Moving on August 2, 2010 Finally, at long last, I can tell you what I've been up to with finding a new home for this blog. I've created a new, community-based science blogging site, called Scientopia. With the help of many wonderful people, we're ready. We launched this morning. So to continue following GM/BM - along with…

Goodbye, Scienceblogs July 7, 2010 So my decision is made. I'm closing up around here. I'm in the process of working out exactly where I'm going to go. With any luck, Seed will leave this blog here long enough for me to post an update with the new location. But I'm through with Seed and ScienceBlogs.

Seed, Conflicts of Interest, and Sleaze July 6, 2010 As my friend Pal wrote about, Seed Media Group, the corporate overlords of the ScienceBlogs network that this blog belongs to, have apparently decided that blog space in these parts is now up for sale to advertisers. We've been advertiser supported since I joined up with SB. I've never minded…

Searching for Topics June 28, 2010 As regular readers have no doubt noticed by now, posting on the blog has been slow lately. I've been trying to come back up to speed, but so far, that's been mainly in the form of bad math posts. I'd like to get back to the good stuff. Unfortunately, the chaos theory stuff that I was…

Saturday Recipe: Ginger Scallion Sauce June 26, 2010 Today's recipe is something I made this week for the first time, and trying it was like a revelation. It's simple to make, it's got an absolutely spectacularly wonderful flavor - light and fresh - and it's incredibly versatile. It's damned near perfect. It's scallion ginger sauce, and once you try…

The Surprises Never Eend: The Ulam Spiral of Primes June 22, 2010 One of the things that's endlessly fascinating to me about math and science is the way that, no matter how much we know, we're constantly discovering more things that we don't know. Even in simple, fundamental areas, there's always a surprise waiting just around the corner. A great example of…

Metaphorical Crankery: a bad metaphor is like a steaming pile of ... June 17, 2010 So, another bit of Cantor stuff. This time, it really isn't Cantor crankery, so much as it is just Cantor muddling. The href="http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/does-cantors-diagonalization-proof-cheat/">post that provoked this is not, I think, crankery of any kind - but it demonstrates…

The Unfalsifiable Theory Of Everything from viXra June 11, 2010 Today is another bit of rubbish from viXra! In the comment thread from the last post, someone (I presume the author of this paper) challenged me to address this. And it's such a perfect example of one of my mantras that I can't resist. What's the first rule of GM/BM? The worst math is no math.…

Gravity, Shmavity. It's the heat, dammit! June 8, 2010 Sorry for the ridiculously slow pace around here lately; I've been ridiculously busy. I'm changing projects at work; it's the end of the school year for my kids; and I'm getting close to the end-game for my book. Between all of those, I just haven't had much time for blogging lately. Anyway... I…

Big Number Bogosity from a Christian College Kid May 4, 2010 I know that I just posted a link to a stupid religious argument, but I was sent a link to another one, which I can't resist mocking. As I've written about quite often, we humans really stink at understanding big numbers, and how things scale. href="http://thebeachnotes.blogspot.com/2010/05/…

The Danger When You Don't Know What You Don't Know May 3, 2010 A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. There's no shortage of stupidity in the world. And, alas, it comes in many, many different kinds. Among the ones that bug me, pretty much the worst is the stupidity that comes from believing that you know something that you don't. This is…

Iterative Hockey Stick Analysis? Gimme a break! April 29, 2010 This past weekend, my friend Orac sent me a link to an interesting piece of bad math. One of Orac's big interest is vaccination and anti-vaccinationists. The piece is a newsletter by a group calling itself the "Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute" (SCPI), which purports to show a link between…

Finger Trees Done Right (I hope) April 26, 2010 A while ago, I wrote a href="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/05/finally_finger_trees.php">couple of posts that claimed to talk about finger trees. Unfortunately, I really botched it. I'd read a bunch of data structure papers, and managed to get myself thoroughly scrambled. What I wrote…

Friday Random Ten, 4/23/2010 April 23, 2010 Stellardrive, Inlandsix: Reasonably good instrumental prog. They're not particularly exceptional, but they're decent. Gong, "The Octave Doctors and the Crystal Machine": Gong is a perfect example of one of the differences between the great prog bands, and a lot of the neo-progressive stuff.…

Book Update April 21, 2010 Very quick post here: the third beta of my AppEngine book "Code in the Cloud" was released this morning. If you've bought a copy of the beta, you can go to your pragmatic account, and download a fresh copy with all of the fixes and new material. If you haven't bought a copy... Well, if you're…

