Today's Math Behind the News

There's a new Sage in mathematics

2007-12-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

Need to solve a calculus problem, model a galaxy, map a 12-dimensional object, or calculate rainfall patterns under global warming? Until now you'd have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a commercial software program like Matlab, Maple, Mathematica, or Magma.

But now your problem can be solved for free, using an open-source tool called Sage that recently won first prize in the scientific software division of Les Trophées du Libre.

William Stein, associate professor of mathematics and lead developer of the tool, worked with over a hundred mathematicians to combine user-friendly and powerful number-crunching with new features such as collaborative online worksheets.

My question is, with the state of American math education, will anyone know how to use it?

A new way to beat the stock market

2007-12-27T08:00:00.000-05:00

Do you remember the first time you heard the sure-fire advice to "buy low and sell high"?

Well, researchers at the University of Warwick discovered a way to detect precisely when ordered patterns form in everything from plasma in the solar wind and fusion reactors, to crowds of people, to flocks of birds. And the technique can be used to find unusual patterns in stock market prices.

They analyzed when complex systems move suddenly from chaos to order using an information technology tool called mutual information that can detect patterns and correlations from a very small set of points, as few as ten within a large system. Their analysis had one-fourth the error rate of traditional statistical methods.

I guess all stock market traders have to do now is buy chaos and sell order.

A new solution to support Moore's Law

2007-12-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

Moore's Law, formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in 1965, says the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. For more than half a century the law has held.

But engineers do not see conventional computers being able to support Moore's Law much longer. So it was exciting news when researchers at the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter controlled the spin of a single electron using only electric fields, clearing the way to make a super-fast quantum computer, in which an electron's spin can exist in both its states simultaneously.

Hmm, kind of sounds like a Presidential campaign.

Using math to avoid the Christmas traffic jam

2007-12-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

Have you ever been stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic and then with no apparent reason the traffic just starts moving again at 60 mph? A team of mathematicians from the Universities of Exeter, Bristol and Budapest published the reason why in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Something as simple as a slow truck moving into a different lane on a busy highway - defined as more than 25 vehicles per mile, or one every 200 feet - can cause a ripple effect called a backward traveling wave.

University of Exeter Dr. Gábor Orosz said, "When you tap your brake, the traffic may come to a full stand-still several miles behind you. It really matters how hard you brake - a slight braking from a driver who has identified a problem early will allow the traffic flow to remain smooth. Heavier braking, usually caused by a driver reacting late to a problem, can affect traffic flow for many miles."

Just great. Now we can ruin hundreds of people's day just by braking too late on the highway.

Monkey math

2007-12-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

Not good at math? Monkeys might actually do it better: a new study shows that monkeys can perform mental addition in a manner remarkably similar to college students.

Monkeys and college students took the same test - one that showed possible totals for the number of dots on a computer screen. The average response time for both monkeys and humans was about one second; the college students were correct 94 percent of the time and the monkeys 76 percent.

The findings point to ancient origins of math in humanity and our distant relatives. The researchers did say that monkeys will not pass college math tests anytime soon, although 76 percent probably will do it for most math classes.

The mathematics of square dancing

2007-12-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

The Montessori method calls for students to use all their senses and their bodies to learn math. Sounds good if you're in Kindergarten.

But Math Professor David Schmitz of North Central College in Napierville, IL teaches a class called the Mathematics of Square Dancing, where students learn group theory, permutations, and other math concepts by moving their bodies. North Central now even sports a square dancing club, called the Square Roots.

To quote Professor Schmitz, "It's math in motion: you're walking through mathematics and would have no idea you're working with concepts that most college math majors don't study until their fourth year," adding that dancing is like "solving a Rubik's Cube."

Maybe there is hope after all for the U.S., currently in the bottom 20% among industrialized nations in math performance: we do have one million square dancers.

The errors of excellence

2007-12-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Life is often random. But not always so. Warren Buffett, day traders, and math PhD quantitative financial analysts have all made millions even billions by acting on the fact that not all variation is noise.

In an article published in Nature Magazine, researchers Evren Turner and Michael Brainard believe that errors made by high-performance athletes, musicians, and even CEOs vary not because of noise or uncontrolled variables but due to an attempt to learn and further improve performance by trial and error. To reach their conclusion they analyzed errors in adult bengalese finch birdsong, even that which was previously perfectly sung.

Here's my conclusion: perfection is a goal never reached perhaps because it is impossible to define.

Infinity

2007-12-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

Mathematicians often use the concept of infinity. But real life applications abound. For example, each of our lives may be considered infinite as one never knows birth or death, just what comes in between.

Which shows that infinity is one of those things that makes the brain hurt. Zeno's infinity paradox has inspired countless (see?) philosophers. The idea of adding up infinitely many infinitesimally small amounts to make something is the basis of calculus. In the stock market short sellers have a theoretically infinite loss potential.

German mathematician Georg Cantor proved that there are different orders of infinity: some infinities are larger than others. There are more real numbers, for example, than counting numbers, even though there is an infinite number of each.

Einstein proposed that the universe is infinite in three dimensions, and finite in four, somewhat following the math of Gabriel's Horn, which is infinite in surface area and finite in volume, making it possible to fill but not to wash.

Is your head hurting yet?

Glowing in the dark

2007-12-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

Scientists play cat and mouse in two related stories.

First, South Korean scientists cloned cats with a gene that produces a red fluorescent protein that makes them glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet rays. The experiment may help people with certain genetic disorders.

In another experiment, Japanese scientists found and turned off the gene that causes a mouse's fear of cats, removing through genetic engineering the nasal cells that mice use to detect cat odor. Thus a mouse's fear is genetic and not learned behavior.

It's just a matter of time - and studies - when we'll find out if both cats and mice fear people that glow in the dark.

Simple voting math not so simple in Ohio

2007-12-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

A team organized to study Ohio election integrity picked locks to access memory cards and used hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, it introduced malignant software into servers.

The team found it easy to corrupt election equipment and software made by several companies, including Elections Systems and Software; Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold; and Hart InterCivic.

Now Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner wants to replace all Ohio voting machines and use optical scanners that read ballots voters have filled in by hand.

This all brings to mind Florida's 2000 Secretary of State Katherine Harris. The next thing you know Jennifer Brunner will be running for Congress, using the voting machines she conveniently installed. At least they won'

Brain teasers

2007-12-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

A cowboy rides into town on Friday, stays two consecutive days, and leaves on Friday. How could that be?

That's a typical interview question asked by cool companies that seek creative thinkers. The best candidates don't score points for the right answer, just for the right approach, kind of like new math.

Google Labs even had its own aptitude test, called GLAT. My favorite question on that test was, "what was the most beautiful math question ever derived?"

So what is the deal with the cowboy? If Friday is a day of the week, for which our thinking is reinforced by the fact that the cowboy stayed two consecutive days, the question seems impossible. So our assumption that Friday is a day of the week could be wrong. For example, Friday could be the name of the cowboy's horse.

Companies have come a long way from, "tell me about your last job." But they still ask you to work on Friday.

Ticket price math

2007-12-13T08:00:00.000-05:00

I could never understand why there are ticket scalpers. What ever happened to the free market? Why don't stadiums, theaters, and concert halls just charge what people will pay?

As usual the market will determine the final selling price but here's the real question: If someone's going to pay $1,000 for a ticket to go see Hannah Montana that originally cost $100, should that extra $900 go to a scalper - or to Miley Cyrus? I know what Miley Cyrus would say!

Other models are available. Priceline has an opaque pricing system; eBay's auction is more transparent. But neither is a fluid bid-and-ask system that would maximize the efficiency of the transaction over time. Airlines have revenue optimization down. American Airlines for example generates an extra $1 billion in annual incremental revenue from manipulating ticket prices.

But will they take you to see Hannah Montana?

The search for beauty

2007-12-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

The most beautiful woman, man, science breakthrough, literature, and so on usually merits a prize:
Miss America, Mr. Universe, the Nobel prize, the Pulitzer prize.

The men and women are easy, just ask People Magazine: J Lo, Angelina, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise. Science breakthrough? That's pretty easy too: Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the discovery of DNA would be high on anyone's list. Most beautiful poem? Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

What do musicians say when asked for the most beautiful piece of music ever written? My informal survey says Schubert's Cello Quintet in C gets the prize.

And how about Google candidates when asked for the most beautiful math equation ever derived? e to the i pi equals minus 1 comes to mind. Just think: you put together an imaginary number and two transcendental numbers and get minus 1 as the result. This is at least as cool as Pythagoras. Just beautiful.

They're back: Led Zeppelin, who almost wasn't

2007-12-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

There's a lot of math and science in music. Even with Led Zeppelin. The only band to have every one of its albums hit the US Billboard Top Ten, Led Zeppelin has sold over 300 million albums. Last night they played London's The O2, in a performance like oxygen to their fans.

Remember that echo on Zeppelin I and II that came before, and not after, the music? Zep guitarist Jimmy Page says he invented the technique, contradicting others who say the echo is the result of someone accidentally leaving the recording tapes in a hot car.

So who came up with the name Led Zeppelin? You can thank Keith Moon, then drummer for the Who, who said Page's erstwhile name for his group, The New Yardbirds, would go over, not like a lead balloon, but like a lead Zeppelin. Page removed the "a" from "lead" and the rest is history.

Although it almost wasn't. In high school, Jimmy Page was interested in science and almost took a job as a Lab Assistant. Now that would have been a rocking lab.

We're all optimists when we first determine who we like

2007-12-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

According to a Harvard Business School study led by Michael Norton, people optimistically interpret ambiguous information and assume they will get along. As we learn more, our thinking is less forgiving.

The research examined the differences in opinions before and after dates arranged online. Before the date, when participants knew less, prospective dates were rated between 6 and 10 on a 10-point scale, and no one scored below 3. After the date, average scores were lower, and ones weren't uncommon.

Norton says that "people are so motivated to find somebody they like that they read things into the profiles." When a man writes that he loves the opera, his would-be mate imagines dressing to the nines to see the Met but when she learns more, she discovers "opera" refers to singing in the shower. "Once you see one dissimilarity, everything you learn afterward gets colored by that," Norton says.

I'm waiting for the next study on couples to see if instead of communicating better they worked hard to maintain ambiguity.

The stats say moderate drinking may be good for you

2007-12-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

Are you a moderate drinker, consuming on average just over one drink a day?

You have a 15 percent greater chance of developing colon cancer and if you're a woman, a 13 percent greater chance of developing breast cancer.

But the good news is, that's a loss of under 12,000 lives per year. Moderate drinking saves 30,000 lives a year simply by reducing the number of fatal heart attacks.

Of course it's a new numbers ball game if you become an alcoholic. To improve your odds, stick to wine: according to a Danish study wine drinkers have a statistically lower risk of drinking to excess.

How a nuclear weapon works

2007-12-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

Back in July 1945 the U.S. detonated the first nuclear explosion in New Mexico.

Here's how it works: when a slow moving neutron hits a Uranium 235 nucleus a funny thing happens: the nucleus accepts the neutron and then becomes unstable, breaking into two or more different nuclei and emitting on average two and a half more neutrons, that can then enter more Uranium 235 nuclei. This behavior was first observed in 1938; it took just seven years to make the bomb.

