Comments on: I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout economics, but…: NPR/Henri Poincaré/Mortgage follies edition

By: We Love Math, Electoral College Department. « The Inverse Square Blog

We Love Math, Electoral College Department. « The Inverse Square Blog — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:38:00 +0000

[...] skill for any reporter today, I think, really any citizen. I won’t go here into the same riff I’ve blogged many times before. I’ll outsource instead to my new blog humor BFF [...]

By: Welcome to Cosmic Variance folks — and a question « The Inverse Square Blog

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:52:07 +0000

[...] if you have a moment, consider answering this prompt. In this post written a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a complaint about some lousy reporting on the housing crisis [...]

By: flexible mortgages

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By: vanrijngo

vanrijngo — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:35:11 +0000

If the money trends, interest rates, mortgage loans, all these talks of meaningless and misleading ideas in changing our economic values, to determine if the trends will continue on the same paths, no matter what is said or done, does make one wonder what good money will actually be, when the 10% does finally wind up owning most everything. When more than 70% of this world’s population lives in poverty right now, when that figure increases, What would be your own view on what good your own hard earned money would amount too? I believe you would not even be willing to pay for the protection that would be needed for you to keep it. Prisons would be over flowing much more than they are now. Unemployment and homelessness would be at its highest levels along with the highest levels of government dependencies. Put that all into your mathematical equations, then tell me what you all come up with.

Cheers!
vanrijngo

By: Michelle S

Michelle S — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:48:43 +0000

To reinforce what our dear friend Poincaré plainly stated, we also have the wisdom of the nigh unmatched Sherlock Holmes during “A Study in Scarlet,” where he responds to Dr. Watson’s astonishment over his ignorance of Copernican Theory. Watson (or Conan Doyle for Watson, if you are not of the Canon-worshiping Sherlockian flock) writes, “that any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.” Holmes replies:

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose… the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic… it is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it that there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

He continues, in reference to the composition of the solar system:

“You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Of course, it does make a great deal of difference to the reading public if a reporter gets the math in a story all wrong, or excludes it completely to avoid learning a few simple concepts. As a writer who focuses heavily on math, I am always extremely annoyed to find mistakes or omissions related to numbers in articles, or to find that the reporter focused on the *wrong* numbers or data to write his story. Yet I do not think this is in discord with Holmes’s statement; after all, certainly he would consider the facts relevant to an article to be of importance to a reporter. And at any rate, I can never resist a good Sherlockian comment.