The sum of all natural numbers is not -1/12

Oh, good. There’s this claim going around that the sum of all natural numbers (1+2+3+4+5…) converges on the value -1/12. I saw that and said to myself that it’s obviously wrong, but saw the smooth patter and rapid-fire use of mathematical jargon and infinities, and no mathematician myself, couldn’t see where the error slithered in. Mathematician to the rescue: Mark Chu-Carroll explains why the story doesn’t work. Short answer: they falsely equated a summation with a converging series.

Inconsistency is death in mathematics: any time you allow inconsistencies in a mathematical system, you get garbage: any statement becomes mathematically provable. Using the equality of an infinite series with its Cesaro sum, I can prove that 0=1, that the square root of 2 is a natural number, or that the moon is made of green cheese.

What makes this worse is that it’s obvious. There is no mechanism in real numbers by which addition of positive numbers can roll over into negative. It doesn’t matter that infinity is involved: you can’t following a monotonically increasing trend, and wind up with something smaller than your starting point.

I could see the point he makes in the second paragraph, but it takes much deeper knowledge to pick out the flaw in the argument.

(Dang — I don’t even have a category for math here. Should I start one? Not that I can talk about math very often.)

Weather extremes harm all sides

While we’re freezing out here in the midwest, and expecting lots of snow, ChasCPeterson is concerned about what’s going on out west.

It’s going to be a grim year out here in the Mojave Desert. The perennials are already crispy and can only get crispier. We’re already past the winter-rain window that would bring annuals. That means no food for tortoises, so no protein, no growth, low juvenile survivorship, decreased reproduction, and if it doesn’t rain this summer, adult mortality too. Nothing for jackrabbits and K-rats to eat means fewer jackrabbits and K-rats, which means in turn that coyotes will switch to digging up tortoises to eat. Crispy perennials and no annuals mean no insects, and therefore no lizards. No lizards or K-rats is bad for snakes. No lizards or snakes is bad for roadrunners and raptors. No bugs is bad for bats and birds; no seeds bad for other birds.

Drought is bad for west-coast humans, but it means death for the ecosystems that belong here.

There’s nothing bad that can’t be made worse! Governor Jerry Brown has suspended the California Environmental Quality Act to make more water available for California’s agriculture and people, which means that not only are those ecosystems strained by the weather, but the humans have just declared open season on what few resources they have left.

Cinematic Appraisals gets appraised

Ashley Miller is getting legal threats from a company called Cinematic Appraisals, because she found their claims laughable, and publicly laughed at them. I have to join in the laughing.

They claim to be a scientific script review company — for a fee, they’ll take a look at your movie script proposal, run it through some scientific tests, and tell you whether it will connect with an audience (I wonder if that’s how movies like Transformers end up getting made?) I wondered how they do scientific script appraisal, so I visited their pseudoscience page. It’s illustrated with this:

sciencey

They put your script under a microscope, and use molecular models to do something or other? What? If only they’d included some beakers of colored water with some dry ice to make them bubble, then I might believe this is a real photo of science in action!

But no, this is what they say they do:

The Mind Science Method has been lab tested and is proven to correlate with the actual psychophysiological responses of a subject to the screenplay. Testing measured neurobiological activity with a variety of electrodermal equipment including galvanic skin monitor, electromyrograms [sic], a zygomaticaus [sic?], a corrogator [sic?], an EEG and EKG (MP150WSW with Tel100C remote monitoring module data acquisition system).

The galvanic skin monitor is pretty much the same thing as the e-meter Scientology uses — it’s basically measuring how much you’re sweating. Electromyograms are recordings of muscle activity; I presume that’s what they doing with the zygomaticus (a muscle in your face involved in smiling) and the corrugator muscles (which are used to wrinkle up your forehead). Then they’re measuring general brain activity and heart rate.

If you want to get a strong response from a person strapped into such a setup, tell them a detailed story about sexual activity, or about lots of violent action with graphic descriptions. Suddenly, a great deal of the American movie industry is explained!

Otherwise, though, it’s a silly sciencey description of some really basic physiological apparatus, with misspellings and awkward grammar, that isn’t going to be able to do what they claim it will do, even with their pretense of a magic algorithm.

I can understand why they’d rely on lawsuits to protect their reputation. It’s too flimsy and compromised to be able to stand on its own.