Hmmm, 1945. Sixty-two years ago. No computers. No Internet. No cell phones. With all this new technology I would have thought everyone, including the Iranians, would have figured it out by now.

Maybe for once it's a good thing the world is more stupid today.

Not good math news

2007-12-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

A recent study of 30 industrialized nations found that fifteen year old Americans do not have math knowledge or the ability to apply it.

The most recent Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA for short, showed only four countries: Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Mexico, faring worse than the US in math. In fact, the US math scores were worse than those of some countries considered non-industrialized, such as Estonia and Slovenia. The US's score is worse than it was the last time the test was administered, in 2003.

The top countries? Finland, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand.

Alas, the worst news may be about reading. The US test results were thrown out - because of errors in the reading exams introduced by the North Carolina firm that printed them.

Is it all about geometry?

2007-12-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

Garrett Lisi likes to surf and snowboard, which is what he does when not giving lectures at places like the International Loop Quantum Gravity Seminar on the Theory of Everything.

Lisi, who has a PhD in Physics from the University of California, San Diego, has been getting a lot of press for his proposal that uses E8, a 248-dimension Lie Group, originally researched by Norwegian mathematician Marius Sophus Lie in 1887, to explain all the known forces of the universe in a GUT or grand unification theory.

Some think the results of Lisi's work may be equivalent to that of string theory. Others just want to string him up: one string theorist called Lisi a crackpot. But Lisi can take comfort in riding this wave: at least to date no one has called him a lousy surfer.

Transportation: what's safe, energy, efficient, and cheap? You may be surprised.

2007-12-03T08:00:00.000-05:00

Travelers, like companies, like a good ROI - return on investment. When deciding between traveling by car, train, or plane, it turns out trains - and Amtrak in particular - have distinct advantages over alternatives when considering safety, efficiency, and pollution.

Using deaths per billion passenger miles, Amtrak ranks with airplanes as 13 times safer than autos. Getting more than twice as many passenger miles per gallon than planes, Amtrak also beats out cars with fewer than five passengers. And Amtrak is the eco-friendliest, spewing out 82% less pollution than planes, and 70% less than cars.

But Amtrak takes a little longer, 8% longer between New York and Boston, for example, and costs a little more: 25 cents per passenger mile vs. 19 for planes and between 18 and 36 for cars.

Government subsidizes planes 16 times more than it does Amtrak; autos 32 times more. That works out to $1 billion for Amtrak, $16 billion for the airlines, and $32 billion for cars. Like travelers, maybe the government should better familiarize itself with the concept of ROI.

Nitpicking numbers

2007-11-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

Republican Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani has been using statistics incorrectly. To quote the New York Times, certain of his statements are "incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong."

Giuliani says this is nitpicking.

Politicians don't have a lock on misusing numbers. Consider Musician Kate Bush. When singing Pi on her album Aerial, she got the 54th digit wrong.

So what's worse: misquoting Pi or underestimating the U.K.'s prostate cancer survival rate by over 30 percentage points?

Numbers: love 'em or leave 'em. Or, as Guiliani would say, nitpick 'em.

Do you know the secret to stock options?

2007-11-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

The stock market has been on a crazy ride recently. First it was 10% down, then in two days made its biggest advance in five years. It can make one dizzier than an astronaut on a daily commute to space.

Some folks don't want the actual ride; they only want to benefit if the market - or a particular stock - reaches and passes a certain price. They pay for the option to buy or sell at a particular price within a certain amount of time.

The Black-Scholes formula revolutionized the pricing of options. First published in 1973, it is now widely used on Wall Street. But it has its limitations: assumptions include no transaction costs, risk-free lending, no dividends, and measuring volatility as a constant.

Alas these assumptions mean that Black-Scholes is at best an approximation to reality. And its misapplication may not only spell disaster for investors. With the current situation in sub-prime mortgage debt and real estate devaluation, maybe a better name might be black holes.

Pioneering mathematician Gene Golub dies

2007-11-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

The study of algorithms in continuous mathematics is called numerical analysis, used in virtually everything from building stability to stock picking to weather prediction.

But one couldn't predict that numerical analysis pioneer Gene Golub, a Turing Award nominee and numerical analysis guru, would succumb to leukemia at the age of 75 only three days after diagnosis.

Golub was the inventor of the SVD algorithm, commonly used in search engines and signal processing. SVD, which stands for singular value decomposition and works with matrices, has so many applications that many mathematicians consider it the Swiss Army knife of numerical analysis.

Mathematical algorithms? Practical applications? The Swiss Army knife? Maybe the government should be looking more into those types of weapons.

Losing money? You have good company.

2007-11-27T08:00:00.000-05:00

In 1720 calculus inventor Isaac Newton lost a fortune in a stock market crash that he had personally predicted. Mark Twain lost a fortune investing in an automatic typesetting machine. Dozens of entertainers and sports stars have at some point filed bankruptcy, including Randy Quaid, Jerry Lewis, Grace Jones, Kim Bassinger, Walt Disney, and Mickey Rooney, who did it twice.

These are not stupid people. But the list doesn't include the 50% of Americans who file bankruptcy because of medical bills.

McKinsey & Co. estimates that by 2015 consumers will be paying $420 billion for medical expenses out of their pockets, not including insurance premiums.

Maybe it's time for us to learn from Isaac Newton by doing some calculus to get us out of this mess.

Giving thanks and gifts

2007-11-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

With the Internet Black Friday is no longer the busiest shopping day of the year. The distinction goes to the Saturday before Christmas - and to Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving.

If you're in an office with Internet access, chances are better than half - 54.5% - that you'll be shopping at work today. With good reason of course: 72.2% of retailers plan a Cyber Monday promotion.

Some say higher gas prices may put a damper on gift giving this year. In a Consumer Federation of America survey, 38 percent of respondents said the cost of gasoline and home heating fuel would cause them to either somewhat or greatly decrease their holiday spending, up from 32 percent in 2006.

But with all the hot air retailers provide to promote their specials, and consumers' fingers doing the shopping online, gas may not be in such great demand anyway.

Order from chaos

2007-11-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

Psychologist George Miller found 2.5 bits to be an approximate limit for a certain type of channel capacity. In Watership Down, Richard Adams coined the term "hrair," referring to a maximum countable number, which for rabbits was four. IT guru Ed Yourdon defined hrair for a computer programmer at between five and nine.

Each of these experts attempts to quantify the optimal number of relationships.

The best explanation of why most humans have two or three children may lie in what Physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum discovered: chaotic behavior tends to occur when a certain parameter, called the first Feigenbaum constant, is approximately four and two-thirds, about the average human family size.

Could it be that the optimal number of relationships occurs when chaos is maximized? How could we ever make order out of that?

Thanksgiving numbers

2007-11-22T08:00:00.000-05:00

In 1863 President Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday celebrated on the last Thursday in November. FDR modified the date to the fourth Thursday in November, to leave more time for shopping.

Mention Thanksgiving, and like the 1621 Pilgrims, we think of food. Americans made 7.2 billion pounds of turkey, 690 million pounds of cranberries, 1.6 billion pounds of sweet potatoes, 1 billion pounds of pumpkins, and 294 million pounds of tart cherries. On second thought, it could be we need that extra time for digestion.

The magic number for safety is 165 degrees - both turkey and stuffing - although some food experts say 170 degrees is best for thigh meat. And global warming might be helpful this time of year, if unusually warm days help save the economy by encouraging more shoppers to venture out and open their wallets. It makes one wonder who the turkeys really are.

The arms race in animals: can we learn something?

2007-11-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

Scientists discovered the fossil of what they believe was an 8-foot sea scorpion that lived 390 million years ago.

Simon Braddy, a paleontologist from the University of Bristol, said that many fossils have been discovered of monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches and jumbo dragonflies. But nothing as big as this sea scorpion.

According to Prof. Jeorg W. Schneider, a paleontologist at Freiberg Mining Academy in southeastern Germany, these scorpions were dominant for millions of years because they didn't have natural enemies. Eventually they were wiped out by large fish with jaws and teeth.

Being the biggest and having the most armor does keep a species dominant. The U.S. has recently been concerned with a new arms race with China and possibly Japan. But maybe we should change our approach and start looking out for ways to cope with large fish with jaws and teeth.

Two trillion dollars is a catchy number

2007-11-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Banks make money by taking in deposits and lending them out at higher rates than it pays. They don't lend it all out - what they keep is called the capital ratio and it is typically around 10 percent of what they have lent.

For example, say a bank has $1,000 in outstanding loans. It keeps 10% or $100 in cash. That's $100 it won't lend because to do so would put its capital ratio below 10%.

Now say just 1% of the $1,000 in outstanding loans go bad, which is $10 of bad loans. The bank has to pay the $10 out of cash since the loan has to be repaid by someone. Now the bank only has $90 in cash; the maximum amount it can lend is $900. But it has $990 left in outstanding loans. Ooops, the capital ratio just went down to 9.1%.

The bank would need to reduce its lending another $90 to get back to a 10% capital ratio. That's a total reduction of $100 in lending: $10 for the bad loan and $90 to keep the 10% capital ratio.

The bottom line? A bank needs to reduce its loan balance by $10 for every $1 in losses.

Goldman's chief U.S. economist estimates that because of sub-prime mortgage losses, lending may be reduced by as much as $2 trillion, 7% of US non-financial debt, raising the likelihood of recession.

Now there’s a depressing thought.

Literacy, is it just reading?

2007-11-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

The National Endowment for the Arts says Americans are reading less. Here are the numbers:

Half of 18 to 24 year olds never read a book for pleasure. Americans 15 to 24 spend an average of 7 to 10 minutes a day on voluntary reading, 60% less than the average American. Reading scores for 17 year olds have dropped.

Given that 58% of middle and high school students listen to music, watch TV, or use other media, some say literacy is more than reading: a better definition would include multimedia. But the NEA says the downturn in reading trends correlates "to fewer job opportunities, lost wages, higher incarceration rates and less participation in civic and community life, including voting and volunteering." Just what we need to compete effectively with China.

In life, one person can make all the difference in the world. With reading, the same may be said of a book: Reading scores for 9-year-olds are at an all-time high. Call it the Harry Potter effect: JK Rowling just may be saving Western civilization as we know it.

Giving thanks for easier air travel

2007-11-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

Flying should be more efficient next weekend. The motivation? Reducing CO2 emissions maybe? Nope: it was to reduce passenger unhappiness.

President Bush outlined several welcome steps to reduce traveler inconvenience over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. But each one raised an obvious question.

First, unused military airspace will be opened to commercial flights along the East Coast to relieve the chronically overcrowded Northeast corridor. OK, why does the military keep controlling airspace it doesn't use?

Second, the FAA imposed a moratorium on non-essential maintenance projects. OK, none of us likes taxes, so why is the government spending money on anything non-essential?

Finally, certain bump fees were doubled, from $400 to $800. Wait a minute, isn't that like a CO2 tax, where government makes something expensive so it's not used as much? So what exactly is wrong with a CO2 tax, especially when traffic flow accounts for as much as one-third of global energy consumption?

Enough questions. For now I'll give thanks just to arrive alive.

