First, Second, …

1st, 2nd, …

And, because this chart is kinda tricky to read, here’s the log-scaled version of the same chart:

For the log-chart, I stopped stacking the numbers.

ETA: Changed the log-chart from a line-chart to a bar-chart after feedback from the readership of bOINGbOING. Hello and welcome!

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.

In this post, Scott also offers, quite magnanimously, to setup and host subversion repositories for any mathematician who happens to want to start collaborating using subversion.

Which, to my mind, immediately prompts the question: why stop there? I’ve had ideas about setting up a free and easy to use platform for modern communication in the mathematical community before; but they were along the lines of duplicating wordpress.com‘s efforts; which isn’t really something that pays off on your efforts. Reading this, though, raised a new idea.

Why not setup a server – preferably with a university data center as backing – which dispenses free platforms with the following contents:

• Source control. Preferably option on subversion, git, mercurial – or some such selection of modern and wide-spread systems.
• Wiki, Blog, Ticket system – a wordpress installation, with LaTeX, and a Trac installation connected to the source control system in use would do quite well.
• Heavy access control: one of the worries I hear pronounced often is that running a blog with your mathematical ideas display the ideas to the world before you get to publish them, thus risking you getting scooped on your research. This worry would be, to some extent, ameliorated by serving things optionally over https, by having a decent and robust access control system, and by having draconian privacy statements for the site administration.
• LaTeX compile farm – why not set this thing up so that it can build your papers for you? That way we really end up building the mathematician’s sourceforge!

So, I guess this post is a call for volunteer implementers. I’ll launch the ideas in the fora I have access to – I’m headed for a faculty retreat tomorrow discussing a research project which seems to include Web2.0 for research communication as a topic, and will see if I can propose the ideas there; and it’s just the thing to discuss with the workgroup Information und Kommunikation of the DMV too. But just because I’m looking for people who want to run this in no way implies anyone reading this shouldn’t.