17 April 2008: ABC’s tabloid journalism and more

Workout notes 1800 yard swim (mostly freestyle), yoga.
I have blood work today and couldn’t take anything in except for water. I am scooting over to the lab as soon as it opens and then getting COFFEE!!!!

ABC News I am not kidding, one of the questions posed to Obama was: “Does Reverend Wright love this country as much as you do?” No, I am not kidding. I didn’t know that Rev. Wright was running for anything.

But remember that ABC was the organization that brought us the fictionalized 9-11 series. I suppose that the thing to do is to treat them like Faux News.

In all honesty, though Obama didn’t shine, he didn’t really hurt himself.

Now, I don’t mind Obama getting asked tough questions; for example one could probably grill him for his support for ethanol made from corn. Yes, Illinois is a huge corn growing state. But ethanol made from corn is not as efficient as other fuels.

But no, we get Wright questions, Ayers questions, and some half-wit asking him about his flag lapel pin.

Other topics

Condoleezza Rice knew about torture, despite public protestations to the contrary.

Soldiers who are on disability pay are ordered back into the Army! I wish that things like this surprised me.

James Raymond lost the hearing in his left ear while fighting in Afghanistan. The former U.S. Army specialist later suffered a knee injury that required him to be flown back home for surgery.

In September 2004, he was given an honorable discharge and the Department of Veterans Affairs determined that he was 10 percent disabled, enabling him to receive $120 a month for the rest of his life.

So it was much to his surprise Thursday when Raymond — now a University at Buffalo student — got a call from his stepfather that he was being deployed again — to Iraq.

“I thought it was a joke, and then I was shocked,” said Raymond, 26, who is from Irondequoit, a suburb of Rochester.

Raymond figured it was all just a big misunderstanding. He thought he would be able to call the Army’s human resources department, explain that he is a disabled vet and that they would cancel his redeployment.

That was not the case. Raymond is expected to report for training May 18 at Fort Benning, Ga., where he would undergo a medical and mental evaluation. Five weeks later, if he is determined to be fit to return to duty, he will be deployed to Fort Dix, N.J., where he would join up with a Reserve unit there. In September, the unit is expected to be sent to Iraq.

More on the media: false stuff gets published in the media all of the time.

Billy Jack points out that some recent articles made a bogus claim that a pree-teen corrected an erroneous NASA “probability of an asteroid hitting the earth” calculation.

The Southern Poverty Law Center mentions that some racist right wing idiots went nuts over a fraudulent claim made in the media that a white girl had been attacked and threatened with rape and murder by Hispanics for carrying an anti-illegal immigration poster.

The story from Athens, Texas, read like it was custom-tailored for anti-immigration propaganda: A 13-year-old white girl at Athens Middle School attacked and threatened with rape and murder by a gang of 21 Latino students, only because she completed a class assignment to “create a protest sign” of her choice by making a placard that read, “If you love our nation, stop illegal immigration.” The student displayed bruises and scratches to support her account, and her parents demanded a federal investigation. [...]

But their protest campaign careened off the rails less than 48 hours later when the alleged victim admitted her story was a hoax. The truth, it turns out, is that while three Latino students ripped the poster from her hands — and those students have since been suspended — a school security camera captured the supposed victim punching and scratching herself to forge evidence. She now faces disciplinary action at the school and is expected to be charged with filing a false police report. She and her parents have issued a formal apology to the school and law enforcement investigators. [...]

Issac Newton Genius, yes. Inventor and great scientist, yes. But even he had some wacky ideas:

Isaac Newton was one of the great workaholics of all time, as well as one of the great insomniacs. His industry and application made Bertrand Russell look like a slacker (and, like Russell, he was morbidly afraid of fire among his papers and books—fire which did, in fact, more than once break out). When he decided that a reflecting telescope would be a better instrument than the conventional refracting model, he also decided to construct it himself. When asked where he had obtained the tools for this difficult task, he responded with a laugh that he had made the tools himself, as well. He fashioned a parabolic mirror out of an alloy of tin and copper that he had himself evolved, smoothed, and polished to a glass-like finish, and built a tube and mounting to house it. This six-inch telescope had the same effectiveness as a six-foot refracting version, because it removed the distortions of light that were caused by the use of lenses.

In contrast with this clarity and purity, however, Newton spent much of his time dwelling in a self-generated fog of superstition and crankery. He believed in the lost art of alchemy, whereby base metals can be transmuted into gold, and the surviving locks of his hair show heavy traces of lead and mercury in his system, suggesting that he experimented upon himself in this fashion, too. (That would also help explain the fires in his room, since alchemists had to keep a furnace going at all times for their mad schemes.) Not content with the narrow views of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, he thought that there was a kind of universal semen in the cosmos, and that the glowing tails of the comets he tracked through the sky contained replenishing matter vital for life on Earth.

Source for the blog article.

Note that a few modern scientists and mathematicians (a tiny percentage) attempt to back up their quackery with bogus mathematical or scientific claims.