The error of our ways

2007-11-15T08:00:00.001-05:00

Change is hard. Psychology experts say the first of four stages of change is denial, when we refuse to think something is true (for example, evidence of marital infidelity or losing a big customer). In statistics, we call that a type I error: rejecting a hypothesis that is in fact true.

Type I errors occur in all disciplines. A drug is approved that is unsafe or ineffective and people die. A budget is voted and signed into law that doesn’t accomplish the desired goals. An experienced piano teacher is hired and the student is turned off to music forever.

Or, in the case of Pakistan, Musharraf remains in power and doesn’t hold free elections as promised, resulting in consequences ranging from loss of US support to the unchecking of terrorism to the release of secret nuclear research that will enable others to build an A-bomb.

Type I errors sure make life interesting. But there are some changes we may want to remain in denial about.

Wasteful spending

2007-11-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

President George W. Bush vetoed a bill to fund education, health care and job training, while signing a $459 billion bill to increase the Pentagon's non-war funding. He said he didn’t want wasteful spending.

The US debt is now at $9.1 trillion. It will likely reach $10 trillion soon – that’s a 1 with 13 zeroes. Interest on debt has to be paid. The numbers are interesting: In 2006 debt interest was $406 billion on a $2.6 trillion budget. In other words, the US government spends 16% of its entire budget on interest. Let’s put that number in perspective: while the US is spending $406 billion a year on interest, it spends $15 billion on NASA, $56 billion for the Department of Transportation, and $61 billion on education.

You’ve probably heard about the apocryphal Chief Marketing Officer who said that her company wastes 50% of their advertising money, she just doesn’t know which 50%.

There is no question about wasteful spending by the US government. The question is, which of that spending is wasteful? Do I hear any votes for the $406 billion in interest?

Thomas Jefferson and economic levers

2007-11-13T08:00:00.000-05:00

Today’s is a tale of two numbers.

The first number is $915 billion. That’s the American credit card debt. It’s just below the $1 trillion in sub-prime mortgage debt.

The second number is 31. That’s the percentage of total US corporate earnings that come from financial sector profits. By the way, that percentage was 20% in 1990 and just 8% in 1950. According to Paul Kasriel, director of economic research at Northern Trust and Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times, financial engineers now generate more profit than mechanical engineers.

In economic speak, debt and financial profits are huge levers. If default rates on nearly $2 trillion in credit card and sub-prime mortgage debt increase, financial profits will decrease, severely hurting the economy.

Want to reverse the levers? Just follow Thomas Jefferson’s advice: "I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."

What party is President Bush in again?

Silence and sweat

2007-11-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

A Dutch researcher from Tilburg University says that talking and thinking at the same time may lower creativity, especially for people sensitive to reactions and opinions of others.

He found that when at least five minutes of silence occurred during a 45-minute meeting, the number of ideas doubled.

In another study The Medical College of Georgia examined a group of 200 overweight and inactive children. They found brain activity improved significantly with vigorous physical activity.

Two unrelated students, except each found a different way to make the brain work better.

OK, so to improve our thinking all we need is a little peace and quiet and the opportunity to run around and have some fun using our bodies. Sometimes I think there’s a bit too much studying and not enough common sense. We could start by chewing gum and walking. Or voting for quiet politicians who run a lot.

Hand waving works

2007-11-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

The US ranks in the bottom 20% among industrialized nations in math. Educators may want to listen up to what University of Chicago psychologists just found out about how children learn math.

Two groups of third and fourth graders participated in the study. One group was told to use their hands when solving math problems, the other group was not so instructed. The hand-waving group was four times more likely to express new ideas to solve problems, and were one and a half times more likely to get the right answer.

Next thing you know some researcher will be telling us that having students verbalize their ideas will help them learn even more. In the good old days, it was the teacher who did all the talking and hand-waving.

And that just might explain how we got to where we rank in math today.

The half-life of words

2007-11-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the term “half life,” which is used in disciplines ranging from the physics of radioactive decay to chemistry to biology. But the half life of a word?

Harvard Professor Martin Nowak and fellow researchers observed that every single one of the ten most common verbs in English: be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, and get, is irregular. Because they’re so common they are less likely to change over time and so they stay irregular.

Then the researchers quantified the relationship between a verb’s frequency of use and its longevity as follows: “The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency.”

This means that irregular verbs not commonly used become regular over time.

In other words, an irregular verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast because 10 is the square root of 100.

Here’s one example: Chaucer used the irregular form of holp for the past tense of help; today only the regular form helped survives.

And that’s no Canterbury Tale.

When women get pregnant

2007-11-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

Want to start a hot argument? Start a conversation about abortion. Today we’ll just talk about the numbers for American women. They are astonishing.

Forty percent of women under 45 have had at least one abortion. I did the math – that’s two out of every five women under 45 who have had at least one abortion.

Twenty-five percent of all pregnancies end in abortion. Forty-nine percent of pregnancies are unintended. Eighty-two percent of all abortions are performed on unmarried women. Women between the ages of 20-24 obtained 33% of all abortions. Black women are three times more likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are two and one-half times more likely. Forty-three percent of women getting abortions are Protestant, twenty-seven percent Catholic. Given that there are more than twice as many Protestants as Catholics, the Catholic abortion rate is thirty-six percent higher than that of Protestants.

Women give three main reasons for abortion: three-quarters say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or other responsibilities; two-thirds say they cannot afford a child; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.

The conclusion? You be the judge. Just keep in mind that zero percent of the abortions were performed on men.

Writers try to do the math

2007-11-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

Unable to reach agreement on a new contract, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents film and TV writers, struck the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

One WGA member, George Hickenlooper, wrote, “entertainment industry executives and studios are raking in exponential profits every year and hiding much of those profits through creative accounting and fuzzy math.” George also wrote that writers deserve residuals from Internet distribution of their shows. Fair enough. But wait a minute George, what’s an exponential profit? And how can the industry make that every year?

In math, exponential growth occurs according to the formula N zero times e to the lambda t, where t is time and lambda and N zero are constants. Exponential growth is measured over time, a continuous variable. Making an exponential growth in one year doesn’t make any sense – that’s fuzzy math.

I’m sure Mr. Hickenlooper the writer knows this, but what does get people’s attention is obscenity, not exponents. Maybe next time if he writes about obscene profits writers might get what they want.

The daylight savings time myth

2007-11-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

Ben Franklin was many things: an author, printer, politician, scientist, inventor, and diplomat. But he wasn’t the inventor of daylight savings time. Many people think so because in 1784 he did write – anonymously at the time – a satirical letter suggesting that Parisians save money on candles by getting up with the sun. But he didn’t suggest changing the time.

No, it was William Willett who invented DST so he could finish his golf game before dusk. DST was adopted by much of Europe in 1916, a year after Willett went to the big 19th hole in the sky, and by the US in 1918.

Actually it was the ancients who invented the ultimate DST, dividing daylight into 12 equal hours regardless of the day’s length. In Rome, timekeepers used water clocks with different scales for different months of the year to make the hour 44 minutes at the winter solstice and 75 minutes at the summer solstice.

Some things never change: after thousands of years, we are still looking for new ways to save time. Now if we could only find a way for people and governments to save money. Ben Franklin, where are you when we need you the most?

Ugly oil trends

2007-11-02T08:00:00.000-04:00

A federal judge said oil companies don’t need to pay up to $60 billion in royalties for oil and gas retrieved from the publicly-owned Gulf of Mexico. And the Alabama Supreme Court threw out a $3.6 billion verdict against Exxon Mobil in another dispute over natural gas royalties.

Pretty nice for the oil companies, no? Yet somehow US oil production has fallen in each of the last six years: last year’s production of 1.9 billion barrels of crude was the US’s lowest since 1949.

All the while demand for oil in China is eventually expected to equal the entire supply from Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer. Over the last 18 months, nearly 70% of oil demand growth came from China and India alone.

Think $100 a barrel is pricey? With these trends and the US importing two-thirds of its oil, that’s starting to look like a bargain.

Who's really doing the math?

2007-11-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

Lots of people say they do the math. Mac Stone for one. He heads up drought response for the State of Kentucky’s Agriculture Department. Mac says, “You do the math: a nice weaned calf is 600 bucks and if you have 80,000 less of them it adds up pretty quick.” Mac is smart: he realizes that multiplication is repeated addition. I did the math for him: that’s $48 million in livestock.

Then there’s Boston pitcher Curt Schilling talking about A-Rod: "Let's do the math: When you're a free agent and the Yankees are in the mix, the price changes." Curt didn’t actually do the math either but A-Rod could be baseball’s first billion dollar star.

After a discussion with an Epic Records executive concerned about the high cost of promoting Jennifer Lopez, Courtney Hazlett for The Scoop writes, “Any way you do the math, the label is not coming close to breaking even on Lopez.” Lopez’s new album sold just 53,000 copies in its first week; Epic makes just $4 on each. Those sales – I did the math and that’s $212,000 – don’t even cover the $300,000 video budget.

One surprise of who – or what – not doing the math is Microsoft with Excel 2007. It seems that under certain circumstances it gets multiplication wrong. Maybe they should hire Mac Stone.

Dam

2007-10-31T08:00:00.000-04:00

Rumor has it the largest dam in Iraq may collapse and unleash a trillion gallons of water onto Mosul, a city of 1.7 million.

People may have different opinions about the Iraqi war but this stunning news has brought awareness of dam safety home.

After the Minnesota bridge collapse, we learned that The American Society of Civil Engineers, which grades the nation's infrastructure, gave our nation’s bridges a “C.” Now we’re learning they’ve been repeatedly giving our dams a “D.”

Some scary dam numbers: According to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, states regulate more than 87,000 dams. Of those, states classified over 10,000 as hazardous, which means if they fail they would pose serious threat to human life.

Numbers are tricky, though, and these numbers are wrong: they’re too conservative because each state defines dams differently. In Missouri, a 34-foot high structure isn't even considered a dam. And Alabama doesn't even track the number of dams.

Damn. Well you can’t say the Iraqi war wasn’t good for something.

Scary Halloween numbers

2007-10-30T08:00:00.000-04:00

Five billion dollars – that’s how much Americans will spend on Halloween this year. That’s up 58% from 2002, and it doesn’t include booze.

Sixty percent of Americans celebrate Halloween, by dressing up, going to a Halloween party, decorating, or trick or treating. And 95% of Americans will buy Halloween candy, with candy corn as the favorite: 20 million pounds worth, or over 100 billion calories, which is 2,500 calories of just candy corn per trick-or-treater.

More numbers: 90% of parents take candy from their children’s trick-or-treat bags, presumably to reduce those sugar calories. Spending on Halloween decorations now ranks only 2nd – to Christmas. And last year farmers harvested one billion pounds of pumpkins from 43,000 acres, in part for the 40% of people who plan to carve them.

Halloween parties rank third behind New Year’s Eve and Superbowl Sunday, with 30% of Americans hosting or attending. The most popular adult costumes: vampires, witches, celebrities, monsters, and pirates. For people that is. Three and a half million pets – mostly dogs, cats and birds – will be endowed with Halloween garb or other Halloween treats this year.

It looks like even on Halloween, the country’s going to the dogs.

The math of torture

2007-10-29T08:00:00.000-04:00

Torture and math – they don’t seem to go together unless you’re an unprepared student taking a final exam.

