And Then Stats...

My apologies if I’m way behind everyone on this one, but a radio news item yesterday and a resulting phone response created a loud clicking sound in my swede as a light finally came on. I know; you’re thinking, man, is this ever going to start? Okay, let’s start.

The item on the radio show was regarding road traffic accidents and, as the broadcaster breathlessly informed us, ten percent of all those accidents involved alcohol. Shocking. Wot can we do? The folk phoning in seemed to be those anti alcohol types and you could sense the studio nodding along. Then a fellow popped up and it soon became obvious that he must’ve fibbed when being quizzed prior to being allowed to go live.

Wot did he say? He said that if ten percent of all road traffic accidents could be attributed to the use of alcohol, then ninety percent of accidents have nothing to do with alcohol. Shouldn’t minds be concentrating on sorting out the ninety percent rather than hyper ventilating on a mere ten percent? Thought I, well said that man and how true of so many so called stats.

Think that through to all the stuff you’ve heard over the years. Think of this Covid-1984 thingy and the sad eyed, scary death reporting for the UK - forty six thousand dead attributed to the flue!! Sad, but  in the interests of balance, shouldn’t they then put on a happy face and report that, according to ‘official’ stats, that means that sixty-seven million plus folk of all ages, shapes, sizes and gender are still alive an’ kickin’...

Anyhoo, since my head lit-up, I’ll never be able to hear a scary stat that gets wheeled-out without instantly thinking of the unstated opposite stat.

Quote;  William W. Watt.

“Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.”

And Then A Little Maths….

You may remember back in 2007 I discovered mathematics doesn’t work. You don’t remember?  Okay, I’ll let you off as I had to use mathematics again the other day and forgot I’d been there before and whatever the answer, it’d be no good.

All this got me thinking of maths again; how rubbish I am at it but at the same time, how fascinating the subject is. This, in turn, got me wondering what progress had been made with Lie Groups and E8 and from there to musing on the wonders of Pi. After not too long a muse, I settled on the steak and kidney and had lunch.

While eating, and still contemplating maths, something in the nether regions of my memory banks pointed me towards an old, old mathematics story.

After a lengthy dig about on drive Y I found him! I’m sorry to say I can’t offer any attributes as it’s been sitting on that old drive since the dawn of DOS.

Oh, and while you read, and to follow on from yesterday, here’s my favourite Robert Cray number. {Sorry. I can’t get a Vevo videos to play full screen. Yet.} Enjoy the old story;

   There was an Indian Chief who he had three squaws. He kept them in three seperate teepees. On occasion, when he came home late from hunting, he wouldn’t know which squaw was in which teepee since it was dark.
   He went hunting one day, and killed a hippopotamus, a bear, and a buffalo. He put the hide from each animal into a different teepee, so that when he came home late, he could feel inside the teepee and he would know which squaw was inside.
   Well, after about a year, all three squaws had children. The squaw on the bear had a baby boy, the squaw on the buffalo hide had a baby girl. But the squaw on the hippopotamus had a girl and a boy. So what’s the moral of the story?
   The squaw on the hippopotamus hide is equal to the sum of the squaws on the other two hides.

I can almost hear the ‘whoosh’ as that one passes waaaay over the heads of anyone under the age of about fifty……

Quote;  Jarod Kintz.

“The only reason I don’t know more about love is because there just isn’t more to know. In fact, I’ve reduced love to a mathematical formula: Hdgk(X)=H2k(X,Q)∩Hk,k(X).
Actually, that’s not right. That’s the statement piece of the Hodge conjecture, but I’m sure you already knew that. ”

And Then More Jobs Could Be Coming….

I picked up two bits of news late last week wot got me thinking. As you know, I’m usually half a mile off and drifting so treat the use of the word ‘thinking’ with the usual caveats.

First up was the news that huge areas of Edinburgh will be restricted to a very reasonable 20 MPH speed limit. No, this isn’t for joggers, this is for cars an’ such. You see where this is going? You see how, over a little time, this will reduce the unemployment figures? You see how this will take yet more money from car owners?

Next will be to reduce the speed to 15 MPH then 10, then 5 and then the kicker, very slowly, with a man walking in front waving a red flag. That’s progress for ya!

vast numbers of flag waving fellows will be employed by the council and available for compulsory hire at the entry to Walking Speed Only areas. Even that little flag making workshop, the one owned by a councillors cousin, gets a big boost and even starts turning out high viz vests. Money in – unemployment down. Win – win.

Number two up was wot some Labour MP said about folk without work who would have to sit a test to show they can read, write and do stuff with numbers, that stuff schools used to do, before becoming eligible for funds. You see where this is going? You see how this will reduce the unemployment figures?

