Michi’s blog

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/article2011061.ece

This is a rather atrocious article giving yet another ad hoc “formula” to compute some numeric measurement of something-or-other. In this particular case, it’s about cleavage, and how to avoid showing too much of it, but these “formulae” plague us every time some journalist wants to math up their reporting.

What caught my eye in this particular case was the people they lined up to back up the story.

Mathematician William Hartston, who holds an MA in Maths from Cambridge University, reckons this will save a lot of showbiz blushes on the red carpet.

“A girl can use this formula to see whether her outfit is counted as decent,” says William, author of Drunken Goldfish and Other Irrelevant Scientific Research.

So. He has a Masters in mathematics. Big whoop. Doesn’t seem to make him more able to distinguish nonsense when he sees it.

Oh, and their arithmetic is plain wrong – it doesn’t do what they claim it would. They try to apply it with the computation given by 0x70x(20×5+32)/75 = 123.2, and disregard, completely, the fact that that zero up front means the whole thing is zero. I’ve tried, and I cannot at a first shot figure out what they THINK they are doing.

This rant was brought to you from a day filled with nothing done and an increasing feeling that I should do more.