Mathematician Vladimir Lefebvre developed Reflexive Theory, which shows that in societies that accept the compromise of good with evil, individuals were more confrontational.

Lefebvre uses his Reflexive Theory to explain the fall of the Soviet Empire. In one Cold War study, when asked if a doctor should conceal a cancer diagnosis from a patient to diminish patient suffering, Americans said no, and Soviets said yes. Soviets said it’s OK to compromise good with evil. Americans did not.

Is it OK to use torture, which nearly everyone would consider evil especially if they were the recipient of it, if good can result? Before answering, the US may first consider what happened to the Soviet Union.

The science of dating

2007-10-26T08:00:00.000-04:00

Newsflash for all you single gals out there who got along with you dad: you are more attracted to guys who look like him.

A study compared 15 key facial components of dads and women’s selections of potential mates and found that a woman with a great dad relationship found men who looked like her father appealing. A woman with a bad dad relationship? Men who looked like her dad were not of interest.

eHarmony, PerfectMatch, and Great Expectations are all dating services that use some combination of math and science to get people together. And they are busy: Single Americans comprise 41% of the American adult population. But maybe all a successful dating site needs is to match pictures based on dad relationships.

Then again, if the study is right, such a move might risk putting it out of business.

For the love of avocados

2007-10-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

I love avocados. There’s nothing like a spicy guacamole to start a great dinner. But alas avocados may be yet another casualty of this week’s California wildfires.

Here are the numbers behind this tasty fruit: An average tree produces 120 avocados a year. Avocados do not survive freezes or even frost. They ripen faster when exposed to bananas and other fruits that produce ethylene gas.

Approximately 90% of US avocado production is in California, with one-third of California’s 60,000 avocado acres in San Diego County, where the deputy agriculture commissioner estimates damage to nearly 5,000 acres or over 7% of US avocado acreage.

The Aztecs ate the fruit as an aphrodisiac. I hope for their sake Californians find a suitable replacement.

A short history of evacuations

2007-10-24T08:00:00.000-04:00

Nearly one million Californians have been ordered to evacuate their homes to escape wildfires; 12,000 of them are at Qualcomm Stadium. Historically speaking, is one million a lot?

Evacuation is defined as a mass movement of people from high-risk to low-risk areas.

In 1940, 338,000 soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk. While the operation was a success, Winston Churchill said at the time, “Wars are not won by evacuations.”

In 2002, half a million people in the Congo were evacuated from the eruption of the Nyiragongo volcano.

In 2005, more than a million people tried to leave New Orleans during Hurricane Ivan.

What’s the best way to ensure survival during evacuations? An FAA study showed that the single most important factor is the physical attributes of the traveler, specifically waist-line.

Ah, yet another scientific reason to avoid eating on airplanes. I do hope the food tastes better at Qualcomm.

We’ll miss you Joe, but probably not for long

2007-10-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

It’s official: Joe Torre will not be the Yankees’ manager in 2008. A look at the numbers, as Joe Mysak did for Bloomberg on Wednesday, makes this astonishing news.

First, the Yankees drew a record 4.27 million fans this year, nearly 11% more than the next most popular team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Next, the Yankees have been to the post season in every single one of the 12 seasons Torre has been their manager.

And in exchange for this unprecedented performance, the Yankees offered Torre a 23% pay cut.

Not re-signing Joe Torre is like not taking the opportunity to re-sign George Burns for the next God movie. Maybe Steinbrenner is working on a different kind of math. But I have a feeling, unlike another famous Yankee Joe, no one will be asking, where have you gone Joe Torre?

The math of voting

2007-10-18T08:00:00.000-04:00

In North Carolina, the Town of Cary elected a council member with an instant runoff.

Here’s how it works: Voters selected their first, second, and third choices. If no candidate received more than 50% of voters’ first choices, a runoff took place between the first two candidates whereby each vote for the third place candidate was awarded to that voter’s second choice.

82% of those surveyed said they understood the new ballot.

But it seems that they didn’t bring in a mathematician to certify the software: a math mistake credited 24 ballots to the wrong candidate. The mistake was discovered and the correct candidate was elected.

If used in Presidential elections, this system could benefit third parties because votes would still count even when cast for the third party candidate.

Maybe it’s time the electoral college took a math class.

The deconstruction of the housing market

2007-10-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

New US home construction is 31% down from a year ago to a 14-year low. Building permit applications are 26% down from a year ago to a 12-year low. Merrill Lynch is taking a $5.5 billion writedown on subprime loan losses. Inventories of unsold homes are at record levels, leading to strong downward pricing pressure.

In math, a top or bottom may only occur when the first derivative – a function that describes the slope of the curve – is zero. These numbers support us just having had a first derivative of zero in house prices over time.

Someday the first derivative will again be zero, when the house prices begin to rise.

But don’t hold your breath: To quote analyst Mark Zandi of economy.com, “The housing market is choking on unsold inventory that continues to rise as home sales plunge and foreclosures surge.” Maybe it’s time for America to do a little remodeling.

Social Security Math

2007-10-16T08:00:00.000-04:00

The first baby boomer recipient of what Fed Chairman Bernanke calls an “unsustainable entitlement program” filed for early retirement yesterday. Kathleen Casey-Kirschling was born one second after midnight on January 1st, 1946.

An actuary is a type of mathematician who evaluates risk and suggests ways to lower it.

In 1946 there were 42 workers for every Social Security beneficiary; today it’s closer to three. General Accounting Office comptroller general David Walker backs up the Fed Chairman, saying that over the next 75 years the Federal Government will need an additional $50 trillion to fill the needs of Social Security, Medicaid, and other so-called entitlements.

That sounds pretty risky to me. Maybe it’s time to get rid of the politicians and put those actuaries to work.

The transformation of AOL

2007-10-15T08:00:00.000-04:00

AOL is transforming itself, laying off 2,000 workers, or 20% of its global workforce, as it moves its revenue model from subscription to advertising. That sounds like a smart move, since at the end of the 2nd quarter AOL had under 11 million subscribers, 60% less than its peak of 26.7 million just five years ago. That’s a loss of 8,600 subscribers a day.

In math, a transformation is a mapping of points over a domain. There are two types of transformations: alias, where the coordinate system changes, or alibi, where the coordinate system remains fixed.

Moving into advertising makes AOL’s transformation more of the alibi type. With their stock dropping to $18.81 in today’s trading, their management team may just need an alibi to keep their jobs.

Al Gore’s fuzzy math vindicated by Nobel Peace Prize

2007-10-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

Over the last year, Al Gore won an Emmy, an Oscar, published a best-selling book, hosted a global concert, and has now won the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the 2000 Presidential debates, candidate George Bush repeatedly accused Al Gore of using fuzzy math on budget numbers.

In 2002 the Bush administration said there was not enough scientific evidence to blame industrial emissions for global warming. But now three-quarters of Americans believe immediate action is required, including 60% of Republicans.

George Bush finally admitted that Gore’s numbers – and math – weren’t fuzzy. But that didn’t stop him from taking office seven years ago. It makes me wonder, if Al Gore had won in 2000, what would George Bush be known for today? Maybe we should give the American voter more credit for seeing the big picture.

The value of music

2007-10-11T08:00:00.000-04:00

The Grammy-winning British rock group Radiohead is letting its fans decide how much to pay for its music.

The idea isn’t new. Before his first book was published, Tom Peters gave away 12,000 copies of In Search of Excellence to friends and business associates. His publisher was furious, saying he just killed his own book, and reduced the initial run to just 15,000. Using the book’s ideas, Peters convinced the publisher to up that to 100,000 copies, and went on to sell six million.

In math the Cobweb phenomena describes economic behavior based on supply and demand, using a first-order differential equation. Will it predict consumer behavior for the value of music?

Radiohead will find out in January, when their In Rainbows album becomes available on CD.

Alas the current theory does not gracefully handle the combination of infinite supply and finite demand, nor does it allow for zero prices. To predict Radiohead’s success mathematicians will need to come up with some new economic theories, and they’ll probably start by getting rid of the cobwebs.

Random rules

2007-10-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

Guards working for a foreign contractor fired randomly and killed two civilian Iraqi women – a mother and her daughter – in Baghdad yesterday. Another Blackwater shooting fiasco? Not this time: instead it was the Australian Unity Resources Group that took responsibility.

Random means having no particular pattern or order. Mathematicians and scientists use random numbers to test hypotheses; some artists and musicians even use them to create art as Franz Liszt probably did in 1885 with his musical composition Bagatelle sans tonalite.

Using a formula, computers generate pseudo-random numbers that are pretty good for most applications. Many think the digits of Pi are random but that has yet to be proven.

Humans have come a long way, now being random even when it comes to shooting bullets at other humans. While it won’t help the two Iraqi women, it’s at least a comfort to know that we’re also capable of random acts of kindness.

It's a very small world

2007-10-09T08:00:00.000-04:00

Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg will share a $1.54 million prize courtesy of the Nobel Committee for Physics after they discovered giant magnetic resistance or GMR, allowing manufacturers to make really small and high density hard disk drives. Their research led to a hundredfold increase in information density in products like the iPod.

Fert and Gruenberg used quantum physics to explain GMR. It is one of the first practical and major uses of quantum physics in consumer products since it was discovered by Max Planck in 1900, and it’s given the field of nanotechnology a big boost.

Nanotechnology controls matter on the molecular level of 1 to 100 nanometers. A human hair has a diameter of 10,000 nanometers; but a water molecule is just under one nanometer wide.

How will the winners use their money? Well, they could buy 77 million gigabytes, enough to store the world’s complete history of printed words. But with the uncertainty of today’s currencies, maybe they should just buy atoms of gold, which at today’s rates would be two times ten to the 26th power. Now that sounds like a solid investment.

The Thompson Paradox

2007-10-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow actor and former Senator Fred Thompson debates for the first time as a Presidential candidate. Originally hailed as the 2008 Republican Party savior, Thompson has recently been on the receiving end of a vitriolic press, having been called lazy, rambling, subdued, unprepared, vague, and soporific.

Voters don’t often listen to the press. Thompson raised over $3 million/month in his first fund-raising quarter and nationally polls a solid second behind front-runner Rudy Giuliani.

In math, the Thompson Lamp Paradox describes a thought experiment in which a lamp is turned on for half a minute, then off for a quarter of a minute, then on for an eighth of a minute and so on. At the end of one minute, will the lamp be on or off?

Like all major candidates under the bright lights of national exposure, and true to the thought experiment that coincidentally shares him name, Thompson is a paradox. Voters love that. And soon we’ll find out, if at the end of the campaign, voters will have turned Thompson’s light on or off.

Uniformly different

2007-10-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

Uniformity is antithetical to American culture. But uniforms, whose purpose is to minimize individual differences to maximize cohesion of a group, are ubiquitous.

Tom Cruise puts on a Nazi uniform for a new movie. President Musharraf will take his off only after his election. And fans pay hundreds of dollars to wear the uniforms of their favorite teams and sports stars.

The military seems to likes uniforms - and uniformity. But until the House of Representatives bill is signed into law, Blackwater will not be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice or US law.

In probability theory, a uniform distribution describes a set where all values are equally probable. For example, tossing a coin has two equi-probable events, a die six.