I’ve previous commented about Marvin Bittinger’s book, The Faith Equation: One Mathematician’s Journey in Christianity. I called it a “combination of ignorance and intellectual dishonesty”. Now that I’ve had a chance to read it more carefully, I find I was too kind. It is pure and utter dreck. Actually, “dreck” is far too kind. I find it hard to convey the self-satisfied stupidity that is found on nearly every page.

Instead of giving a detailed critique, in the spirit of the Carnival of Mathematics, I’ll focus on some of the questionable mathematics that Bittinger uses.

“questionable”?

I’m not going to get into the accuracy of individual prophecies here; instead, I want to comment on one tool that Bittinger uses to justify his small probabilities. On page 93, we read:

“There is a concept from probability that we use often in these arguments. Suppose an assertion, such as God promising never again to flood the earth after the time of Noah’s Ark, occurred t years ago, and to date the prophecy either has not been fulfilled or was just fulfilled. Statisticians would then estimate the probability of the event to be approximately one over twice the number of years: 1/(2t). We refer to this as the time principle and use it extensively.”

There are two problems here: first, the “time principle” is completely nonsensical and second, it is not used by “statisticians” as Bittinger claims.

The “time principle” is nonsensical for several reasons. First, it is based on years, an entirely arbitrary way to measure time. We can get any probability we like from the formula 1/(2t) simply by changing the unit of measurement. If we measure time in centuries instead of years, the probability increases by a factor of 100. If we measure time in seconds, the probability decreases by a factor of about 31,000,000. Second, a well-established principle of probability is that if a space is partitioned into events, the sum of all the probabilities must be 1. But the sum of 1/(2t) for t from 1 to n can never be 1, since it is .91666… for n = 3, and 1.041666… for n = 4. Third, it doesn’t take into account the character of the assertion. If I asserted in 1975 that “people will write the year 2000 on their checks”, this would clearly not be fulfilled until 25 years later. Yet it would occur with probability 1 (or at least close to 1), not 1/50 as the “time principle” suggests.

Is the “time principle” used by statisticians, as Bittinger claims? I used MathSciNet, the online version of Mathematical Reviews, a review journal that attempts to review every noteworthy mathematical publication. I found no references to this principle anywhere in the literature. I then consulted a statistician down the hall at my university, who had never heard of this principle and agreed it was nonsensical.

More on the election:

Yes, even Hillary “I am with the working class folks” Clinton lost patience with them from time to time:

During the past week, Sen. Hillary Clinton has presented herself as a working class populist, the politician in touch with small town sentiments, compared to the elitism of her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama.

But a telling anecdote from her husband’s administration shows Hillary Clinton’s attitudes about the “lunch-bucket Democrats” are not exactly pristine.

In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

“Screw ‘em,” she told her husband. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’re doing nothing for you; you don’t have to do anything for them.”

The statement — which author Benjamin Barber witnessed and wrote about in his book, “The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House” — was prompted by another speaker raising the difficulties of reaching “Reagan Democrats.” It stands in stark contrast to the attitude the New York Democrat has recently taken on the campaign trail, in which she has presented herself as the one candidate who understands the working-class needs.

Many (including myself) think that her tactics won’t work against Obama.

[...] when Senator Obama used a poor word choice in describing small town voters, the GOP and the Clinton campaign shook the dust from the old Gore/Kerry playbook and began their assault. Hillary Clinton was quick to suggest that Obama had been divisive and elitist. She even chose to criticize Obama by comparing him to Kerry and Gore, an ill-advised mistake given Gore’s position as the most prominent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates.

McCain and the RNC also ramped up their attacks, giving the appearance that they expect to brand Obama with the same iron that bested his predecessors.

But there are substantial differences between Obama’s candidacy and those of Gore and Kerry, differences that the GOP may ignore at their peril.

First, and perhaps most importantly, Gore and Kerry both secured the nomination because it was, at least in some sense, their turn. Gore had served dutifully as vice president and heir-apparent, while Kerry was the last of his entering Senate class yet to attempt a presidential bid. Their ascension to the nomination was as much the product of patience and timing as it was the result of political skill.

Obama’s rise could not have been more different. A relatively unknown Senator with only two years in Washington, Barack Obama has become the near-presumptive nominee of his party by sheer will and persuasion. His success has been the direct result of connecting with voters, of getting in touch with their concerns and aspirations. Were he actually out of touch, his candidacy would have ended soon after Iowa, in the chorus of withdrawals that included Biden, Richardson, and Dodd.

The “elitist” line of attack worked with Gore and Kerry because they found it confounding, never fully able to forcefully respond. But unlike Gore and Kerry, Obama has shown himself to be exceptionally skilled at attacking from a defensive position. Each time he has been confronted with a potential controversy, he has used the opportunity to swing at his opponent while further validating the rationale for his candidacy.

Finally, some fire from our side.

More on the Election