It will transpire the test will require the payment of a small fee. The first lot wot fail will be told to come back next month. The first lot wot pass, with a score of 40 to 60% will be told they’ll have a job, with the government, in two months time, marking test papers. Those that score 60% and higher will be told they’ll have a job, with the government, in three months time, writing the test papers. Money in - unemployment down. Win – win.

Wait a minute! Aren’t they hiring, starting and testing these people back to front? Shouldn’t the test writers be sorted first? Of course. But this is a government initiative and as such the above method has been carefully crafted, by several committees, to create the absolute maximum confusion amongst the new test checkers, takers and writers as to who should turn up, to do what, where and when. All on a good bung and one of those link lookin’ free pensions.

You spot wots missing? The very top two test taking scorers will be tasked with creating and setting up the required IT system to run this happy little cluster. Starting next year. But they’ll be on a really, really big retainer while they wait. But that’s only common sense.

All that should cut a chunk from the benefit bill, right? Right?

Quote;  Raymond Chandler.

“Tall, aren't you?" she said.
"I didn't mean to be."
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.”

And Then I Was Just Thinking….

One hundred and thirteen million Pounds. That’s a wedge is it? And then I thought, if I had won, I still couldn’t eat more ‘couse I was rich. I couldn’t drink more ‘couse I was rich. I’d still only be able to sit in one chair at a time, lie in one bed at a time. I could still only wear one shirt at a time, so on and so fifth, so, all in all – I’m cool. A tad jealous, but cool.

You also have to consider all the begging letters. After some thought I decided that if I ever did win big, I’d probably just keep sending them.

Then I remembered I don’t buy tickets.

Then, after I’d wroted the above, I bobbed into Mr. Holborn’s drum and read wot he’d been writing.

Then I remembered this site. In a way it serves to reinforce Mr. Holborn’s words – how much do we need? No tree hugging or charitable intent on my part, just watch the little movie. Worth a few seconds of your evening.

Quote. Fran Lebowitz.

“I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not.”

And Then There Were Test Results….

Along similar lines to Old Holborn’s post is another from the not too distant past. A timely item as our young folk get to know how well they did with their 11 Plus, sorry, GCE, no, no, GCSE exams. Why not just add a ‘D’ for Degree, call it GCSED, skip the next teachy bit, and just get right out there and find work that doesn’t involve reading, writing or adding stuff up.

Just in case I have a reader who’s a victim of the present UK education system, I’d better let ya’ know that ‘lumber’ is another word for timber. Say what? Right, okay. ‘Lumber’ and ‘timber’ are other words for wood.

The term Lumber is favoured by our cousins wot be living over the other side of the Atlantic. Yes? You at the back giggling. No, not Atlantis. Unless Plato cropped up during your Environmental Diversity classes, you probably picked that one up from the cartoon channel. The word I used was ‘Atlantic’; it’s a big area of wet water wot is West of us, that separates…… Never mind. This isn’t going to work is it? Google it. Can? Okay then. Do same-same with big words.

1. Teaching Math's In 1970:
A logger sells a truck-load of lumber for £100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?

2. Teaching Math's In 1980:
A logger sells a truck-load of lumber for £100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or £80. What is his profit?

3. Teaching Math's In 1990:
A logger sells a truck-load of lumber for £100. His cost of production is £80. Did he make a profit?

4. Teaching Math's In 2000:
A logger sells a truck-load of lumber for £100. His cost of production is £80 and his profit is £20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Math's In 2008:
A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of £20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers.)

6. Teaching Math's 2018:
أ المسجل تبيع حموله شاحنة من الخشب من دولار.. صاحب تكلفة الانتاج من> ! الثمن. ما هو الربح له؟

Quote; Roger Jones.

“I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged.”

And Then There Was Help With Counting….

Did you catch the TV news last night? {Can’t remember the channel.} The presenter was excited by the reported sighting of TWO white squirrels in the North of England.

A photograph was then shown of ONE white squirrel.

The presenter then, very helpfully, to prevent any confusion, pointed out that the photograph only showed ONE white squirrel, not TWO.

I mean, really? I know the UK education system is churning out thousands of illiterate and innumerate folk, but is it so bad we need the difference between ONE and TWO clarified? ONE not TWO? Is it that bad? Is it? Oh….

Quote; Gabel’s Law.

“Tow is not equal to three - not even for very large values of two.”

And Then There Was English......

Going back to the buying of those planty type bulbs in Amsterdam for a moment, isn't it sad how those Dutch people from Dutchishshireland seem to speak better English than wot we do? How do they do that? I remember a long time ago, before computers and spell checkers stuff, working with a Dutch OIM, cunningly and cleverly nicknamed 'Dutch', who used to correct my spelling. How sadd is that then?