Up to now Blackwater has been able to operate outside the law of Iraq and the US, but the chances are pretty good it won’t be able to evade the laws of probability.

The mathematics of competition

2007-10-04T08:00:00.000-04:00

It was fifty years ago today, October 4, 1957, that the launch of a 183 pound, basketball-sized satellite by the USSR triggered the US to began an ambitious space program culminating with Neil Armstrong’s moon walk in 1969.

Back then US and Soviet scientists were mortal enemies. Today the US and Russia collaborate on the Space Station and many other projects. Yet the popular notion is that human advances in space have slowed considerably.

When just 21, the mathematician John Nash, Jr. wrote a doctoral dissertation on the mathematics of competition. Nash constructed mathematical scenarios in which both sides won, and found stable scenarios where no person continues to profit from competition.

Well, until someone in government figures out how to use Nash’s research, maybe we can count on China to get our competitive juices flowing again.

Reciprocity

2007-10-03T08:00:00.000-04:00

After Iranian President Ahmedinejad’s controversial visit to Columbia University, an Iranian University in the northeastern city of Mashhad reciprocated by inviting President Bush to talk about the Holocaust, terrorism, and human rights.

In math, to get the reciprocal of a non-zero number just divide it into 1. Six is the reciprocal of one-sixth. Three-fourths is the reciprocal of four-thirds. These are reciprocal partners. The problem with zero is that no number times zero equals one. Zero has no reciprocal, no partner.

It doesn’t look like President Bush will be reciprocating Ferdowsi University president Alireza Afshour’s invitation: a White House spokesperson said they weren’t “taking it too seriously.”

So from a math standpoint if President Bush doesn’t reciprocate it’ll either be because President Ahmedinejad’s visit to Columbia was worth zero or because he didn’t want to be a partner with Iran or its President.

What’s the frequency Kenneth?

2007-10-02T08:00:00.000-04:00

In October 1986 former CBS anchorman Dan Rather was attacked in New York City while being asked, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

Dan didn’t know but frequency, defined as the number of occurrences in a given time period, is ubiquitous. Beats per minute is a frequency that measures heart rate, a musical time signature is a frequency that specifies beats per bar, and Hertz measures the frequency of alternating current, sound, and anything else that occurs in cycles per second.

Every frequency has a pitch. The A that orchestras tune to is 440 Hz. The common US alternating current frequency of 60 Hz is close to a B flat; in Europe it’s 50 Hz or close to a G.

Maybe if Dan Rather’s assailant had instead asked for the pitch he wouldn’t have left empty handed.

Concave comes back

2007-10-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

The founder of the largest Japanese athletic shoe company Asics, Kihachiro Onitsuka, passed away at age 89. Back in 1951, inspired by his lunch, he invented the company’s trademark Onitsuka Tiger basketball shoe by employing the concave shape of octopus suckers.

In math, when you connect any two points on a concave curve the resulting line segment does not intersect the curve. And a concave function is one that is open only on the bottom.

In preparation for the 2012 Olympics, Land Securities has planned a 37-story concave-shaped building in East London designed by architect Rafael Vinoly. The building’s unusual top-heavy shape seeks to maximize rental income from having bigger floors on top where the view is best.

Maybe tenants could even avoid the elevator by using Onitsuka Tiger shoes.

Associative rights

2007-09-28T08:00:00.000-04:00

AEPi – Alpha Epsilon Pi – is a fraternity. A federal appeals court ruled that because AEPi does not accept women, The College of Staten Island did not have to recognize it.

Federal anti-discrimination statutes specifically exempt fraternities; Alpha Epsilon Pi claims protection of associative rights under the First Amendment.

In math, addition is associative for integers: when you add three numbers together, you get the same result whether you add the first to the sum of the second and third or you add the sum of the first and second to the third. Here’s an example: when adding three plus five plus seven, eight (three plus five) plus seven is the same as three plus twelve (five plus seven): fifteen. You could say that math protects the associative rights for integers under addition. Addition is also associative for the set of real numbers and imaginary numbers, as is multiplication.

In life, associativity is one of those self-contradictory words. On one hand, it means the process of tying together people, events, and/or ideas. But it could also be used to describe a grouping of people who share some characteristic – such as being male, which by definition means excluding others, such as females.

If the court ruling holds up, not all male students will be unhappy: at The College of Staten Island: they will likely have new options, such as being able to join – and associate with – the sororities there.

The Halo Effect

2007-09-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

Aliens are good business. In 1996 the movie Independence Day was the 18th highest grossing movie ever – in fact over 70% of the top grossing movies involve aliens.

Aliens are very good business for Microsoft, grossing $170 million for Halo-3 in its first 24 hours on sale, breaking the $125 million record for Halo-2.

So besides a weapon in the video game, what exactly is a halo? It’s most commonly a ring of light. A ring is what mathematicians call a toroidal shape, that is, a torus. In topology, the study of properties existing during deformation, twisting, and stretching of objects, a torus is a surface having genus one, which means it has a single hole, like a coffee cup with a handle.

Halo-3’s success may be due in part to “The Halo Effect,” as buyers’ expectations were influenced – not unreasonably – by the success of Halo-2.

But most likely Halo-3’s success is due to the business halo worn by Microsoft, which, although alienating European regulators, has deformed, twisted, and stretched its business model in more ways than a topologist to be one of the world’s most successful companies.

Acute or obtuse?

2007-09-26T08:00:00.000-04:00

Acute is one of those words with several meanings: when used in medicine it refers to an intense, sudden, and short-lived symptom; in literature and analysis it refers to making fine distinctions; and in math it refers to an angle less than 90 degrees. It may also refer to anything of critical importance and consequence, or something sharp and/or pointed.

For example, an article in today’s Khaleef Times observed an acute reduction of girls under age seven in Indian urban areas, which in 20 years decreased from 959 girls per thousand boys to just 906. Alas this acute reduction may result in chronic problems later on, when boys don’t have enough cute girls to meet.

Meanwhile, arctic Beluga whales have what the Vancouver Sun calls acute hearing, able to distinguish human sounds from miles away.

And the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations is the only national certification for acute stroke care, which medical researchers say is of critical importance – shall we say acute – in effective stroke treatment.

In math, an acute angle is certainly more pointed than an obtuse one, and while some may consider the distinction between acute, right, and obtuse angles fine, a cute angle on this is that we all benefit from cooling off when it’s under 90 degrees.

Not perfect: an abundance of deficiency

2007-09-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

Perfect numbers are in the news.

- The NFL is starting to think that three is the perfect number for pre-season games.

- While attempting to shoot a 59 at the PGA Tour Championship, Zach Johnson said he had the perfect club and the perfect number on the 18th hole. But his stroke wasn’t perfect and Johnson had to settle for 60.

- A post on the New York Times asks, “Is it possible that right now we have exactly the perfect number of troops in Iraq, neither more nor fewer than we need?”

A perfect number is actually an integer that is the sum of its proper divisors. The smallest perfect number is 6: which is the sum of 1, 2, and 3. The next is 28, then 496. Only 44 perfect numbers are known. Of those, they’re all even and the largest has over 19 million digits. How do those mathematicians figure that out?

Usually a number is different than the sum of its proper divisors. When the sum is greater, the number is called abundant. For example, 12 is abundant because the sum of its proper divisors 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 is 16. When the sum is less than the number, the number is deficient. Of the first 17 integers all are deficient, except for 6, which is perfect, and 12, which is abundant.

Which leads us to believe that there may be an abundance of deficient numbers. Well, nothing is perfect, not even the NFL, the PGA, or the New York Times.

The ambiguity of absolute value

2007-09-24T08:00:00.000-04:00

In math absolute value means the distance of a number from zero, regardless of direction. The absolute value of 3 is 3, the absolute value of negative 3 is 3. The absolute value of something is always non-negative.

Some folks use the term absolute value in a way that adds ambiguity. Last week the US Environmental Protection Agency said that servers and datacenters accounted for 1.5% of all US power consumption in 2006. By itself that’s a stunning statistic. But then the EPA said that the absolute value is twice what it was five years ago. Maybe the EPA was referring to actual power consumption, not the percentage, but that’s not what they wrote.

Absolute value seems to be a difficult concept even for academics.

The University of Massachusetts gets it wrong in their glossary, saying the absolute value of x-m is the same as m-x, which it’s not when x is greater than m. What are they teaching their math students there?

The US Department of Transportation gets is wrong, too: it says the absolute value of -(10x + 4) is the same as (10x + 4) but it’s not when x is less than -2 1/2. I hope they do a better job of transporting things.

Princeton University says it’s a numerical value regardless of its sign. That’s not exactly right either: what if the numerical value is less than zero? I’m sure Einstein didn’t come up with that definition.

One thing is clear: government and higher education do not absolutely value – or properly use – common math terms.

No specter for Spector

2007-09-21T08:00:00.000-04:00

With all the news about Spears, Lohan, Hilton, and Simpson, one murder defendant is having trouble breaking through the clutter, despite a regular change in his hairstyle.

The jury deciding rock producer Phil Spector’s fate has not reached a verdict in ten days. But that’s just halfway towards the 20-day record set in the 1993 trial of Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris in Idaho.

Jurors have made great sacrifices on behalf of the American judicial system. The longest civil jury trial in U.S. history ran over three years from February 1984 to October 1987 after plaintiffs claimed poisoning by dioxin in a 1979 chemical spill. The numbers are eye-glazing: the trial included 200 witnesses, 90,000 pages of transcripts, 6,000 exhibits, and 9,000 evidentiary rulings. The jury denied the claims.

But civil judgments can be significant. In 2001 plaintiffs won just over half the civil trial cases, with 4% awarded $1 million or more. Punitive damages, estimated at $1.2 billion, were awarded to 6% of plaintiff trial winners. The median punitive damage award was $50,000. I guess jurors want to feel useful after spending all that time away from work.

But no one seems interested in Spector’s case, hairdos or not. Maybe the inevitable civil trial will generate more publicity for him. In the meantime maybe he should just try wearing ill-fitting gloves.

Skill or luck?

2007-09-20T08:00:00.001-04:00

Newsweek postulates that Alan Greenspan’s 20-year success as Federal Reserve Board Chairman may be significantly due to luck.

First, here are the numbers:

From 1987 to 2005 the Gross Domestic Product grew by 70%. Nonfarm employment increased 31%. Annual consumer price index inflation averaged just 3.1%. Pretax corporate profits increased 38% to $1.3 trillion. The average stock quadrupled in value.

The numbers seem too good to be based on luck alone. But it is possible. Consider this scenario: the email scammer who sent out 1,000,000 emails to investors predicting the rise or fall of the market. Half a million emails say the market’s going up, half a million say it’s going down. Let’s say the market went up. Next month the scammer only emails the half million folks who got the up prediction. The third month the scammer only emails the quarter million folks who got the next correct prediction, and so on.

After a year, the scammer has a perfect record with 244 people. Ask any of those 244 people if the scammer’s perfect record could be due to luck and they’ll probably say no, how could anyone make the right pick 12 months in a row? Very unlikely. They must know something.

But Alan Greenspan’s no email scammer: he’s one smart cookie – he does know something. And I’d put my money on him.

