hideous, wonderful, horrific piece of computing history
TECO is one of the most influential pieces of software ever written. If, by chance, you’ve ever heard of a little editor called “emacs”; well, that was originally a set of editor macros for TECO (EMACS = Editor MACroS). As a language, it’s both wonderful and awful. On the good side, The central concept of the language is wonderful: it’s a powerful language for processing text, which works by basically repeatedly finding text that matches some kind of pattern, taking some kind of action when it finds it, and then selecting the next pattern to look for. That’s a very natural, easy to understand way of writing programs to do text processing. On the bad side, it’s got the most god-awful hideous syntax ever imagined.
My dear friend Sci seems to have stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest by posting something less than entirely complimentary about the science cheerleaders. That sounds like a sarcastic way of saying that she wrote something taking them down – but actually it’s an accurate description of what she did. What she wrote wasn’t entirely negative or entirely positive. It was an honest, balanced assessment of just what she thought about the idea of the science cheerleaders and why they made her feel uncomfortable.
I think Sci’s assessment was dead-on. But over at Labspaces, there’s a whole discussion about it which has largely devolved into a bunch of people shouting at each other (complete with a sub-discussion about which dudes successfully banged hot but crazy smart chicks).
I don’t have much too say about the basic issue that hasn’t already been said. Personally, I’m very much behind Sci’s take on it. I’ve got a daughter who loves science, and I’d be very proud if she grows up to become a scientist; but I don’t like the message that I think the science cheerleaders actually deliver.
What I think gets missed in discussions like this is that there’s an awful lot of societal context that you need to consider in things like this. An awful lot of the criticism that’s been aimed at the people who aren’t thrilled with the science cheerleaders is, I think, based on ignoring that context.
We live is a highly patriarchal society. In our society, there is a constant message that men are important, and that women exist in order to serve men. A woman who isn’t attractive, who isn’t dressing in ways that show off her fuckability, is considered less valuable as a person.
This isn’t just an attitude of the misogynistic assholes in our society. This is an attitude of our society, reinforced virtually everywhere. It’s something that’s virtually impossible to avoid. No matter how much you think you’re better than that, that you don’t believe that you’re a sexist or a misogynist, you’ve still absorbed that message. Living in this society, it’s pretty much impossible to not absorb that message. Whether you’re a man or a woman, whether you’re young or old, whether you’re smart or stupid, whether you’re straight or gay, it doesn’t matter. This is a very deeply engrained attitude in our society, and you can’t avoid it.
I’m not saying this to insult men, or to insult women. But I am saying that if you deny that you’ve been influenced by the society you grew up in, if you deny that you’ve internalized the incredibly strong messages of sexual and gender roles that are such a part of your society, then you are fooling yourself.
Just, for a moment, think about cheerleading as a sport.
Cheerleading is the most popular sport for young women in high school. There are thousands of girls who want to be cheerleaders, with huge competition for the few available spots. As a sport, it’s extremely demanding and difficult physically. It takes a tremendous amount of effort, practice, skill, and strength to be any good at it.
But what does a cheerleader actually do? What is their role as an athlete? It’s not to go out and win. Not even to compete. The primary role of a cheerleader is to support the male athletes. Cheerleaders are dressed up in impractical costumes – tiny skirts even in the coldest weather – and to dance, jump, and do all sorts of rythmic gymnastics while men are competing at the real sport. The women’s sport is very much subservient to the men’s, and the women’s sport is highly sexualized.
Even when you have co-ed cheerleading, you’ll find that the men typically wear long pants and a loose sweater, while the girls wear miniskirts and tight clinging, revealing tops.
In the male sports that have cheerleaders, the primary role of the male participants is to show off their strength and skill at the sport. The primary role of the chearleaders is to show how a group of attractive, fuckable women are supporting the talented male athletes.
This is basically the problem that many people have with the science cheerleaders. It isn’t that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with cheerleaders – but the societal context of cheerleading is that the cheerleaders aren’t part of the thing they cheer – they’re outsiders who support it by showing off how hot they are.
