There’s a neat article [1] in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist (although sadly, this particular article seems not to be online) in which Brian Hayes discusses the Monty Hall problem and people’s strong resistance to the official solution to it.
Now, folks like Jason have discussed the actual puzzle about probabilities in great detail (on numerous occasions). It’s a cool problem, I believe the official solution, and I’m not personally inclined to raise skeptical doubts about it. What I really like about Hayes’s article is how he connects it to the larger ongoing discussion in which scientists engage:
Category Archives: Numeracy and innumeracy
Fear and loathing in the academy.
Today Chad has an interesting post about attitudes among academics toward math and science versus the humanities and arts. The general attitude Chad sees on display in his academic milieu is that a gappy knowledge of art history or music or literature is something to be embarrassed about, but when it comes to innumeracy or scientific ignorance, intellectuals have no shame.
Chad writes:
Song chart meme: for two-two-two geeks in one.
Some screechy monkey or other tagged me on the song chart meme. The idea seems to be to come up with a visual/graphical representation of a song or some lyrical subset of it.
In other words, you can get your music-geek and your math-geek on at the same time.
I came very close to going through our entire record collection last night to pick the optimal song. But then I figured I’d just put up two suboptimal responses rather than laboring to determine what the optimal response would be. (Of course, because I’m a tremendous Luddite, both are hand drawn.)
Tradition takes its toll
The tradition in the Free-Ride family (passed down from my family) is that, on Christmas morning, no one gets to start opening presents until everyone is awake and ready to start opening presents. It doesn’t matter how early the kids are awake. Until the last sleepy parent is ready, you just have to wait.
Santa does leave filled stockings on the foot of each bed, so there’s something to keep you occupied, but that only keeps you satisfied for so long.
The fact that we are visiting the grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment introduces an interesting complication to the power struggle between sleepy parents and impatient children.
Doing the math: how plausible is the claim that changing what you eat makes more difference to global warming than changing what you drive?
Dave Munger pointed me to an article in the New York Times that claims “switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry.”
Dave is a critical consumer of information and notes that there is little given in this particular article (which appears in the “Media & Advertising” section) as far as numbers. As I’m not an agronomist, I don’t have all the relevant numbers at my finger tips, but I’m happy to set up some equations into which reliable numbers can be plugged once they are located.
What part of ‘course requirement’ isn’t clear?
On my last post, Kristine commented:
My favorite “finals week activity” was defending to two students why they couldn’t take the lab exams three weeks after all of their classmates took it, just because they realized now that they never showed up for class that week. Whew. Ten minutes each, and as emotionally draining as grading 100 exams.
I feel Kristine’s pain. And, I think this raises the larger question of what the problem is that keeps these students from understanding that “course requirements” are things that are required for them to do.
The math limerick.
A real nerd can combine love of math and poetry, like so:
{(12+144+20+3(4)^0.5)/7}+5(11) = 81 + 0
It’s a true equation. And, it’s a limerick. Read it out loud and you’ll see:
“Roman numerals? They didn’t even try to teach us that in school!”
Sadly, this makes me think more kids should have been watching M&M commercials in December of 1999. As reported by the Gainesville Sun:
Proofreaders at the University of Florida appear to have failed the Pepsi challenge.
UF has called off a massive giveaway of Gator T-shirts, paid for by Pepsi, upon realizing that Roman numerals intended to denote the year “2006” on the shirts actually translated into “26” in standard Arabic numerals.
“The giveaway was halted,” said Mike Hill, UF’s associate athletics director for external affairs. “We identified the problem on the first day of distribution and the giveaway was halted.”
The T-shirts, distributed to about 4,000 students picking up football tickets Tuesday, were also scrutinized by Pepsi proofreaders before distribution. Neither party noticed the problem initially, but staff distributing the shirts and the students who received them discovered the error Tuesday, Hill said.
To denote the year 2006, the shirts should have featured the numerals “MMVI,” not “XXVI.”
Granted that “26” and “2006” are just separated by a couple of place-holding zeroes — if you’re working with a number system that has ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands places. With Roman numerals, though, you’re adding it all up (with the occasional kicking back from the sum — IV being five less one, for example).
But here’s where etymology could help a lot. If you know that M stands for “mille” and “mille” indicates a thousand (which is why 1000 millimeters = 1 meter), you’d never think of getting to 2000 with anything other than MM.
And that’s why kids today need to start taking Latin again!