A meteorite makes quite an impact

2007-09-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

A meteorite reached Earth in southern Peru and left a crater 66 feet wide and 16 feet deep. No one was killed but hundred of locals are now reporting to be sick, presumably from the dust kicked up by the impact.

Meteorites can be really old. In 2003, a rock from the asteroid belt slammed into a home in a Chicago suburb. It was formed 4.5 billion years ago, even before Daley was mayor.

If it weren’t for meteorites, humans and maybe even dinosaurs may never have existed. Many scientists believe that meteorites wiped out 90% of life 251 million years ago, well before the dinosaurs, who are also thought to have become extinct after a major meteorite impact 65 million years ago.

At least 30,000 meteorites have been found on Earth. A meteorite has a burnt and crusty surface, from the heat of friction with the atmosphere upon entry, and attracts magnets if it has any iron.

That’s just what many of us hope for when we get old: sunburnt, a little crusty in an endearing way, and of course attractive.

What would we do without O.J. Simpson?

2007-09-18T08:00:00.000-04:00

His approval ratings may be low, but he’s as newsworthy as ever. President Bush? Senator Craig? Nope, we’re talking about OJ.

Google OJ Simpson and you’ll get 11.6 million results. So where does that rank among others with low approval ratings? President Bush gets 45 million; Senator Craig just 1.1 million. Apparently one good way to lower your visibility is to deny that you’re gay.

Britney Spears got 61% more results than the president with 72.3 million. Among other bad girls in the news, Paris Hilton came in 2nd with 40.6 million. Lindsay Lohan couldn’t even break eight figures; she had under 10 million Google results.

Math’s most famous and longstanding mystery – finding a proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem – was finally solved by Professor Andrew Wiles. But he gets only 158,000 Google results. Albert Einstein garnered four million.

Einstein is still way behind OJ but I have faith: given enough of the fourth dimension of time, Einstein will eventually triumph.

Google and googol

2007-09-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

Incorporated nine years ago, Google’s market cap is now $165 billion, seven times more than just three years ago, when it went public. Still, $20 million for sending a traveling rover to the moon, which is what Google offered last week, is a big number.

But it’s a lot smaller than the number “googol”, spelled googol as opposed to Google for the company name, which is defined as the number one followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was invented by mathematician Edward Kasner’s nephew in 1920.

A googol is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe, and it is estimated that a supermassive black hole will need a googol years to evaporate from Hawking radiation. A googol is slightly less than 70 factorial, which means that there are more than a googol ways to order just 70 people or objects.

The company’s headquarters is known as the Googleplex. Googolplex – with an ol and not an le – is also a number: it’s a one followed by googol zeroes. Carl Sagan wrote that it would be impossible to write the number googolplex because even using 1 point type it would take more space than exists in the universe.

That $20 million Google Lunar X Prize? It’s unlikely to be won. You only have a little over five years to win it. And with the way gas prices have been going, the money may not even cover the fuel cost.

The rules of spying

2007-09-14T08:00:00.000-04:00

In defiance of NFL rules New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick used a video camera to steal signals from the New York Jets last Sunday, resulting in personal and team fines and the loss of one or more draft picks.

This is really big news. Spying is ubiquitous and has tacit approval, in sports, government, business, even love. The only rule is not to get caught, but even then a slap on the wrist is usually the most severe consequence, unless you play for the wrong side, in which case you probably get the death penalty.

The CIA? We don’t want to know – we even keep the size of their budget a secret.
Business? Hewlett-Packard spied on board members a few years ago and their stock has never been higher.

Love? Private detectives, spy software, Bluetooth cellphone snatching, you name it – they’re all tools to find cheating spouses and maximize divorce settlements.

Baseball? Major Leaguer Moe Berg, who, when traveling to Japan on a major league All-Star team in 1934, took home movies of the Tokyo skyline that were used in the planning of General Jimmy Doolittle's 1942 bombing raids. The U.S. government wrote a letter to Berg, thanking him for the movies.

Don’t expect Belichick to get a letter like that - except from his fans.

Living longer – and shorter

2007-09-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

Americans living longer than ever. US life expectancy steadily growing. Life expectancy higher than ever. More years in our lives.

All news headlines after new census bureau statistics were released on Wednesday. What’s true is that an American’s life expectancy at birth rose from 77.8 to 77.9 years. But the numbers tell the real story.

First, infant mortality went up, from 6.8 per thousand live births to 6.9. Higher life expectancy only happens for those who survive being born.

Most important, there are forty-one countries whose citizens live longer than those in the US, such as Andorra at 83.5 years, Singapore at 81.7, and Australia at 80.5.

So maybe we’re living a month or so longer than we used to, but we’re living years shorter than others. And it’s getting worse: just 20 years ago we ranked 11th.

What’s the reason for the US decline in world rankings? According to the Voice of America, independent researchers say America's poor showing compared to other industrialized democracies results, in part, because of widespread obesity and a lack of health insurance.

A good diet and a good doctor? Americans might also need some more accurate news reporting.

A confluence of nudity

2007-09-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

Math is all about patterns. So was it coincidence or a force of nature that caused people on two continents to take their clothes off?

In a village called Boraj in the Rajasthan state in India, the panchayat — or village council — publicly inspected the bodies of 1,500 men and boys one by one for evidence of murder of a 35-year old woman with the townspeople looking on. At the rate of one inspection every ten seconds, the job took four hours. No evidence was found.

Percy Honnibal is a carpenter in Oakland, CA. He likes to keep his clothes clean and himself comfortable when working, so while hammering nails and cutting wood to build cabinets he works in the nude. This got him arrested. But because he was not acting lewdly or seeking sexual gratification, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Julie Conger found him not guilty.

While attempting to burglarize a home in Duluth, MN a 20 year old male found himself in a struggle with the homeowners, who found a way to pull off the burglar’s clothes, leaving him stark naked before fleeing. Police found the suspect 20 minutes later. I wonder how it took them that long.

Clothes have their function in society. And as these stories witness, so does nudity.

Complexity and the moon

2007-09-11T08:00:00.000-04:00

Japan plans to land a man on the moon by 2025. A big first step is an unmanned moon launch scheduled for this week.

Technology is a funny thing. Back in 1961 when President Kennedy wanted to land a man on the moon it took eight years. At that time electronic computers had only been around for 15 years or so. With all the whiz-bang power, graphics, and communications capabilities of today’s computers, it’s going to take 18 years or ten years longer than the first time. How did that happen?

It turns out that a group of mathematicians and scientists believe the explanation could be found in chaos theory. Harvard Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam says, “The increase in complexity is directly related to sweeping changes in the structure and dynamics of human civilization: both the increasing interdependence of the global economic and social system, and the instabilities of dictatorships, communism, and corporate hierarchies.” He didn’t leave anyone out, did he?

So what’s next for humans? Bar-Yam says one future human organizational structure might be a fully networked system where hierarchical structures are unimportant.

Sounds good. No boss, and maybe we could even get back to the moon ten years sooner.

Fakers

2007-09-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it’s good to be a faker, sometimes it’s not.

James Campbell has shown up in full firefighter’s uniform at the World Trade Center, various train wrecks and wildfires, even at hurricane Katrina. But Mr. Campbell is a faker. Over the weekend Mr. Campbell was arrested for impersonating a fireman.

In Finland, Ochi Yosuke received kudos and a $3,400 first prize for winning the Air Guitar World Championship. Here it pays to be a faker: winning the real thing, for example, the International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship, only netted the winner $3,000.

At the MTV awards Britney Spears was unable to pull off being a faker, flubbing the lip-sync to her new song “Give Me More.”

But when they’re good, fakers make very good money and achieve great fame, especially when they’re actors. Keanu Reeves made over $150 million from The Matrix Reloaded and Bruce Willis $100 million from The Sixth Sense. Talk about gender income disparity: Julia Roberts tops the actress payday with only $25 million for Mona Lisa Smile.

Still, she did a lot better than James Campbell, who now faces felony charges and jail time, and Britney Spears, who faces public humiliation.

For the love of popcorn

2007-09-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

People have yet to get sick of improving on nature but they do get sick from it.

Today’s case in point: buttery popcorn. While lung disease used to be the nearly exclusive domain of smokers and coal workers, modern technology and consumer tastes bring us into the popcorn factory, where a potentially fatal disease called popcorn lung has been contracted by workers exposed to the chemicals that give popcorn its buttery flavor, in particular diacetyl, which combines two groups of methyl and carbon monoxide into one molecule with that distinct buttery aroma so appealing to popcorn lovers.

A new study published by British medical journal The Lancet said artificial additives may increase hyperactivity and decrease attention span in any child, not just one diagnosed with learning disabilities due to ADD or ADHD.

Doing the math often means making and testing hypotheses. These two stories support the hypothesis that what smells good and tastes good may not be good if it was made by people and not nature.

Just food for thought.

A requiem for Pavarotti

2007-09-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

Recognized as one of the greatest tenors of the 20th century, Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti died this morning at the age of 71. Before making his mark in opera Pavarotti tried his hand as an insurance salesman and elementary school teacher. It’s a good thing for opera fans that he failed at both.

Pavarotti holds the world record for most curtain calls, at 165, and shares the honor for making the best-selling classical album The Three Tenors with fellow tenors Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras. He might also hold the record as the heaviest tenor, having weighed in at 396 pounds in 1978.

With the A above middle C defined at 440 Hz, the tenor range is about 130 to 493 Hz, although the lowest note in the Wagner Ring cycle is the A two octaves below middle C and many tenor roles reach the C one octave above middle C, that note being called the “tenor C.”

One hundred years ago Enrico Caruso was making his mark as the 20th century’s first popular tenor, making recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company starting in 1904 and surviving the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 after performing the night before. But it was said that Caruso could not reach the tenor C. He would either lower the entire score a half-step or sing the note falsetto.

Who will be this century’s tenor sensation? If Pavarotti gets his wish posthumously, it could be 34 year old Peruvian Juan Diego Flórez, known affectionately as JDF by his fans. It seems Pavarotti himself anointed JDF as his successor.
JDF is taking Pavarotti seriously. He even sings tenor Cs in encores.

The Big Dig for Higgs

2007-09-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

Today’s quiz: What do you call a ring that is 17 miles long yet 300 feet below the ground, uses the world’s largest supply of liquid helium, and cost $10 billion?

Why that would be the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator of course! Known as LHC, the Geneva-based Large Hadron Collider will have seven times the power of its closest rival, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago.

As a result, scientists are gradually leaving the US for physics’ new center of gravity in Switzerland.

The LHC’s main goal is to find physical evidence of the Higgs boson, the only Standard Model elementary particle yet to be observed. Not quite a unified field theory like the one Einstein searched for most of his life, the Standard Model incorporates quantum mechanics and special relativity but not gravity.

At 22%, Switzerland already has one of the highest percentages of foreigners in the world. And with the influx of Fermi scientists it will get ever so slightly higher.

It seems that in the American immigration debate someone lost sight of how to keep immigrants – like world class scientists – we currently have but are about to lose: the Fermi lab will close in 2009.

Maybe all America needs to keep more smart people from leaving is a new Standard Model for its political system. And of course a political accelerator.