The polar vortex isn’t dead yet

Oh, great. We had some remarkably cold weather earlier this month thanks to the break-up of the polar vortex, and now it’s predicted that it’s coming back.

…during the third and fourth weeks of January, some changes will take place. The high amplitude pattern is forecast to get more extreme. The polar vortex will move farther south and get stronger. The pattern will gradually change the current mixture of Pacific and Arctic air in the Canada Prairies and the North Central U.S. to all Arctic air. The air will get significantly colder over the Canada Prairies and the much of the eastern half of the nation as a result.

Isn’t this pretty?

extremecold

I live right under the first “E” in “EXTREME COLD”.

I take it back. David Brooks belongs on the NY Times op-ed pages

He serves the needs of the upper class so well — he’s such a perfect lickspittle. His latest column deplores all this leveler talk of economic inequities: don’t you peons realize that a widening gap has two parts, the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, and the two have absolutely nothing to do with one another? Oh, sure, there are some perverse compensation schemes on Wall Street, but mainly wealth is perpetuated because rich marry rich and pass on their money to their rich kids, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that, so let’s skip over that issue with one sentence and spend the whole column blaming the poor. Let’s focus on poor people! And that doesn’t mean raising the minimum wage, oh no. We have to resist the temptation to reduce everything to simple causes, therefore he proposes that the problem is simply a lack of social mobility. Just fix that. We can close the gap by closing our eyes to the sight of the 1% skittering off rapidly to the right and a world that laughs at obscene wealth and embraces pornographically hardcore wealth, and instead just tell all the poor people to start plodding off in that same direction. That’s how we’ll close the gap!

Shorter David Brooks: If the poor would just stop begging for bread and start eating cake, rather than blaming looters and exploiters and profiteers and that whole infrastructure of privilege, why, everything will be hunky dory in no time at all.

OK, let’s try it. How about giving Naquasia LeGrand a column in the NY Times, too?

[Read more…]

Gun culture in America

Write one post about gun control, and guess what happens? Your inbox fills up with crap from people who love their guns. Just love ’em. It’s everything from calm descriptions of existing gun laws, and aren’t they onerous enough already (no, obviously, they aren’t) to veiled threats to show me how useful concealed handguns are in putting down enemies of Liberty. After reading enough of them, I’ve decided that it is inappropriate and inaccurate for me to always be mentally referring to these people as gun nuts. Sorry, you’re not gun nuts at all, which is unfair to people who are mentally ill; you’re gun assholes, instead.

For example, on Twitter I’ve got this person who is quite insistent about ‘refuting’ me, giving me these lovely anecdotes taken from gun asshole sites to prove how wonderful guns are at helping people.

Tweet Child O’ Mine @EwwMoist
.@pzmyers – Concealed carry permit holder stops mass shooter. bearingarms.com/concealed-carr…

Really? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if now and then in the flurry of flying bullets, someone managed to shoot a bad guy — although I do kind of object to the idea of living in an atmosphere of hurtling chunks of lead — but then I read the story, and it isn’t even an accurate summary.

Police on Sunday afternoon said they believe the gunman went in and started shooting, hitting the three victims. As he was on his way out, somebody at the bar shot him.

The actual story is that a gun asshole, angry at being denied entrance to a “Gentleman’s Club”, shot three innocent people, and then as he was leaving, another gun asshole shot the first gun asshole.

I count that as 4 people getting shot by two gun assholes. No one won. And this is an argument against gun control…how?

The other argument this @Ewwmoist person keeps flinging at me is that there are 300 million guns floating about in this country, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and therefore there’s nothing that can be done. That’s about the dumbest argument for maintaining a state of destructive lawlessness I’ve ever heard.

Hey, the US consumes 300 metric tons of cocaine every year. I guess we should just give up and install vending machines in the public schools. Hey, 7500 gallons of an industrial chemical just tainted the drinking water in West Virginia. Looks like a great argument for less regulation of chemical storage! Hey, we’re pumping almost 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Time to give up! (That last one is actually a serious argument used by many Republicans.)

I don’t know about you, but when I spill toothpaste on my countertop, I don’t enshrine it as a new fixture of my bathroom decor, and I don’t decide to squirt even more on top of the blob. I clean it up. And it looks like we’ve got a very big cleanup job in the US. Thanks, gun assholes!

