goodmath

One more bit of personal blogging, and then it'll be back to the math. You may have noticed that I haven't been as active in the discussions on my posts for the last few weeks as I would normally be. There are two reasons for that; one I've mentioned before - my father's illness. The other is…

My fellow SBer Craig Hilberth at the Cheerful Oncologist writes about a meta-analysis that purports to show the positive effect of intercessory prayer. Neither Craig nor I have access to the full paper. But what we know is that the claim is that the meta-analysis shows a result of g=-0.171, p=0.…

For reasons that I'll explain in another post, I don't have a lot of time for writing a long pathological programming post, so I'm going to hit you with something short, sweet, and beautiful: binary combinatory logic. I've written in the past about lambda calculus, and it's equivalent variable-…

In general, I haven't talked much about personal stuff on the blog, unless it related to something else that I was already talking about. This post is going to be an exception to that. There's a bit of a scienceblogs flamewar that started up, with Rob Knop, a new SBer on one side, and a bunch of…

Today's bit of basics is inspired by that bastion of shitheaded ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor. In part of his latest screed (a podcast with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute), Egnor discusses antibiotic resistance, and along the way, asserts that the theory of evolution has no relevance to…

In the comments to another post, Blake Stacey gave me a pointer to a really obnoxious article, called "A New Theory of the Universe", by a Robert Lanza, published in the American Scholar. Lanza's article is a rotten piece of new-age gibberish, with all of the usual hallmarks: lots of woo, all…

I've been getting so many requests for "basics" posts that I'm having trouble keeping up! There are so many basic things in math that non-mathematicians are confused about. I'm doing my best to keep up: if you've requested a "basics" topic and I haven't gotten around to it, rest assured, I'm doing…

I've received a request from a long-time reader to write a basics post on modal logics. In particular, what is a modal logic, and why did Gödel believe that a proof for the existence of God was more compelling in modal logic than in standard predicate logic. The first part is the easy one. Modal…

PZ, Bora, Orac, John, and others have all put up posts about a list of the 50 most significant Science Fiction and Fantasy works of the last fifty years. As the reigning Geek-Lord of ScienceBlogs, I figured that I had to weigh in as well. Here's the list: the one's that I've read are bold-faced…

In math and computer science, we have a tendency to talk about "going meta". It's actually a pretty simple idea, which tends to crop up in other places, as well. It's also one of my favorite concepts - the idea of going meta is just plain cool. (Not to mention useful. There's a running joke among…

This isn't really math, but I can't resist commenting on it. I was looking at Evolution News and Views, which is yet another "news" site run by the Discovery Institute, because the illustrious Dr. Egnor had an article there. And I came across this, which I found just hysterically funny: If You…

I just realized that I've been writing this blog for a whole year! I managed to miss the actual anniversary, which was on thursday. It's hard to believe that I've been doing it for a full year. When I started Good Math/Bad Math on Blogger, I honestly believed that I'd probably last a couple of…

The third edition of the Carnival of Mathematics is out: this time around, it's hosted at Michi's Place. The next edition will be up in two weeks at my fellow ScienceBlogger Jason Rosenhouse's EvolutionBlog.

For today's installation of programming insanity, I decided to go with a relative of Thue, which is one of my favorite languages insane languages that I wrote about before. Thue is a language based on a rewriting system specified by a semi-Thue grammar. Todays language is called Thutu (pronounced…

As promised, another review of a childrens math book. Tonight, my daughter and I read "Rabbits, Rabbits, Everywhere: a Fibonacci Tale" by Ann McCallum. This time, I have absolutely no complaints. "Rabbits" is a beautifully told story, with delightful artwork, which makes the basic idea of the…

Today's basics topic was suggested to me by reading a crackpot rant sent to me by a reader. I'll deal with said crackpot in a different post when I have time. But in the meantime, let's take a look at axioms. What is an axiom? If you want to do any kind of formal or logical reasoning, or any…

One thing that comes up a lot in homology is the idea of simplices and simplicial complexes. They're interesting in their own right, and they're one more thing that we can talk about that will help make understanding the homology and the homological chain complexes easier when we get to them. A…

So... Remember George Shollenberger? He's the goofball who wrote a book allegedly containing the First Scientific Proof of God, which I dealt with here and here. Well, George has been continuing to babble away. He's got his blog - and he continues to comment on a nearly daily basis on Amazon.com'…

I recently had the opportunity to get hold of a collection of children's picture books with math stories. A fellow scienceblogger had been contacted by a publisher, who offered to send review copies of their books to interested SBers. The publisher turned out to be the folks who publish the "Sir…

One of my fellow SBers, Kevin over at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge wrote a scathing article reviewing an incredibly bad anti-evolution blog. There's no way that I can compete with Kevin's writing on the topic - you should really check it out for a great example of just how to take a…

I've been working on a couple of articles talking about homology, which is an interesting (but difficult) topic in algebraic topology. While I was writing, I used a metaphor with a technique that's used in homotopy, and realized that while I've referred to it obliquely, I've never actually talked…

Todays bit of programming insanity is a bit of a novelty: it's an object-oriented programming language called Glass, with an interpreter available here. So far in all of my Friday Pathological Programming columns, I haven't written about a single object-oriented language. But Glass is something…

One thing that I frequently touch on casually as I'm writing this blog is the distinction between continuous mathematics, and discrete mathematics. As people who've been watching some of my mistakes in the topology posts can attest, I'm much more comfortable with discrete math than continuous.…

Multiple people have written to me, after seeing yesterday's href="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/02/basics_algorithm_1.php">algorithms basics post, asking me to say more about sorting algorithms. I have to say that it's not my favorite topic - sorting is one of those old bugaboos that…

A kind reader pointed out that I frequently mention algorithms, but that I haven't defined them in the basics posts. To me, they're so fundamental to the stuff I do for a living that I completely forgot that they're an interesting idea. It's really pretty simple: an algorithm is description of a…

Over in the thread about Engineer Borg and his wacked-out electromagnetic theory of gravity, a commenter popped up and pointed at the web-site of someone named Tom Bearden, who supposedly has shown how to generate free "vacuum" energy using electronic and/or electromagnetic devices. I hadn't…

PZ has already commented on this, but I thought that I'd throw in my two cents. A surgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, posted a bunch of comments on a Time magazine blog that was criticizing ID. Dr. Egnor's response to the criticism was to ask: "How much new information can Darwinians mechanisms generate…

What we have here is a truly warped language. Back in the very early days of what eventually became computer science, many of the people working in the field invented all sorts of automatons/computing formalisms. The one that I've always found the most confounding is the Tag machine invented by…

Please make sure you read to the end. A couple of late submissions didn't get worked into the main text, and a complete list of articles is included at the end. Oy. So I find myself sitting in my disgustingly messy office. And I've got a problem. The Math Carnival is coming to town. All those…

Today, the ACM announced the winner of the Turing award. For those who don't know, the Turing award is the greatest award in computer science - the CS equivalent of the Nobel prize, or the Fields medal. The winner: Fran Allen. The first woman ever to win the Turing award. And the first Turing…