Random Tuesday Stories

I’m cleaning out my RSS reader and wanted to share a few stories:

• Mathematicians are the happiest workers. Which belies the “they’re all insane” myth (see: Godel, Cantor, Newton, John Nash). Get your story straight media!
• The picture to the left is a sculpture that’s been around since 1997 in SF and is a building that has objects falling out of it. I have to go hunt this down the next time we go into the city.
• The FDA is broken: “No one was held accountable, no appropriate or effective actions have been taken, and the same managers who engaged in the wrongdoing remain in place and have been rewarded and promoted.”
• How to Live What Michael Pollen Preaches: “Real home cooking means having a good repertoire of reliable, quick, uncomplicated recipes and understanding enough of the underlying principles to improvise when needed. It means knowing how to stock a pantry and plan your menus so that you shop for groceries only once a week.”

Everything and More

Oh my. It’s been awhile since I’ve written a non-children’s book review. Let’s see how I do, shall we?

Everything and More is, as the subtitle says, a compact history of infinity. And no one ever told David Foster Wallace that popular science and math books should never, ever contain an equation. The book is rife with them, along with series and sequences and proofs (Yay! Cantor’s diagonal proof! My favorite!) and graphs.

I remembered some things from calculus and college math: that limits really do make more sense when you talk about epsilons and deltas; that my own personal understanding of a lot of math is not too far above the calculus level; and that Godel showed that math, while useful, may just be a set of abstractions that exist only in our minds and not be the fundamental theory of the universe. And that kind of freaks me out. It’s way more comfortable for me when math is the fundamental theory of the universe.

I learned some things too. That there’s a reason math is taught to students in the order that it is and not in the order it was discovered. The section about limits and defining them is told in historical order and only cleared up when we got to the part about the epsilons and the deltas (which was near the end). But, now that I think about it, maybe that was the point. Maybe he wanted his readers to see the confusion and to understand how asking clarifying questions about equations is one of the ways that math moves forward. I also learned that historical asides, like that Georg Cantor was a violin prodigy, can provide de-stressifying moments in otherwise hairy explanations, and the juxtaposition of set theory and fourth grade math is both funny and occasionally appropriate. And footnotes in math books can make the arguments hard to follow.

All in all, I’m glad I read it. I’m glad I bought it, something of a rarity for me these days.

Everything and More: Recommended

Some News Stories

(I’ll get back to regular posting soon. I’ve got three more Lessons from the Garden to do and some other ideas bouncing around in my head.)

• AIG To Halt Lobbying Efforts
  “The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that AIG was still engaged in a state-by-state effort to soften new federal regulations requiring mortgage originators get licenses and provide extensive background information. Abuses and fraud by mortgage originators helped ignite the crisis that threatened AIG with bankruptcy and forced the federal intervention.”
• You Have 60 Minutes To Do Complex Math Or Else You’re Dead. Go!
  “Fermat’s Room, from Spanish directors Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña, manages to turn math into a deadly, mysterious game. Everyone assembled in the room has secrets, of course, and motivations they are hiding. But as the walls literally close in on the characters, increasing desperation forces them into confrontation. As they try to unravel who is behind the crime, they must solve various “enigmas” to keep back the walls (though some of the problems are a bit too familiar, like the “Light Switch Puzzle”).”
• The Mommy Track
  “That may be part of the reason she has become virtually the only current A-list actress to achieve her status while completely bypassing romantic comedies. Nobody is ever likely to call her “America’s Sweetheart.””
• Roseanne Remains The Most Realistic Comedy on TV
  “But it still doesn’t change the fact that families like the Connors are not present on television in any way, shape, or form, even on reality TV. When Bravo airs the “Real” housewives of Atlanta, NYC, and Orange County, they show only the frivolous and the uberwealthy.”
• The Trophy Kids Go To Work
  “Millennials, of course, will have to temper their expectations as they seek employment during this deep economic slump. But their sense of entitlement is an ingrained trait that will likely resurface in a stronger job market. Some research studies indicate that the millennial generation’s great expectations stem from feelings of superiority.”