Meanwhile, what are we liberals doing? We’re basically performing surreal Portlandia skits. That link is to a story about a couple going out to dinner and seeing that someone in a neighboring table has a handgun stuffed into the waistband of his pants. What to do, what to do? They eventually tell their concerns to their server as they’re leaving (who dithers about not knowing what to do either), and then they write a blog post asking whether their reaction was appropriate.

What the fuck? The restaurant has a sign prohibiting firearms inside. There is no argument, no second guessing, no hesitation. The instant you see a gun asshole carrying in such a place, you go up to the manager, and you say, “I suspect there’s a gun asshole over there with a deadly weapon; I don’t feel safe here, and I expect you to do something about it or I’m leaving.” That’s it. And you don’t freakin’ feel guilty about having a reasonable expectation of safety in a public place.

And that’s gun control in America. The gun assholes orgasm over shootouts in strip clubs, while the liberals tiptoe about, afraid to ask if we can get a little relief from the gun culture at a restaurant.

Die, banks, die

When I got home last night, I saw something ominous. Leaning up against my door was one of those overnight letters from Fed Ex. This:

bankamerica

I thought, uh-oh, who’s suing me now? Because there’s nothing I’m doing that requires the urgency of an overnight letter (it even announced on the back in big bold orange letters “EXTREMELY URGENT!”) right now. Then I saw it was from the Bank of America. They hold my mortgage — which I pay promptly every month, also kicking in a little extra on the principal — so I thought maybe it had to do with something essential about that.

You know where this is going. I opened it, it contained a one page letter offering an appointment to refinance my mortgage. Absolutely nothing urgent about it, and also something I’m absolutely uninterested in doing, since we got in at a good interest rate and already have an affordable payment. This is Morris; we’re buying our house with payments that are two thirds of what we paid in rent for an apartment in a Philadelphia suburb.

But I’m getting annoyed at the persistence and lies. You know this wouldn’t be something to my advantage; the banks aren’t really at all interested in helping me pay them less, and this thing promised me an average reduction of about 20% in my monthly payment. They’re already constantly dunning me with requests to refinance every week in regular mail, requests that get dumped in the trash unopened, but this is a new attention-grabbing low.

I’ll tell you what, Bank of America. You want to save me money and altruistically reduce my payments? Easy. Unilaterally credit me $5/month and stop wasting money sending me these stupid letters. You’ll save more money than that on printing and postage, I’ll have less trash and save a little bit each month, we both win. Alternatively…eat shit and die.

Education in Texas: yet another exposé

Zack Kopplin has a very thorough exposé of the Responsive Ed charter schools in Texas. Charter schools are an alternative to the standard public school system, but they receive public funding, your tax dollars, and are therefore required to follow the same legal strictures as all public schools. And that means no religious indoctrination.

The Responsive Ed schools are simply yet another manifestation of the creationist ideal: they teach creationism flat out, and they also mislead and cast false doubts on evolutionary science. They also use the Christian bible as a source.

Outright creationism appears in Responsive Ed’s section on the origins of life. It’s not subtle. The opening line of the workbook section, just as the opening line of the Bible, declares, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

There’s the usual ignorance of how science works, too.

Another Responsive Ed section claims that evolution cannot be tested, something biologists have been doing for decades. It misinforms students by claiming, “How can scientists do experiments on something that takes millions of years to accomplish? It’s impossible.”

The Texas legislature ought to be sitting up in alarm at these gross illegalities…but as it turns out, state senator Dan Patrick, chair of the Texas Senate Education Committee, is also promoting Responsive Ed. Sorry, Texas, you’re doomed. As long as you keep electing these assnuggets to run your educational system, you’re not going to have competent education.

It’s not just evolution, either. Kopplin lists all the lies that are taught about history, other countries, feminism, stem cells, gay rights, sex ed, you name it.

Texas: screwing over another generation. Thanks, guys.

<groan>

A week from Tuesday, UMM will host a distinguished visitor whose anti-war work I respect, but who otherwise is a raving nutcase. And wouldn’t you know it, his talk is specifically centered dead on the topic in which he is an ignoramus: Chris Hedges will be lecturing us on The New Atheists as Secular Fundamentalists. Promising title, yes?

You know, I’ve already heard this same stupid song before, and I didn’t like it then. I suppose I’m going to have to go listen to this product of the Harvard Divinity School rant about it again, and I’m not going to enjoy it.

I would have enjoyed hearing him dissect the war culture in America, but listening to him blame the atheists for both the terror and the war on terror is going to be annoying.