Nature’s Numbers by Ian Stewart (1995)

Books & Boots

Stewart is a mathematician and prolific author, having written over 40 books on all aspects of maths, as well as publishing guides to the maths used in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, authoring half a dozen textbooks for students and co-authoring a couple of science fiction novels.

He writes in a marvellously clear style, but more importantly, he is interesting: he sees the world in an interesting way and manages to convey the wonder and strangeness and powerful insights which seeing the world in terms of patterns and shapes, numbers and maths, gives you.

He wants to help us see the world as a mathematician sees it, full of clues and information which can lead us to deeper and deeper appreciation of the patterns and harmonies all around us.

1. The Natural Order

Thus he begins the book by describing just some of nature’s patterns: the regular movements of the…

View original post 1,736 more words

Maths ideas from John Allen Paulos

Books & Boots

There’s always enough random success to justify anything to someone who wants to believe. (Innumeracy, p.33)

It’s easier and more natural to react emotionally than it is to deal dispassionately with statistics or, for that matter, with fractions, percentages and decimals. (A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper p.81)

I’ve just read two of John Allen Paulos’s popular books about maths, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper: Making Sense of the Numbers in the Headlines (1995) and Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (1998).

My reviews tended to focus on the psychological, logical and cognitive errors which Paulos finds so distressingly common on TV and in newspapers, among politicians and commentators and every walk of life for the simple reason that I didn’t understand the way he explained most of his mathematical arguments.

I also criticised the style and presentation of the books which I found meandering, haphazard and so that…

View original post 2,813 more words

Brunei to become barbaric on April 3, allowing stoning to death for adultery and homosexual acts

Why Evolution Is True

Only one religion on Earth—and I’ll give you this paragraph to guess—would, in this day and age, suddenly sanction stoning to death for “crimes” like homosexual behavior and adultery. The punishment statue starts on April 3 in Brunei and is described in several places, including the New York Times (click on screenshot below).

Six years ago Brunei announced that it was going to impose a harsh form of sharia law, for the country’s official religion is Sunni Islam. In the past few years it banned alcohol and celebrations of Christmas (even by non-Muslims). Now the vise is being squeezed even harder. As the NYT reports:

Brunei has had the death penalty on the books since it was a British protectorate, but in practice executions are not typically carried out.

Homosexuality is already illegal in Brunei, with a punishment of up to 10 years in prison, but the new laws allow…

View original post 238 more words

Book Review – Isaac Newton by James Gleick

Vishy's Blog

When I was wondering which book to read next, James Gleick’s biography of Isaac Newton leapt at me. At less than 200 pages, it wasn’t too long, and so I read it in a couple of days.

This book covers all the important events in Isaac Newton’s life, starting from his birth in a farm, when his father was no more, how he ended up in school, how he went to Cambridge University, how his career progressed from there, how he discovered the law of gravitation and the three laws of motion, how he invented Calculus, his spats with famous scientists of his time including Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, how he became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and later became a member of the Royal Society, how he later got the King’s patronage and headed the Mint, and what happened after that.

James Gleick’s style is natural and breezy…

View original post 1,030 more words

Naturopaths use deceptive tactics to support pseudoscience

The Logic of Science

Earlier this year, a new review paper was published claiming to show evidence that naturopathy was effective (Myers et al. 2019). I’m a bit late to the game on this one, but I still want to briefly talk about this review, because it is a good illustration of the deceptive tactics people often use to claim that quack treatments are effective.

The paper in question is, “The state of the evidence for whole-system, multi-modality naturopathic medicine: a systematic scoping review.” The first thing to note is that it was published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. It is hardly surprising that a journal dedicated to alternative medicine is going to publish a paper claiming that alternative medicine works. In other words, this review was not published in a respected medical journal. Rather, it was published in a biased journal with a reputation for research that is…

View original post 1,901 more words

Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos (1988)

Books & Boots

Our innate desire for meaning and pattern can lead us astray… (p.81)

Giving due weight to the fortuitous nature of the world is, I think, a mark of maturity and balance. (p.133)

John Allen Paulos is an American professor of mathematics who won fame beyond his academic milieu with the publication of this short (134-page) but devastating book thirty years ago, the first of a series of books popularising mathematics in a range of spheres from playing the stock market to jokes.

As Paulos explains in the introduction, the world is full of humanities graduates who blow a fuse if you misuse ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, or end a sentence with a dangling participle, but are quite happy to believe and repeat the most hair-raising errors in maths, statistics and probability.

The aim of this book was:

• to lay out examples of classic maths howlers and correct them
• to teach readers…

View original post 4,758 more words

New Zealand bans semiautomatic and “military style” weapons

Why Evolution Is True

On March 13, 1996, the Dunblane Massacre took place in Scotland. A man named Thomas Hamilton assaulted a school with four legally-owned handguns, killing 16 children and a teacher (and wounding another 16) before committing suicide. Reaction was swift, and within two years the government had passed two acts banning all handguns in England, Scotland and Wales; the exceptions are “historic and muzzle-loading guns” and a few other types of large “sporting” handguns that are large.

Following the two mosque shootings on March 15, New Zealand has acted even faster. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whom I much admire, just announced that New Zealand is banning not only the sale of semiautomatic weapons, but ownership of them, which will end via a government buyback scheme. (The weapons used in the mosque shootings had, as I recall, been bought legally but modified illegally.)

Tvnz reports (click on screenshot):

Ms Ardern had previously…

View original post 627 more words

Is the Pope Catholic?

Why Evolution Is True

Here’s a video from the British comedy game show QI (“Quite Interesting”) about the official title of the Pope Francis. It turns out that it’s not “Pope”. Further, you’ll learn that THE POPE IS NOT A CATHOLIC! In fact, the man who is officially the Pope is also NOT a Catholic. Listen and learn.

h/t: Michael

View original post

New York Times changes headline to make Israel seem more culpable

Why Evolution Is True

On March 14, two rockets were fired at Tel Aviv, Israel, from Gaza. Fortunately, although the missiles weren’t intercepted by the Iron Dome, nobody was hurt. It was the first rocket attack on Tel Aviv since 2014, and Israel retaliated with air attacks on terrorist military sites. Hamas denied responsibility, but it’s clear that some Palestinian militant group was responsible. It is of course a war crime to fire missiles at civilian targets.

What’s interesting—and I noticed this at the time—was that mainstream (or anti-Israel) Western media almost invariably began its stories with headlines like “Israel retaliates after rockets strike Tel Aviv”, switching the temporal order of events to make Israel seem more culpable. Here, for example, is what I just got when I Googled “rockets fired at Tel Aviv from Gaza”:

But in an even more telling media switch, Honest Reporting notes that the New York Times, which…

View original post 191 more words

Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

Books & Boots

Harald Sohlberg (1869 to 1935) was one of Norway’s greatest painters. He is best known for works which evoke the wildness of the Nordic landscape, brooding scenery illuminated by midwinter light, and realistic depictions of the wood buildings of old Norwegian towns.

This is the first major UK exhibition of Sohlberg’s works, celebrating 150 years since the artist’s birth, and it reveals that there’s much more variety, in subject matter, treatment and quality, than a first glance suggests.

Self Portrait (1896) by Harald Sohlberg. Private collection

The exhibition proceeds in sensible chronological order. Born the eighth of 12 children, Sohlberg early wanted to be a painter but his father insisted he learn a craft and apprenticed him to a master scene painter and decorator, Wilhelm Krogh. When he went on the National College of Art and Design, where he developed his printmaking skills, it was also to discover the great…

View original post 1,521 more words