The “science cheerleaders” don’t actually cheer about science. They don’t show off their scientific skills. They don’t show that they know or care anything about science. Taken in the context of the society that they’re part of, and the traditional role and purpose of a cheerleader, they’re basically removing themselves from any role as an actual participant in science. Cheering isn’t part of the activity being cheered. A football cheerleader doesn’t play football; she supports the football player. A science cheerleader isn’t doing science; she’s supporting the scientists. And in our society, when you put together a group of hot women in hot costumes nad have them cheer about science, the basic message isn’t “Women can be interested in science” or “Women can be scientists”. It’s “science is cool, and you girls can support it by showing off how fuckable you are to all those smart science dudes”.
At best, what the science cheerleaders do is say “You can be interested in science and still be hot”. But put in context, that’s a very sad message: what it says is “As a woman, your primary responsibility is to be hot; you can be a scientist too, as long as you’re hot.”
Most people don’t want to think of themselves as being sexists or racists. Our self-image is that being a racist or a sexist is bad, and we’re not bad people. So we reject the idea that we’ve got these deeply ingrained racist and sexist attitudes. The problem is, we are sexists. We are racists. We’re not deliberately racist or sexist – but we all share the common context of our society, and it is ridiculous to pretend that we have somehow overcome that. And that causes some of the most pernicious problems of discrimination. The majority of discrimination today isn’t conscious and deliberate. It’s subconscious: it’s the attitudes and beliefs that we have internalized, which color our perceptions in ways we don’t even recognize.
I’ve done a lot of work recruiting, interviewing, and hiring people. And when you look at that, it becomes ridiculously obvious just how strong those subconscious biases are.
For example, in an experiment I’ve actually witnessed: Give a guy a bunch of resumes with names removed, and stripped of any content which could show the gender of the candidate, and they’ll pick out a bunch of resumes. If you look at the resulting selection, you’ll typically find that the number of women’s resumes who get selected are slightly above the proportion of women in the population. (This is another manifestation of sexism; in order to succeed, women need to be better than the corresponding male candidates; in a technical job, the average woman candidate will have better qualifications than the men she’s competing with, and in a blind resume search, that will result in the women being selected at a higher rate, because they have better qualifications.
Now, take the same batch of resumes, and an equivalent batch of screeners, but leave the names/gender identifiers on the resumes. You’ll get a dramatically different result. In the resulting pool of selected resumes, you’ll find that nearly all of the top male candidates from the initial round – better than 90% – were also selected in the open search. But of the women selected in the blind search, less that 20% will get selected in the open search.
And it’s not just men who do this. Use women as screeners, and you’ll see something similar. It’s not quite as as extreme – with women screeners in the open search, about 40% of the women from the blind search will also get selected. But still, the majority of women will be excluded, when the only additional piece of data is gender.
That’s the problem with the science cheerleaders. Not that there’s something wrong with cheering about science. Not because it’s impossible to be both a cheerleader and a scientist. The problem is that given our societal biases, the science cheerleaders play right into gender stereotype, and end up reinforcing the message that the primary role of women in science is sexual and supportive. You can be a female scientist – but if you are, it’s important that you do it in a way which shows your sexual subservience to the men. You can be a female scientist – as long as you’re also a hot chick who’s sexually available to male scientists.
As a closing point, before you start flaming me: just ask yourself, honestly: what would you think if a group of men dressed up in speedos and filmed a video cheering about science? Not doing any science – just dancing in their speedos chanting “science is cool.” In fact, can you even imagine a bunch of really great male scientists agreeing to dance in speedos while cheering?
This is a repost of a recipe from last year. I just made this year’s batch, and I gotta say… this stuff is absolutely amazing. It’s so good that I can barely believe that I invented this, even though I know I did, because I was there.
Since I started doing my family’s thanksgiving dinner, I always made a simple cranberry relish – it’s the recipe that’s on the side of every bag of fresh cranberries – the cranberries, sugar, and oranges, into a food processor. The problem is, that really needs to sit for a couple of days, to let the flavors blend together, and to give the cranberry pectin a chance to thicken it. And last year, I completely forgot to do it in advance – on thanksgiving morning, I took the turkey out of the fridge, and saw my bag of cranberries.