A "Science" Post

Dude. Someone at Central Florida University published a paper calculating how vampires’ feeding on humans affects the two populations. The result? In about three years, there wouldn’t be any people left. (via Good Morning Silicon Valley):

If vampires truly feed with even a tiny fraction of the frequency that they are depicted to in the movies and folklore, then the human race would have been wiped out quite quickly after the first vampire appeared. Let us assume that a vampire need feed only once a month. … Now two things happen when a vampire feeds. The human population decreases by one and the vampire population increases by one. Let us suppose that the first vampire appeared in 1600 A.D. … On February 1st, 1600, 1 human will have died and a new vampire born. This gives 2 vampires and (536,870,911 – 1) humans. The next month there are two vampires feeding and thus two humans die and two new vampires are born. This gives 4 vampires and (536,870,911 – 3) humans. Now on April 1st, 1600, there are 4 vampires feeding and thus we have 4 human deaths and 4 new vampires being born. This gives us 8 vampires and (536,870,911 – 7) humans.” And so it goes. By 1603m there are no humans left, unless every birth is a multiple one. “In the long run, for humans to survive, our population must at least essentially double each month,” explains Efthimiou. “This is clearly way beyond the human capacity of reproduction.”

My Favorite Math Proof Technique

I’ve fallen behind on my plan to post more about math and science. In an effort to catch up, here’s a link to the wikipedia page for my favorite math proof: Cantor’s Diagonal Proof to show that the set of rational numbers is larger than the set of natural numbers.

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There were two stories in the Economist last week about why women need to be part of the worlds’ economies.

Good Math, Bad Math does a wonderful job at showing how people mis-use math to their own ends.

I’ve got book reviews in a couple of different places on the internet. I’m going to consolidate them all here. Although there’s not much there yet. Stay tuned.

Math is Useful, Dammit

I’m still stuck on that damn math-is-useless article. And I’m taking my lunch break, so I don’t have to feel guilty about writing. Rather than rage blindly (which, let’s face it, I have a tendency to do), I’m going to go ahead and list things math is good for.

1. I’m going to go ahead and give them the point in the last paragraph in the article that math is good for learning a habit of thought. It’s true.
2. Computers aren’t fail-safe. They need to be double checked.
3. When politicians or policy analysts or NGOs throw out numbers about something (i.e. “X percent of people believe…”) you need to be able to know if they’re even remotely right.
4. Calculating your household budget.
5. Understanding how changes in your household budget affect you.
6. Knowing how much money you’re paying to the credit card companies, in advance, if you don’t pay off your bills each month.
7. Understanding your investments.
8. Knowing how much the tip should be.
9. Knowing what your share of the bill is when you go out to lunch with friends. (Ignore all the anecodtal evidence that math majors can’t do this — once you get past calculus, numbers tend to be few and far between.)
10. Balancing your checkbook.
11. Calculating (in your head with a wiggly baby in one arm) whether or not you’re buying enough fabric to make pillowcases with.
12. Knowing, if you paid with cash, that you’ve gotten the right amount of change.
13. How to make only a half (or a third or a quarter) of a recipe. (“No one is going to pay you for knowing division,” my ASS.)
14. Calculating your weekly menu. (If I only have $60 to spend on food, and I decide to make three pasta dishes, and I have x ingredients, which dishes can I make and stay within my budget?)
15. Knowing what your gas milage is, and, with some simple thought, linking what types of driving increase and decrease it.

So, some of those were pretty clearly mom-related stuff — what do you expect? That’s what came to mind in five minutes. Life really is a story problem.

Don’t worry about your math skills. That’s why we have computers.

Wow. The amount of blind rage this NYTimes article about why math education isn’t necessary inspired surprises even me. Some random quotes include:

“True, those calculators and spreadsheets and credit card machines need to be programmed. But, in between bouts of visa restrictions, American universities successfully import thousands of math whizzes each year because jobs await them, and the tiny percentage of American-born students who do Ph.D. work equal the world’s best.”

and

“Most experts point out that careers in science or computers require mathematics, even when it is not a real job skill but a filter for the lazy or stupid, as passing freshman physics is for pre-med students.”

Here’s one real consequence:

“…an estimate that American businesses waste $30 billion a year on remedial training.”

And the token other-point-of-view response, buried in the last paragraph:

“But kids don’t study poetry just because they’re going to grow up to be poets.It’s about a habit of mind. Your mind doesn’t think abstractly unless it’s asked to – and it needs to be asked to from a relatively young age. The rigor and logic that goes into math is a good way for your brain to be trained.”

Let’s examine that for a minute, shall we? The author is arguing that we don’t need math because 1) other people and machines can do it for us and 2) it’s really just a filtering mechanism anyway. That’s despite the fact that we clearly do need to know how to do math — that $30 billion per year for remedial training number speaks more loudly than the rest of the story.

This is in line with my personal theory that people don’t like math because they’ve been taught from an early age that Math (and Science, for that matter) Is Scary and Hard ™. Seriously, how much of that is an emotional block, rather than an actual inability? Stories like this don’t help.