Raising all that money for Muscular Dystrophy raises a burning question

2007-09-04T08:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday at his annual Labor Day Telethon broadcast on 190 stations, Jerry Lewis raised nearly $64 million to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The IAFF or International Association of Fire Fighters contributed 40% of the total. In 42 years Lewis has raised over $1.4 billion dollars to fight MD. The annual Telethon accounts for about a quarter of MDA’s net income.

Muscular Dystrophy is actually an umbrella term for some forty-odd neuromuscular diseases. All that money: Must be a lot of people with MD. Actually approximately one in 4,000 newborns gets the disease, which means that 80,000 babies get MD each year in the US.

Another statistic from the National Center for Health Statistics says that around 1,200 people die annually from MD.

MD has no cure so these two statistics do not add up. You can’t have 80,000 babies getting MD and only 1,200 dying from it. Some possibilities are that MD victims leave the US before they die, death statistics are underreported, or birth statistics are overreported. I’ll have to ask Jerry Lewis about this, maybe he knows.

It turns out that burn injuries are second only to motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in the US. According to the Journal of Burn Care and Rehabilitation, 2.4 million burn injuries are reported each year and one million will sustain substantial or permanent disabilities resulting from their burn injury. That’s twelve times the number of babies getting MD.

The International Association of Fire Fighters has incredible power to raise money. Think what they could do for burn victims.

It’s too bad George Burns isn’t around anymore. With that cigar of his he’d be the perfect host for a telethon.

Waving goodbye to the energy crisis?

2007-09-03T08:00:00.000-04:00

Finavera is an Oregon company that manufacturers the AquaBuOY, a device that sits in the ocean and makes electricity from waves. By 2011 it plans to operate two wave parks that will generate enough electricity to power 35,000 homes. The wave parks would cover a total of five square miles of ocean.

The plan is ambitious: ocean survival is non-trivial for man-made moving parts. In New York City, Verdant Power attempted to convert East River tides into electricity using six turbines but all failed within eight months.

Still, if Finavera or one of several other companies developing wave energy equipment can battle the ocean and win it could mean a significant reduction in pollution from oil and especially coal, which today produces half the US’s electricity.

Of course we’re talking lots of buoys out there along with thousands of miles of cable to bring the electricity back to land. In fact the total land area to accommodate the total USA demand for electricity would be a square grid 125 miles long on each side.

As coal, oil, and natural gas prices rise, so does investment in alternative energy sources. The investment curve should look like a hockey stick, with the change in slope occurring when the cost of fossil fuel equals that of alternative energy.

Logic would dictate that a huge increase in gas prices would make alternative energy investment – and a clean solution to the world’s energy needs – happen much sooner. But don’t wave goodbye to our energy woes quite yet – the wave technology is unproven and unless they’re looking for early retirement don’t expect any politicians to recommend a $5/gallon gasoline tax anytime soon.

Where there's a will...

2007-08-31T08:00:00.000-04:00

It’s good to be Trouble - if you’re a certain white Maltese of that name: you’d be the recipient of a $12 million trust fund, courtesy of the estate of Leona Helmsley.

Twenty percent of Americans have wills, and of those, ninety percent go uncontested. Still, that means that of all the Americans alive today, six million lawsuits will eventually be filed over their estates.

Like one Mary Murphy, who left her modest $200,000 estate to Pets Unlimited. The only problem was that Miss Murphy’s will also called for her collie-sheep dog Sido to be put to sleep, presumably so they could be together in the after-life. The State of California stepped in and passed a law saving Sido’s life and postponing the reunion with his master.

Mary and Leona have nothing on Countess Carlotta Liebenstein who in 1991 left her entire $80 million estate to her dog, Gunther. Rumor has it that subsequent generations of Gunthers have built quite a mansion collection, including a home previously owned by Madonna. I wonder where they get their investment advice.

One conclusion is clear: If these wills are any indication of a trend, the country is going to the dogs.

Reducing civilian casualties in war

2007-08-30T08:00:00.000-04:00

A new device being developed by the US Army may change how we look at war.

The Active Denial System – or ADS – is actually a ray gun that makes people think their skin is on fire. They move out of the way quickly but without injury.

Here’s how it works: ADS’s powerful rays reach the nerve endings in the skin and cause intense pain without damaging cells. ADS rays can penetrate clothing and windows but not thicker materials like concrete or metal.

US commanders in Iraq believe the device could save thousands of civilian lives. In the last two years alone, the AP reports that the war has caused over 27,000 civilian deaths and 31,000 injuries.

The system was developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico, at a cost of $62 million, about one ten-thousandth the estimated cost of the Iraqi war. Still, Pentagon officials say the technology is too expensive.

That’s one reason the Pentagon has yet to give the go-ahead to the device’s deployment; another is concern that it could be misconstrued as a torture machine.

$62 million too expensive? Finding an alternative to killing civilians is torture?

Sounds like military intelligence to me.

Smelly business

2007-08-29T08:00:00.000-04:00

According to an EPA report, the third largest item in today’s landfills are disposable diapers – or as they’re called across the pond, nappies. Yet disposable diapers won the battle against cloth. Today fewer than 150 diaper services exist in the US.

But disposables may have lost the war. It seems many new parents are foregoing the diaper altogether and using an age-old technique called elimination communication – or EC, the term having been coined and popularized by Ingrid Bauer in 2001.

With EC, babies are taught – as early as birth – to signal when they are ready to go so parents can take them to the bathroom. Both baby and parent get lots of practice communicating: newborns urinate every ten to 20 minutes.

So what are the repercussions if EC replaces diapers? For one, 25 billion disposable diapers will no longer grace our landfills each year. And we’ll save on all the ingredients that make up diapers, including 3 billion pounds of wood and half a billion pounds of petroleum feedstocks.

I’m not sure about that wood savings, though. If EC catches on, it’ll be very good news for the wood flooring business.

The obesity epidemic

2007-08-28T08:00:00.000-04:00

The Trust for America’s Health just released a report on obesity in America. It said we’re fat and getting fatter: adult obesity rates rose in 31 states last year.

Jim Marks, a spokesperson for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which sponsored the study, said that obesity costs $117 billion per year in preventable health care expenditures. Americans seem to agree: the report said 85% of Americans believe that obesity is an epidemic.

Lots of organizations release reports. What caught my interest in this one is that the reporting organization’s Secretary is Dr. Margaret Hamburg, Senior Scientist at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and an expert in public health and bioterrorism. An expert in nuclear threats and bioterrorism with the last name of Hamburg is focusing on obesity?

The real numbers behind this story is how much money we’d save if everyone ate less.

According to my calculations based on current eating habits and food prices, Americans would save $430 billion/year by reducing 1,000 calories from their daily diet. What’s a thousand calories? Try four slices of toast with butter, or two chocolate bars, or a Big Mac and fries.

Combine the food savings with the preventable health care savings – forget about all the fuel we’d save in cars and airplanes not carrying around all that extra weight and the $1.8 billion we spend on diet books – and we’re looking at a 4% reduction in our GDP.

Fat economy indeed.

Hacking the iPhone

2007-08-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

The iPhone is designed to be used only with ATandT cellular service. But with some clever hacks to the iPhone’s software and hardware, Glen Rock New Jersey native George Hotz found a way to make his iPhone work with T-Mobile, since he didn’t want to pay the extra $20/month ATandT charges its iPhone customers and the termination fees that would have been imposed by T-Mobile if he switched.

For George Hotz, iPhone hacking has been good business. He traded his hacked iPhone for a 350Z and three 8GB unhacked iPhones. It takes George 2 hours to unlock an iPhone and he’s been offered hundreds of dollars per phone to do so. But he’s turned down all offers and made the hack public on his web site. And why not? Who thinks it’s OK for the company that makes the cell phone to tell us who we have to use for cellular service? That’s like the TV manufacturer telling us which channels to watch, or like saying we can use cable but not satellite. Can you imagine if Bose radio said OK, you can buy our radio but you can only listen to, say, Fox or ABC? And by the way, it’ll cost you more to get those stations. How did Apple pull this off?

George Hotz spent 500 hours over his summer vacation doing the hack. But Apple Co-Founder and CEO Steve Jobs doesn’t seemed too concerned; he hasn’t yet called or sued George and Apple stock was up $2 on the news. It’s probably just as well. George is just 17 and he’s on his way to college today.

Say what?

2007-08-24T08:00:00.000-04:00

Chinese children must learn Mandarin, joining 40 million around the world who are studying to do the same.

I haven’t heard one economist say that China won’t soon be the new #1 economic power in the world. But it seems the US will likely keep its crown for language. Within China itself 175 million people formally study English, and by 2010 that number will grow to two billion people worldwide.

English is de rigueur to succeed in big business. Newsweek reports on a recent survey where 91 percent of multinational employees in Latin America, Europe and Asia believed English was "critical" or "important" to their current positions. Just two years ago McKinsey found that fewer than one out of ten college graduates in China were suitable for employment at multinationals primarily because they didn’t speak English.

Here are the global rankings: Mandarin and English tie for the #1 spoken language in the world, each with 1.1 billion, although some estimates which no doubt include immigrant NYC taxi drivers put the number of English speakers as high as 1.8 billion.

With all the outsourcing in the news it’s funny we don’t hear more about India, where Hindi is spoken by nearly 1 billion people. Rounding out the top ten spoken languages, including those spoken as a second language, are French and Spanish each with 500 million, Arabic with 320 million, Russian with 255 million, and then Portuguese, Bengali, German, and Japanese.

I just hope those Chinese kids are watching their language.

The smell test

2007-08-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

Officer Kenneth Marrow smelled alcohol on 24-year-old Cody Schaaf at a fast food drive-in and arrested him for drunk driving. The arrest is being challenged because Officer Marrow detected the alcohol seven feet away from inside the restaurant.

Smell – our olfactory system – is so unquantifiable. For example, the only numbers oenophiles put on their wine is the price. Instead they use words like herbaceous, cloying, rustic, and buttery. Mathematicians don’t tend to use those words unless they’ve had too much wine.

So you just never hear numbers associated with smell, and there is no unit of smell, as in “wow that onion was strong, must have been at least three olfactors!”

Odorants – molecules that humans can smell – bind to receptors on the nose’s cilia. Each receptor can bind to several odorants and each odorant can bind to one or more receptors. The number of possible combinations is the number of different smells detectable by the brain: it’s in the millions although the best trained nose like that belonging to a master perfumer can distinguish – and name – 10,000 different smells.

Smells are stronger up close and fade inversely with the square of the distance from the source. This means that Office Marrow smelled 82% fewer of the molecules from Mr. Schaaf’s breath than he would have if he were just three feet away.

Time will tell if Officer Kenneth Marrow – or Cody Schaaf will pass the smell test. But the argument seems moot – Mr. Schaaf flunked the breathalyzer test.

Is fat catching?

2007-08-22T08:00:00.000-04:00

New research indicates that a common virus may cause obesity. OK, where do I sign up for the vaccine? And is this virus catching?

Researchers from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge said that exposure to the virus Ad-36, which is known to cause respiratory and eye infections, also causes human adult stem cells to store more fat.

The NIH now says 97 million American adults are overweight or obese. They haven’t published stats on how many of those have respiratory and eye infections.

Another recent study said that people who hang out with fat people tend to be fat and people who hang out with thin people tend to be thin. So maybe this fatness virus is catching.

