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.