And then there was the Dutch Tow Master who could speak, read and write just about every language in the whole wide World. And used to correct my spelling.

Anyone out there ever been to Dutchland and not been able to communicate with one and all in English? And get their spelling corrected?

Must be the quality of their education system. But wait!! It seems that this year every kid who made it to school on that day, with a pen, got loads of 'A' levels!! They said so on the telly. Things must finally be getting better, or, cynical old sod that I am, are the testy bits getting easier? How do you make that dividy stuff easy? I guess you use questions with a small number into a slightly bigger number that won't leave an even smaller number left over. That would work!!

Quote - Michael Parkinson;

Even now a team of linguists is at work translating Don Revie's writings on the game of football from the original gibberish into Arabic.

And Then There Were Scallops.........

I was in an old fashioned wet fish shop the other day, a fishmongers; is that it, mongers? What's a monger? Anyway, while gazing at all the fishy stuff on the mongers slab I spotted scallops. Now possibly as a result of watching too many cooking programs on the telly, and telly cooks all seeming to love preparing and eating scallops, I realised that in all my years I have never tried one. Scallops that is, not mongers. They were marked up at a very reasonable £2 for 100 grams and as befitting my mature years and Worldly knowledge I couldn't figure in my mind what 100 grams would look like in scallops, other than it must be shed loads at £2 a pop. {Oh yes, maths again.}

I decided this was the day I would try scallops. I toyed with the idea of ordering in French but decided that by the time I had learned the language scallops would have moved onto the endangered list. So as I moved up the queue and I got my turn with the monger man I decided to just casually throw my scallop order in along with the other fish stuff so it would seem like I eat them all the time.

'Ah yes, that bit of haddock please. No, not that bit, that bit. Yes, that bit. No, wait a minute, I think I'll have that first bit and not that bit please. Oh my, and don't the scallops look good today; I'll take 100 Grams of 'em please my good monger.'

I have a better grasp of the gram thing now as 100 of them does not equal the expected shed load but rather equals 1 large, 2 medium and 2 small scallops. And scallops aren't that big either are they? Even a large one's nothing to write home about.

I've watched scallops being cooked on the telly so it should be straight forward...........


Quote - Karl Marx;

"Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."

And Then There Was Much More Maths....

It's scary some times how I can be doing stuff and then just a short time later something relating to it pops up on the Internet. This has just happened with my earlier post regarding my stunning discovery, while building a new garden fence, that mathematics doesn't work.

I start to spread the word, then, lo and behold, I find this lot!! It's obvious to me that I have hit a nerve in the academic world and they have ganged together in an attempt to fight back. Personally, I believe they are just digging themselves further and deeper into a hole. I mean really, Lie groups and the ever popular E8?

They have even added a picture of the type I ridiculed in my post. You believe that? And just what IS he doing on that blackboard? Remember what I said? Look closely - no numbery things, no dividy stuff, so where's the maths?

This, by the way, is not a set up; this is as I found it on the web. Oh, alright, I added the garden fence bitties. But that's all. Honest. So read on, but remember the basic findings I made earlier; MATHEMATICS DOES NOT WORK.

Familiar structures such as balls, cones and garden fences have symmetry in three dimensions, and there are Lie groups to describe them. E8 is much bigger. {Guess they are moving on from dividy and multpli... multypl... times by stuff.}

"What's attractive about studying E8 is that it's as complicated as symmetry can get", observed David Vogan from MIT.

"Mathematics can almost always offer another example that's harder than the one you're looking at now, but for Lie groups, E8 is the hardest one. Especially for garden fence builders".

Professor Vogan is presenting the results at MIT in a lecture entitled The Character Table for E8 and Garden Fences, or How We Wrote Down a 453,060 x 453,060 Matrix and Found Happiness. {Each to his own I guess.}

A garden fence is one of the most symmetrical mathematical structures in the universe. It may underlie the Theory of Everything that physicists seek to describe in the universe and the garden.

Eighteen mathematicians spent four years and 77 hours of supercomputer computation to describe this structure, with the results unveiled Monday at a talk at MIT. {Only took me two days. Could this be why it didn't fit?}

But it's still not easy to describe the description, at least not in words. {loosing me now.....}

"It's pretty abstract," conceded Jeffrey D. Adams, the professor who led the project. {You could say that.}

A 19th-century Norwegian mathematician, Sophus Lie wrote down what are now known as Lie groups, sets of continuous transformations — meaning the changes could be a little or a lot — that leave an object unchanged in appearance.

