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Low-functioning pinhead...
February 25, 2006
Disclosure
All I can say is … wow.
I’d hate to be one of the former Enron employees who’s [sic] SSN, credit card number, home address, phone number, etc. was readily available for anyone with a rudimentary regex parser
The public’s got a right to know 'n all, but couldn’t they have redacted this information?
February 17, 2006
Innumeracy Watch
Soon after getting my PhD, I went out to buy my first car. The manufacturer was offering very advantageous 1.9% financing, a deal to which I naturally agreed. When I went in to sign the papers, the salesman looked in his little book, and announced, “Your monthly payment will be …,” stating a figure noticeably higher than I had figured. I reached into my breastpocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “According to my calculations, that should be … Why the higher figure, Chet?” (Slimeball car salesmen always seem to have names like “Chet.”) “Oh, that’s the … <mumble, mumble> … insurance.” “I don’t need insurance. I’ll pay the …” There was some hemming and hawing, but the loan papers were redrawn, and I eventually signed.
Which brings us to the sad case of Richard Cohen [via P.Z. Myers], who insists that being ignorant of basic algebra, far from being a handicap, is positively a good thing,
I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages) but I flunked algebra (once), barely passed it the second time…
Here’s the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know – never mind want to know – how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later – or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note – or reason even a little bit. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please.
Here’s the thing, Mr. Cohen. I don’t care whether you enjoy going through life being cheated by every slimeball named “Chet” who has the good fortune to cross your path. If you’re unable to figure out that the monthly payment, , on a loan with Principal, , consisting of monthly payments at an annual interest rate, , is given by the formula1
well, that’s too bad for you. And I’m sure the Chet’s of this world will be only too glad to “help” you figure out whether it’s time to refinance your mortgage or how best to save for retirement. It’s only money after all…
No, it’s when Mr. Cohen turns to commenting on matters of public policy that his innumeracy becomes a threat to the public discourse. And, most of all, it’s when he offers girls like “Gabriella” the ‘wisdom’ that Math is hard and she needn’t worry her pretty little head about it, that I really get steamed.
I have a 10 year old daughter and I’ll be damned if she succumbs to the societal cues, coming from all side, to the effect that girls are just not cut out to understand math. Wallow in your own innumeracy, if you wish, Mr. Cohen. But keep your mitts off my daughter, thank you very much.
Update:
Here’s the news article that inspired Mr. Cohen’s column. Apparently, a lot of schools are not equipped to teach algebra to their students and the students are not prepared to learn it. Ergo, it must not really be important…Update (2/18/2006):
A reader (I have the best readers) wrote in to point out that I should have done a bit more … algebra. Using the identity one can rewrite (1) in the more calculator-friendly form:which, now that I think about it, was probably the form that I actually used.
Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!
Update (2/25/2006):
You can try your own hand at some of the horrible stuff that Richard Cohen thinks “Gabriela” shouldn’t worry her pretty little head about. I’m not actually that fond of the test. Too many nearly identical questions involving a linear equation in one variable. And at least one of the questions (#6) is of the rote-memorization (“The Gobi desert is in Asia; the Sahara is in Africa.”) variety that Cohen is so fond of.1 Yes, I think I used a computer to evaluate this expression. Computers are great for tasks like that. They are, like any mechanical aid, an extension of, not a replacement for our ability to think quantitatively.
February 16, 2006
Camino 1.0
Camino 1.0 is out. And it finally joins the rest of the Mozilla family in supporting MathML.
It’s quite fast, and has a bunch of slick features1. All in all, it’s a very attractive Cocoa-based browser, a worthy alternative to Safari.
For those who are keeping track, my rule for selecting the MIME-type with which to these pages is
RewriteRule ^$ index.shtml RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Gecko|W3C.*Validator|MathPlayer RewriteRule \.html$|\.shtml$ - [T=application/xhtml+xml] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Chimera|Camino/0|KHTML RewriteRule \.html$|\.shtml$ - [T=text/html]
which says that the W3C Validator, Gecko-based browsers (including Camino 1.0 and above), and IE6 (and above) with the MathPlayer plugin installed, receive application/xhtml+xml. Everyone else receives text/html. Technically, late-model versions of Opera and Safari could handle application/xhtml+xml. But there’s no point, so I don’t bother.
Update (2/19/2006):
At Zack Ajmal’s urging, I’ve shifted to sendingapplication/xhtml+xml to all UAs with that in their Accept header. My rewrite rule isRewriteRule ^$ index.shtml RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application\/xhtml\+xml [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} W3C.*Validator|MathPlayer RewriteRule \.html$|\.shtml$ - [T=application/xhtml+xml]
This change currently only benefits users of Opera 9. But, hopefully, Safari will get fixed someday, too. The bottom line is that, if you don’t see 平和と静けさ displayed in an attractive shade of green, then your browser is — in some fashion or other — defective.
1 That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that, like Firefox 1.5, it now contains the still-rather-crappy builtin SVG renderer. This make a mess of the SVG figures I include in various blog posts hereabouts. Notably, it
- Has no support for the SVG Font Module.
- Doesn’t support ViewPort Size negotiation.
Opera’s builtin SVG renderer, and the one in the Safari Nightly builds, have the same problems.
There’s a workaround for the second problem. Adobe Illustrator outputs SVG files which say something like
<svg width="345" height="249" viewBox="0 0 345 249">
If one changes this to
<svg width="100%" height="100%" viewBox="0 0 345 249">
they will scale OK in Firefox/Camino and Opera. I’ve done that with the figures here at Musings, but it’s really a bad idea. Instead, the Mozilla, Opera and Safari people should fix their SVG renderers. And, while they’re at it, they can implement the Font Module…
In the meantime, if you have the Adobe SVG plugin installed, you can disable the builtin SVG renderer by going to about:config and setting svg.enabled to false.
February 15, 2006
Koszul-Tate
I’ve written before about Berkovits’s Pure Spinor formalism for the superstring and its