Crankishness

The Power of Spin

Posted by richardelwes on March 27, 2013
Posted in: Crankishness, Nonsense, Stats. Leave a comment

A dialogue:

A. Imagine that you could lift up into the air, and soar through the sky, just by gently fluttering your arms.

B. Yes, I’ve dreams like that. Lovely.

A. Where would you go?

B. Hmmm… I’m not sure. Maybe a cruise over the ocean to Rio?

A. What?? You seriously think you can flap your way to Brazil? What sort of lunatic are you?

As verbal entrapment goes, it’s hardly very clever or subtle. But A-san’s logic is identical to that from a recent Church of England press release.

The Church commissioned a survey which asked

“Irrespective of whether you currently pray or not, if you were to pray for something at the moment, what would it be for?”

19% of their interviewees were unwilling or unable to address this hypothetical scenario, either saying that they never prayed or that they didn’t know.

On the strength of this data, the Church announced that “Four out of five British adults believe in the power of prayer”, a statistic which is now making its way through the UK press.

I have just written to the CoE press office, reminding them of the Ninth Commandment: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour”.

The sine of the beast

Posted by richardelwes on December 18, 2008
Posted in: Crankishness, Maths.

Two things (one interesting, one very silly) that I have recently learnt about the sine function:

1. The sine rule, as most school-students know, says that in any triangle, frac{A}{sin a} is constant, whichever side A and opposite angle a you pick.

Less well-known is that this quantity actually has a geometric meaning: it gives the diameter of the triangle’s circumscribing circle. The Math Less Travelled has pictures.

2.

sin (frac{37 pi}{10})=-frac{1 + sqrt{5}}{4}

This may seem an innocuous enough fact. But prepare to be amazed! If you convert frac{37 pi}{10} into degrees, you get 666o, which is of course the the Number of the Beast. And you might spot the ubiquitous Golden Ratio phi=frac{1+ sqrt{5}}{2} lurking on the other side of the equation. So now our formula becomes:

sin(666^{o})=-frac{phi}{2}

The standard numerological-satanic interpretation of this fact, I am reliably informed, is that the Devil is the opposite of God (hence the minus sign), and only half as powerful. Where exactly the trigonometry fits in, I’m not sure…

The Chaos of El Naschie

Posted by richardelwes on November 13, 2008
Posted in: Crankishness.

If you read the December 2008 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Chaos, Solitons, & Fractals, you’ll find an article entitled On the vital difference between number theory and numerology in physics.

Perhaps the editor-in-chief of that journal, Mohammed El Naschie, should start paying attention.

Elsevier are the world’s biggest publisher of scientific journals, and they are by no means universally loved for it. This particular journal has pseudo-scientific form. But for the post of editor-in-chief to become compromised like is an unparalleled indictment.

John Baez, in the comments to his post, adds: “A rather famous mathematician, upon reading this blog entry, has promised to contact Elsevier and pressure them to do something about this situation. We’ll see what happens (if anything).”

Bad Science 1 – Bad Medicine 0

Posted by richardelwes on September 15, 2008
Posted in: Bloggery, Crankishness, General Science, Politics.
The Guardian has won its legal battle against Matthias Rath – a vitamin-magnate who told desperate South Africans that his pills could cure AIDS, while “so-called anti-retroviral… drugs severely damage all cells in the body – including white blood cells – thereby not improving but rather worsening immune deficiencies and expanding the AIDS epidemic.” Ben Glodacre of Bad Science – who wrote the piece in the Graun that attracted Rath’s unsuccessful lawsuit – is justifiably pleased and proud. Meanwhile Rath is doubtless spitting mad, and hopefully, shortly, bust.

RH ≠ NP

Posted by richardelwes on July 5, 2008
Posted in: Crankishness, Maths, Nonsense.

Maybe it’s lucky Li’s proof of the Riemann Hypothesis didn’t work out, since…

“…if a proof is found, it has the potential to lead to the undermining of current encryption methods, which depend on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers.”

Current encryption methods are pretty crap, aren’t they?

RH ? NP

Posted by richardelwes on July 5, 2008
Posted in: Crankishness, Maths, Nonsense.

Maybe it’s lucky Li’s proof of the Riemann Hypothesis didn’t work out, since…

“…if a proof is found, it has the potential to lead to the undermining of current encryption methods, which depend on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers.”

Current encryption methods are pretty crap, aren’t they?

Riemann Hypothesis

Posted by richardelwes on July 3, 2008
Posted in: Crankishness, Maths.
It’s been proved!

…or not.

Or maybe it really has?

Well, it’s just a pre-print, not yet peer-reviewed or published, so the sensible money’s got to be firmly on “not” for the time being.

The Developer On Line blog has an interesting post pointing out that the university responsible does have some form in this regard.

The story is that in 2004, Louis de Branges released a “proof” (and an accompanying expository apology [pdf]), which was met with near universal eyebrow-raising. Among the skeptics was Xian-Jin Li, his former PhD student, who indeed had previously coauthored a paper containing counterexamples to De Branges’ approach.

Now Li is claiming his own proof. How much it’s based on De Branges’ I couldn’t say (but he doesn’t get a reference).

Anyone who claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis is gambling with their reputation, and of course such claims are ten a penny. But it should be noted that these folks are[1] serious mathematicians, and not total cranks.

[1] As far as I can make out from ten minutes on Wikipedia, anyway. Can any expert readers leave a comment?

UPDATE: Terry Tao and Alain Connes both say “no”. Ok, Li’s apparently “updated” the paper since, but…

False alarm folks. Maybe next time he might think to ask some experts to check the paper before going public?