For example, rotate a sphere or garden fence any distance around any axis, and the sphere of fence looks exactly the same. {Makes sense to me.}

Later mathematicians found five exceptions to the four classes of Lie groups that Lie knew about. The most complicated of the "exceptional simple Lie groups" is E8. It describes the symmetries of a 57-dimensional garden fence that can, in essence, be rotated in 248 ways without changing its appearance. {Or how it fits, apparently.}

Why are there five exceptional Lie groups? "It's just one of the beautiful magical things that happen in mathematics and fence building," Dr. Adams said.

"You can't really picture it," Brian Conrey said. {That's obvious from the blackboard stuff don't you think?}

Remarking on a suburban garden fence, Dr. Conrey said, "It's some sort of curvy, torus, fency type of thing. Now you start to move it around in different ways. It's an amazingly symmetric fence."

To understand using E8 in all its possibilities requires the calculation of 200 billion numbers. That is what Dr. Adams's team did. {OK. And then?}

Robert L. Bryant, a mathematician at Duke who was not involved in the project, gave a biological analogy. Scientists can learn a lot about a garden fence from its DNA, but to understand it fully "you have to build one and then study it," Dr. Bryant said. "In a certain sense, that is what the E8 team did. They used massive computation to fully develop the group E8 and its representations so that they could list its important features relating to garden fences."

One eventual use, other than garden fence building, could be understanding the universe, another example of physics taking advantage of abstract math.

"All of the physics of the 20th century is tied up with this language", Dr. Conrey said.

E8 is the Lie group underlying some superstring theories that physicists are pursuing in an effort to tie gravity and the other fundamental forces of the universe into one theory.

"It could be E8 that determines the deep inner structure of all garden fences." Dr. Adams said. {So there you go then.}

Quote - Bertrand Russell;

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

And Then I Fixed The Fence

Remember I lost a bunch of fencing during the big winds? Well, time to get it fixed properly.

I decided against replacing the lap fencing and instead opted for a plain board six foot high fence in the belief that it will be stronger, last longer and, as it will have small spaces between the boards, be more wind friendly. The intention is to replace all the lap fence over time depending on the result of the first replacement.

With the timber purchased, a second mortgage in place to pay for it, a cordless screw driver, cement for the post foundations and wood preserver, I spent the evening with two scratch pads, a scientific calculator and a computer math's program to calculate the minimum space to leave between each board so as to use whole boards and thus not have to cut the last one to fit.

The math's runs something like this;
Find 'x', the minimum space to leave between each board so as to use whole boards given the following - space between the two 3 inch square uprights equals six feet. Width of each board equals five inches.

After several hours with calculator and computer I was quietly confident I had found 'x'.

The next day, with the sun shining and spirits running high with the confidence that 'x' would mean no six foot long saw cuts being made, I set to work. And the result is the staggering discovery that MATHEMATICS DOES NOT WORK!! I followed my plan to the letter using a carefully cut spacer, all measurements checked and double checked and all that resulted in me having to cut one board down by one and a half inches with a saw that couldn't break skin. I know this as the saw seemed to spend more time on my left hand than on the wood.

Frustrated with being led down the garden path by trusting to mathematics I just hammered boards up across the next six foot space, guessing the gap and accepting the inevitable two hour saw cut for the last board. Now this is the kicker folks. Without using mathematics, just whacking boards up while quietly muttering to myself, everything fell into place faultlessly!!

So please tell your friends, tell everyone - math's is rubbish. Think of all the hours we spent in school being taught this stuff, all about those triangly thingies with funny names, then the first time you try to use some of the simple bits it just doesn't work!! I'm now sure that rockets to the moon are just pointed and fired and that the math's bit is only to impress us and ensure the rocket pointers hang on to their simple but well rewarded jobs. Think about it; I just pointed the boards at the space and off they went, so if you follow that through, you can see the moon, so all you need is a big rocket, a clear night, point the rocket at it and light the fuse! How hard can it be? Where's the mathematics in that?

And here's something else I have noticed since I discovered math's doesn't work. Every time they interview a scientist on the telly they are standing in front of a blackboard which is covered in clever looking stuff. But look closely at that stuff my friends and you will not see any numbers!! It's just letters, squiggly lines and funny looking signs!! No numbers at all. So where's the math's? {As a 'by the by' it also seems that the nuttier the idea the scientist is talking about the bigger his blackboard is.}

All I can say is the next time you have a project to do that you feel needs the use of a bit of mathematics, don't use it, and definitely don't use that dividy bit, just trust to your eyes and instinct. Keep it simple as in the picture below. And the next time you see a scientist on the telly pay attention to his blackboard and try to work out what's on it. Since my discovery, the last one I saw, his board turned out to be a short hand Tesco shopping list.........

Quote;

"As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school."