Of course another way to fix the obesity problem is by changing its definition. It worked for math SATs. When the math SAT test was recently revised questions on geometric proofs, imaginary numbers, and trigonometry were eliminated from the new test. Those changes were necessary to keep math SAT scores from continuing to fall. Evidently this was a better alternative to doing a better job of helping students learn. So all we need to do is ratchet up the pounds or BMI numbers to qualify for being overweight or obese.

But if they do develop a fat vaccine, will that be covered by health insurance? Hillary, any comment on that?

Religious math

2007-08-21T08:00:00.000-04:00

There are some fascinating numbers behind religious behavior, which Arthur C. Brooks brought to light yesterday in a Wall Street Journal editorial.

Compared to Americans, Danes were seven times more likely to agree with the statement, “Religions bring more conflict than peace.”
Americans are four times more likely than the French and eight times more likely than Norwegians to attend a house of worship regularly.

Recently two books that promote the benefits of atheism and the failures of religion made the best seller list. A rise in American secularism? On the contrary: the authors and readers of those books who agree with their premise are fighting a losing battle for the hearts and minds of America.

The simple reason may be that adults who regularly attend a house of worship have an average of 2.23 children, while those who don’t attend have just 1.58 children. I wonder what they do with all that extra time? Whether you call the difference 41% higher or 29% lower, clearly it’s not making babies.

The political implications are startling. Religious people who consider themselves politically conservative or very conservative have 78% more children than secular liberals. What this means is that based on current trends, a state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California) will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020, based solely on who’s having babies.

Well now at least we know what it takes to be successful in politics.

Dean gains strength

2007-08-20T08:00:00.000-04:00

As Category 4 Hurricane Dean barrels into the Gulf of Mexico, people prepare for the worst.

Dean is rare: only 23 Category 4 or higher hurricanes struck the US mainland since 1851. If Dean should become a category 5, it will only one of 3.

Thirty-eight years ago, engineer Herbert Saffir and U.S. National Hurricane Center Director Bob Simpson came up with the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale to classify Western Hemisphere cyclones into five categories. Hurricanes originating in places other than the Atlantic (and the northern Pacific east of the International Date Line) use different scales.

Saffir-Simpson is based on sustained wind speed: the higher the speed, the greater the potential damage and flooding. It’s interesting to note what Saffir-Simpson does not reflect: specifically location and rainfall. A category 2 storm making a hit over a densely-populated city will be more deadly and costly than a category 5 storm striking an uninhabited area.

In the U.S. sustained wind speed is the average of measurements taken 33 feet above the surface over 1 minute time intervals. By the way, the WMO or World Meteorological Organization uses a 10 minute interval, which means the US will always have higher sustained wind speed stats compared to the WMO.

I guess we’re always striving to be #1, even in hurricanes. And who knows, maybe we’ll even add a Category 6.

College rankings

2007-08-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

Today’s issue of the U.S.News and World Report ranked U.S. colleges, and Princeton came out on top for the eighth straight year.

I thought it might be interesting to compare the college rankings with rankings of endowment size. It’s like what they do in baseball to answer the question, do the teams with the largest payrolls win more?

Based on numbers from the US Department of Education, six of the best colleges also had the largest endowments and they’re the usual suspects: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, and Columbia.

Four schools with the largest endowments didn’t make the top ten best school list: University of Texas, University of California, Texas A and M, and University of Michigan. In fact, Texas A and M finished a dismal 62nd in the U.S.News and World Report rankings.

Three schools: California Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, and Duke, were all ranked in the top 10 best schools but didn’t have the largest endowments. Now there’s like an opportunity for fund raisers.

Of course whenever there’s a survey there’s controversy. It seems that some colleges don’t approve of U.S.News and World Report’s reliance on reputation as a contributing factor to the rankings. They say it’s too nebulous and not sufficiently quantitative.

Gee, I wonder where those colleges ranked.

When the earth moves

2007-08-16T08:00:00.000-04:00

Scientists no longer measure the energy of an earthquake by the Richter scale. Today they say a quake is of a certain magnitude. When you go from one magnitude to the next, say from 4 to 5, the earthquake energy is 32 times greater.

A magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck off the coast of central Peru last night. Its energy was equivalent to that released by the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, and slightly less than the world’s largest nuclear test, about 1,000 times stronger than Hiroshima.

As if it didn’t have enough problems with an approaching hurricane, the island of Hawaii was hit Monday with a magnitude 5.3 earthquake.

On Sunday, a 5.1 magnitude earthquake shook central Spain.

And last Thursday a 7.5 magnitude quake hit the Indonesian island of Java.

But John Bellini of the USGS says that 7.5 magnitude earthquakes happen 18 times a year, so it’s not unusual for two occur in one week: it’s actually quite common.
In fact a million earthquakes occur each year, three thousand a day. Most are magnitude 2 and not even felt by people.

Earthquake myths abound. Here’s the boring truth: No animal reliably senses an impending earthquake. Earthquakes do not occur in any particular type of weather or time of day. Despite what you might’ve seen in the movies, the ground will not open and swallow people. California will not fall into the sea. And there is no inconvenient truth for earthquakes: the rate at which they occur has remained constant despite all of man’s earth moving.

Of course, musicians know earthquakes too:

Carole King: The Earth moves under my feet; and
Jerry Lee Lewis: There’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on

It must be because they still use the Richter scale.

Kudzu and you

2007-08-15T08:00:00.000-04:00

Back in the 1930s, the US Dept of Agriculture urged farmers to plant Asian plant kudzu to combat erosion. With no natural enemies or diseases, kudzu promptly blanketed seven million acres of the US Southeast, strangling vegetation along the way.

Kudzu has impressive numbers: 30 vines may grow from a single root crown. Its roots can weigh up to 400 pounds, reach 7 inches in diameter, and grow 10 feet deep. Kudzu vines can grow as much as 18 inches in one day and 55 feet in a year. No surprise a horror movie was made called Kurse of the Kudzu Kreature.

But between chefs and scientists, there may be a win-win solution.
Known as the “plant that ate the south,” kudzu is now being eaten by the fiercest of enemies: people. Atlantan chef Ryan Cobb fried, boiled, and stuffed kudzu to the delight of a Travel Channel cable show audience.

Scientists found that kudzu root extract eliminates most of the rise in blood pressure from high-salt diets – at least in rats – and that kudzu may mitigate cognitive loss, hypertension, and insulin resistance to the benefit of diabetes sufferers and menopausal women.

In the 1970s, the Dept of Agriculture changed its mind and called kudzu a noxious weed. Now things are coming full circle just as Kudzu spreads as far north as New Jersey. Maybe the new catch phrase should be "Kudzu and you: perfect together."

The ice bug cometh

2007-08-14T08:00:00.000-04:00

According to a new study by Rutgers scientists, DNA, long frozen in glaciers, may return to life as the glaciers melt.

The scientists melted five samples of ice ranging in age from 100,000 to 8 million years to find microorganisms trapped inside. Life in the oldest ice samples grew very slowly, doubling only every 70 days. But life in the newest samples doubled every couple of days.

They discovered the math behind the difference: It seems that – at least in the polar regions of Earth – DNA literally has a half-life of 1.1 million years. That is, every 1.1 million years a piece of DNA will lose half its base pairs: DNA from the oldest samples had on average just 210 base pairs, while the newest samples had over 20,000 pairs. And the less DNA, the harder it is to reproduce.

The scientists suggest that, given the extremely high cosmic radiation flux in space, it is highly unlikely that life on Earth could have been seeded by genetic material external to this solar system; it would never have survived the trip.

There is little concern that the ancient life will pose any danger. But who really knows? Could global warming’s biggest threat actually be from life unleashed from our past?

I wouldn’t be too concerned. We’re probably still our own worst enemy.

Sex math

2007-08-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

Candidates paid for votes in the Iowa straw poll. Does anyone realistically put any stock in the results?

Several polls about sex, where no one was paid, should engender the same skepticism.

A British study found that on average during their lifetimes, men reported 12.7 heterosexual partners and women 6.5, about half.

An ABC News poll conducted by TNS found that on average during their lifetimes men reported 20 sex partners, and women just 6. The same poll reported that only 54 percent of women condone sex before marriage, and for men it was 68 percent. So, let me get this straight: nearly half the women and one-third the men believe in no sex before marriage? That should be a tip off that there’s something terribly wrong with these polls.

Even the NY Times, who reported on inherent contradictions in sex poll results, got it wrong by equating mean and median.

For the record, the mean is the average. The median is the number both above which and below which half the results lie. The housing industry gets it right: they report both mean and median home sale prices. The mean is usually larger because the very high priced homes skew the average higher.

So what’s so wrong with those sex polls? Think about it: if we start with the same number of men and women, the average number of sex partners has to be the same for men as it is for women. There’s no way men have twice the number of sex partners.

But the polls do prove one thing: there’s no question they’d like to think so.

Bush tick

2007-08-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

Last year around this time, President Bush got Lyme Disease after developing a tell-tale circular rash. The infection, delivered by a deer tick to his left shin, disappeared after antibiotic treatment.

Named after a sleepy but deer-infested town in Connecticut, Lyme Disease is often misdiagnosed and therefore often mistreated: One JAMA study found that 57% of patients originally diagnosed with Lyme Disease never had it.

Concerned about getting Lyme Disease in the US? Although cases have been reported in all 50 states, most occur in the Northeast, upper Midwest, or Northwest. And even if a tick discovers you, all is not lost: it has to bite and stay in place for 24 to 48 hours before you’ll get infected.

Here are the numbers: one percent of deer ticks are infected with the Lyme Disease bacteria, and just over 21,000 - less than one-hundredth of one percent - of Americans are diagnosed each year. Don’t have a bulls-eye rash but have Lyme Disease symptoms of fever, headache, body ache, fatigue, muscle pain, and swelling of the knees? You might be one of four people who don’t present with rash but still have the disease. Or you might have been bitten by another one of the 82 species of ticks in the U.S. that account for nine major diseases. Ouch!

President Bush didn’t disclose the disease at the time because he didn’t believe that it affected his performance. But maybe now we have an explanation for those low poll numbers he’s had for the last year!

Shuttle teacher aloft

2007-08-09T08:00:00.000-04:00

McCall Idaho educator Barbara Morgan finally made it into space 22 years after being the backup to Christa McAuliffe. She’ll spend up to two weeks making repairs to the Space Station on the 119th Space Shuttle flight and the 20th flight for the Endeavour.

The numbers behind a shuttle launch are astounding.

It takes nearly 17,000 people to make the shuttle fly. And when it does it takes just eight and half minutes to reach its orbital speed of 17,300 miles per hour, despite weighing four and a half million pounds at takeoff. And when it lands, it weighs less than 230,000 lbs.

We all know about the danger of falling debris during the first few minutes of flight. But before the launch engineers found another danger and designed a sound suppression system – or SPS – that dumps 300,000 gallons of water on the launcher platform and solid rocket boosters to keep acoustical energy from damaging the shuttle wings and control surfaces. That’s quite a pre-flight bath!

On this flight Barbara Morgan is taking 10 million basil seeds to distribute to students and educators.

And you can be sure that after her trip, when she finally returns to teaching, Barbara Morgan’s students will never go wanting – or hungry – at story time.