So there was no time to let it sit. I figured I needed to do something else. What? Well, I love chutneys, and a good chutney sounded nice. I went hunting online for cranberry chutney. There were lots of recipes, but none of them appealed to me. So I said to hell with it, and ad-libbed.
The results were just delightful, and it’s become the new cranberry tradition in the Chu-Carroll household. It’s got fantastic balance: sweet, sour, spicy, and bitter all at the same time, in the right proportions to compliment the turkey.
Someone recently sent me a link to a really terrific crank. This guy really takes the cake. Seriously, no joke, this guy is the most grandiose crank that I’ve ever seen, and I doubt that it’s possible to top him. He claims, among other things, to have:
is exactly 4.I’m going to focus on the last one – because it’s the simplest illustration of both his own comical insanity, of of the fundamental error underlying all of his rubbish.
Over at my friend Pal’s blog, in a discussion about vaccination, a commenter came up with the following in an argument against the value of vaccination:
Mathematical formula:
100% – % of population who are not/cannot be vaccinated – % of population who have been vaccinated but are not immune (1-effective rate)-% of population who have been vaccinated but immunity has waned – % of population who have become immune compromised-(any other variables an immunologist would know that I may not)
What vaccine preventable illnesses have the result of that formula above the necessary threshold to maintain herd immunity?
I don’t know if the population is still immune to Smallpox, but I would hope that that is just a science fiction question. Smallpox was eradicated, but that vaccine did have the highest number of adverse reaction (I’m sure PAL will correct me if that statement is wrong)
It’s a classic example of what I call obfuscatory mathematics: that is, it’s an attempt to use fake math in an attempt to intimidate people into believing that there’s a real argument, when in fact they’re just hiding behind the appearance of mathematics in order to avoid having to really make their argument. It’s a classic technique, frequently used by crackpots of all stripes.
It’s largely illegible, due to notation, punctuation, and general babble. That’s typical of obfuscatory math: the point isn’t to use math to be comprehensible, or to use formal reasoning; it’s to create an appearance of credibility. So let’s take that, and try to make it sort of readable.
What he wants to do is to take each group of people who, supposedly, aren’t protected by vaccines, and try to put together an argument about how it’s unlikely that vaccines can possibly create a large enough group of protected people to really provide herd immunity.
So, let’s consider the population of people. Per Chuck’s argument, we can consider the following subgroups:
is the percentage of the population that does not get vaccinated, for whatever reason.
is the percentage of people who got vaccinated; obviously equal to 
.
is the percentage of people who were vaccinated, but who didn’t gain any immunity from their vaccination.
is the percentage of people who were vaccinated, but whose immunity from the vaccine has worn off.
is the percentage of people who were vaccinated, but who have for some reason become immune-compromised, and thus gain no immunity from the vaccine. He’s arguing then, that the percentage of effectively vaccinated people is 
There’s a whole lot wrong with this, ranging from the trivial to the moderately interesting. We’ll start with the trivial, and move on to the more interesting.
I always appreciate it when readers send me links to good crackpottery. But one of the big problems with a lot of the links that I get is that a lot of them are just too crazy. When you’ve got someone going off on a time-cube style rant, there’s just no good way to make fun of them – the stuff just doesn’t make enough sense to make fun of.
For example, someone sent me a really… interesting link recently, to a book by a guy who claims to have proved that 
CONCEPTIONS OF π
One conception of π is the value 3.141… that is used for calculations, involving geometrical figures containing circles.
Another conception is that the number 3.141… is only an approximation. I interpret
π in this book as the relationship between a circle and its diameter, and not as the irrational number 3.141…
I have attempted to find a value that will result in exact calculations of circles.
SQUARING
The word “squaring” is used for the following:
A. The square with side of 4 u.l. so-called square squaring form
B. A circle with the diameter of 4 u.l., the circle squaring form
C. The only cylinder that has been produced by a square and two circles, from which come the cylinder squaring form
I identify the characteristics found in figures that I call square squaring, circle squaring and cylinder squaring and the principles behind these figures. I refer to three figures:
1. Square
2. Circle
3. Cylinder
It’s not particularly easy to make fun of that, because it’s so utterly and bizarrely nonsensical.
