All Hail Bad Science

My girlfriend (the word fiancé is weird and horrible sounding) got me Bad Science by Ben Goldacre for Christmas. It's a most excellent book which explains exactly why so much Science reporting, mainly in the area of health and diet, is so dodgy and in some cases downright dangerous.

It's also very readable and very funny. I picked it up to have a quick look on Christmas day and ended up reading half of it. Brilliant.

Oh and the author also has a website/blog at badscience.net

Yeah, whatever did happen to my personal robot?

The idea for this post has been shamelessly stolen from the BBC.  I'm sure Tomorrow's World was predicting we'd all have our own personal house robot slaves by now.

Personally I can't imagine a robot like this being developed for the domestic market. It'd just cost way too much money for something that's probably cheaper to employ a human to do anyway. If we do ever get useful human robots I can't see it coming out of anything other than military research or from the development of a Japanese sex robot. 

A friend of mine (yes, I know you won't believe it's not me) wants a Cameron (from Sarah Connor Chronicles). I'm not sure for which purpose he wants it. Probably to do the hoovering.

I should probably get a robot to do my blog posting for me.

Who needs maths? You.

I was just reading this article on BBC News about the problem we have in the UK of not enough people studying maths, and the general cultural issue of maths being seen as difficult and uncool to be good at.

I always thought it was weird that people have this attitude towards maths, at my house when I was little maths was always talked about as a fun interesting thing, and possibly as a result of that or possibly because of some mental aptitude I always found it really easy. I did Maths, Further Maths and Physics A-Levels because the amount of duplication on the courses meant it was much less work than three completely different A-Levels. And you got no essays to write.

The thing that really surprised me about that article is that you have proper adults, presumably out working in the real world, saying they don't use maths in the real world. Really? What jobs are they doing? Even if you aren't doing a mathematical job there are tons of areas where you use maths every day.

eg. in light of current housing market problems I have been making a few calculations around mortgages. A simple calculation might be if house prices drop by x% how much would I have to overpay my mortgage by to make sure I have paid off enough of the loan to be able to get a remortgage deal this time next year? (too much)

People must be working stuff like this out all the time. What difference will a fuel price rise of 5p make to my monthly fuel costs? How many people spend any time at all having to work with spreadsheets, performing computations on rows and getting complex reports out? Or have to create or read any kind of graph? That's all maths. Builders need to work out stuff like "how much cement will I need?", or "given that VAT is 17.5%, how much should I knock off for cash if I'm not going to declare this to the taxman?", or "how much of this weeks salary can I send back to Poland?". What kind of surcharge will I have to pay for my flight at the check-in desk if I weigh 220lbs, my bag is 33lbs and it's a 5$ surcharge per kilo for every kilo, or part thereof over 100 kilos.

Perhaps people don't realise how much maths they are using when doing stuff like that.



The other day I had to work out the difference in area between taking a circle for a "within x miles" calculation and just using a square.* I ended up having a discussion with a drunk friend of my brothers that evening. He actually said "When does anyone use something like geometry in the real world?".

Sometimes knowing a bit of maths and being able to work something out makes life easier, sometimes it's quite fun to be able to work something out. It can also save you money and money = work therefore maths = good.

*Answer is that the square is 4/π times larger, or the area of the circle is 79% of the area of the square.

Monkeys control robot arm with their brains

This is just awesome. The era of the cyborg is upon us. Those crazy scientist folk have inserted probes into a monkey brain and got them to control a robotic arm.

I reckon this means that within months we'll have Stephen Hawking's brain embedded in a fully robotic moving life support system much like the drug crazed psycho who gets transformed into RoboCop 2 in the film of the same name. Or the robotic Richard Nixon from Futurama.

The prospects for the lazy are brilliant. Imagine having actual workable arms and legs that you could control just with your own brain. You could actually lift yourself up off the sofa and go and do something. Yeah, ok I have that already but these would be robot legs and arms which is better!

Sloths aren't lazy, or are they?

Sorry for all the link to news story type posts this week. What do you expect, me to actually put some effort into composing some hilarious prose for you? And at least there are some posts, unlike previous months.

Anyway Scientists have discovered that sloths aren't lazy, they are just slow. They say they aren't lazy, because they only sleep for 9.6 hours a day. That seems quite a lot to me! Is that really a measure of laziness though? How much you sleep?

The same survey also shows that pythons sleep for an impressive 18 hours a day. I've definitely got some respect for a python as a lazy animal. Every few days they have to hunt, which is lazy enough in itself. They just lie camouflaged and wait for a rodent to walk past. Then they just spend a few days sleeping and digesting. Easy. They are even too lazy to warm their own blood.

I think my favourite lazy animal is still the male lion though. He basically sleeps all day whilst his women look after the kids and go hunting for his food for him. Sure he has to fight off young pretenders now and again but other than that, brilliant. Plus they look cool.

Hungover?

"Third of staff 'hungover at desk'" is the headline but, of course, the headline is misleading. It's not that 1/3 of staff are hungover at their desks every day! No, surprisingly the story is that a mere 1/3 of workers have ever been hungover at their desks. That's what they are saying. Only 1/3 of people have come into work with a hangover at some point? Or should I say, only 1/3 of people said to the survey makers that they'd ever come into work with a hangover.

What's even more surprising about this result, from what is obviously a nation of liars, is that apparently only 35% of them felt it made them less productive!

Anyway this is a totally pointless survey, or at least the aspects of it reported by the BBC are totally pointless, because it doesn't specify how many times people have been hungover at work. It makes no distinction between people who might have only done it once or twice to people who might arrive at work hungover 3 or 4 times a week.