Shocking Fraud from Financial Scum April 20, 2010 Against my better judgement, I've ended up writing a lot about the financial mess that we're currently going through. If you've read that, you know that my opinion is that the mess amounts to a giant pile of fraud. But even having spent so much time reading and studying what was going on, the…

I am a racist April 7, 2010 (Unfortunately, this post has been linked to by a white supremacist site. Instead of providing a forum for their foulness, I'm shutting down comments on this post.) Unfortunately, I lost the link that inspired this. But I recently saw a post by a conservative about "reclaiming" the word racist. It…

Financial Shenanigans: the Repo 105 March 19, 2010 I'm glad to report that electricity has been restored to the Chu-Carroll household. So now I'm trying to catch up. During the outage, I got a bunch of questions about the latest news coming out of the big financial disasters. A major report came out about the failure of Lehman Brothers, and one…

Code in the Cloud: My Book Beta is Available! March 17, 2010 As I've mentioned before, I've been spending a lot of time working on a book. Initially, I was working on a book made up of a collection of material from blog posts; along the way, I got diverted, and ended up writing a book about cloud computing using Google's AppEngine tools. The book isn't…

Grandiose Crankery: Cantor, Godel, Church, Turing, ... Morons! March 9, 2010 A bunch of people have been asking me to take a look at href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.4433">yet another piece of Cantor crankery recently posted to Arxiv. In general, I'm sick and tired of Cantor crankery - it's been occupying much too much space on this blog lately. But this one is a real…

Animal Experimentation and Simulation March 1, 2010 In my post yesterday, I briefly mentioned the problem with simulations as a replacement for animal testing. But I've gotten a couple of self-righteous emails from people criticizing that: they've all argued that given the quantity of computational resources available to us today, of course we can…

Scumbag Animal Rights Villains Harass Children for Father's Speech February 24, 2010 This post is off-topic for this blog, but there are some things that I just can't keep quiet about. Via my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Janet over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, I've heard about some absolutely disgraceful antics by an animal rights group. To be clear, in what follows,…

Friday Random Ten, 2/19/2010 February 19, 2010 Transatlantic, "The Whirlwind (Part 4) - A Man Can Feel": a track from the new Transatlantic album. Transatlantic is a supergroup: it's made of members of Marillion (Pete Trevawas on bass), the Flower Kings (Roine Stolte, guitar), Spock's Beard (Neil Morse, vocals and keyboards), and Dream…

Disco Strikes Out Again: Casey Luskin, Kitzmiller, and New Information February 15, 2010 For a lot of people, I seem to have become the go-to blogger for information theory stuff. I really don't deserve it: Jeff Shallit atRecursivity knows a whole lot more than I do. But I do my best. Anyway, several people pointed out that over at the Disco Institute, resident Legal Eagle Casey…

The End of Defining Chaos: Mixing it all together February 7, 2010 The last major property of a chaotic system is topological mixing. You can think of mixing as being, in some sense, the opposite of the dense periodic orbits property. Intuitively, the dense orbits tell you that things that are arbitrarily close together for arbitrarily long periods of time can…

A Crank among Cranks: Debating John Gabriel February 4, 2010 So, remember back in December, I wrote a post about a Cantor crank who had a Knol page supposedly refuting Cantor's diagonalization? This week, I foolishly let myself get drawn into an extended conversation with him in comments. Since it's a comment thread on an old post that had been inactive…

Cantor Crankery and Worthless Wankery January 29, 2010 Poor Georg Cantor. During his life, he suffered from dreadful depression. He was mocked by his mathematical colleagues, who didn't understand his work. And after his death, he's become the number one target of mathematical crackpots. As I've mentioned before, I get a lot of messages either from…

More about Dense Periodic Orbits January 26, 2010 It's been quite a while since my last chaos theory post. I've been caught up in other things, and I've needed to do some studying. Based on a recommendation from a commenter, I've gotten another book on Chaos theory, and it's frankly vastly better than the two I was using before. Anyway, I want…

Zippers: Making Functional "Updates" Efficient January 13, 2010 In the Haskell stuff, I was planning on moving on to some monad-related stuff. But I had a reader write in, and ask me to write another post on data structures, focusing on a structured called azipper. A zipper is a remarkably clever idea. It's not really a single data structure, but rather a…