It’s pretty hard to get through his drek… But he’s got this way of characterizing different kinds of squares, and then different kinds of circles based on the different kinds of squares. The ways of characterizing the squares are based on screwing up units. There are three kinds of squares: squares where the number of length units in the perimeter are larger than the number of area units in the area; squares where the number of length units in the perimeter are smaller than the number of area units in the area; and squares where they’re equal.
That last group contains only one element: the square who’s sides have length 4. He concludes that this is a profoundly important square, and says that a square whose side-length is four of some unit is the “square squaring form” of the square. This is a really important idea to him: he goes out of his way to write a special note in extra large font:
N.B.
Squares with sides of 4 u.l. have a perimeter of 16 u.l. and an area of 16 u.a. Perimeter = 16 u.l. and area = 16 u.a. What I immediately observed was the common number for the perimeter and the area.
As you can see, we’re dealing with a real genius here.
From there, he launches into a description of circles. According to him, every circle is defined by a square, where the circle is inscribed in the square. It makes no sense at all; this section, I can’t even attempt to mock. It’s just so damned incoherent that it’s not even funny. The conclusion is that for magical reasons to be explained later, the circle with diameter 4 is special.
Then we get to the heart of the matter: what he calls “the circle squaring form”. This continues to make no sense. But it’s got some interesting typography. It starts with:
ln
of
the logarithm e
For no apparent reason. Then he goes on to start presenting the notation he’s going to use… And to call it insane is kind. In includes two distinct definitions: “Logarithm e = log e” and “Logarithm ln of e = log ln”. I have no clue what this is supposed to mean.
From there, he goes through a bunch of definitions, leading up to a set of purported equations describing the special circle related to the special square whose sides are 4 units long. What are the equations going to show us?
The formulae will define a circle that shows relation to;
- Its diameter to its circumference and area.
- Circles relation to its square.
- Its relation of the shaded area that is not covered by the
circle.- Finally, how many per cent a circle cover its square’s
area and perimeter.- Also relations to the cylinder.
So he gets to the equations, which are defined in terms of “ln of logarithm e”. His first equation, presented without explanation, is:
What in the hell that’s supposed to mean, I don’t know. He doesn’t define Q. s is the length of the side of a square. Where eln s comes from, I have no idea… but he gets rid of it, replacing it with s. Apparently, this is supposed to be a meaningful step – we’re supposed to learn something really important from it! He goes through a bunch of steps, ending up with “Relevant Formula: ⇒ 
I’ll stop here. I think by now you can see my problem. How can you make fun of this in an entertaining way? There’s just nothing that I can say about this stuff beyond “huh? what in the bloody hell is he trying to say here?”
He offers a cash prize to anyone who can prove him wrong. I think he’s pretty safe in not needing to worry about paying that prize out; you can’t prove that something nonsensical is wrong. Yeah, sure, π=3.2 or whatever in his universe: after all, for any statement S, 
What kills me about this is how utterly, insanely, ridiculously wrong it is… My daughter, who is in fifth grade, did experiments last year in math class where they roll a circle along a piece of paper to get its diameter, and then compare that to its length. A bunch of fourth graders can easily do this accurately enough to show that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is around 22/7. Any attempt to actually verify his number totally fails. But it would seem that in his world, when reality conflicts with theory, reality is the one that’s wrong.
This is really remarkably clever:
Since I can’t stand to just post a video without any explanation:
A fractal is a figure with a self-similar pattern. What that means is that there is some way of looking at it where a piece of it looks almost the same as the whole thing. In this video, what they’ve done is set up three screens, in a triangular pattern, and set them to display the input from a camera. When you point the camera at the screens, what you get is whatever the camera is seeing repeated three times in a triangular pattern – and since what’s on the screens is what’s being seen by the camera; and what’s seen by the camera is, after a bit of delay, what’s on the screens, you’re getting a self-similar system. If you watch, they’re able to manipulate it to get Julia fractals, Sierpinski triangles, and several other really famous fractals.
It’s very cool – partly because it looks neat, but also partly because it shows you something important about fractals. We tend to think of fractals in computational terms, because in general we generate fractal images using digital computers. But you don’t need to. Fractals are actually fascinatingly ubiquitous, and you can produce them in lots of different ways – not just digitally.
