Getting Math Right: A Journalist Does Not Disappoint

So fairly often here I mock journalists for stupid, credulous, and lazy science reporting. I thought I'd give credit where it's due. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote two columns in a row that got math correct. Maybe we can get him made science editor?

Why coincidences are surprisingly common, and
Why the lottery is a mug's game

When programmers try too hard

I use Adobe Acrobat X a lot at work. Recently I wanted to search through a long document for a page that says "Day 2" (which divides the book into materials for Day 1 ... and materials for Day 2 of a training session).

I used the built-in search for the string "day 2" and it matched today.



This is the difference between Google and Adobe. Google's semantic interpretation of search strings more often than not finds useful matches. Adobe, with the best of intentions, confused and irritated me. This match is obviously stupid, but I doubt Adobe will fix their engine.

Cancer Institute Brags About Therapy That Doesn't Actually Exist Yet

The Roswell Park Cancer Institute recently issued this.

Wow, that press release overpromises. They claim "The new ... vaccine is expected to show great promise in patients with bladder, brain, breast, esophageal, gastrointestinal, hepatocellular, kidney, lung, melanoma, ovarian, prostate, sarcoma and uterine tumors."

Notice that they're claiming its effectiveness against many utterly dissimilar tumor types ... and note the key phrase "is expected to show great promise ..." It doesn't even show promise yet, it's just expected to eventually be promising. Did they just press-release the start of a research program, before a single experiment is even conducted?

I'm especially interested in the use of a one person anecdote, the story of Christine Sable. Ms. Sable didn't even receive the vaccine this release is touting, but the "story" implies that her not experiencing recurrence of her cancer demonstrates its effectiveness. The unstated premise is that all cancer vaccines are the same, but if I state it baldly like that, it's obviously stupid. In any case, by the release's own testimony she had about a 25% chance of no recurrence. With a sample size of one (given) the result is literally of no value in determining the effectiveness of the treatment.

They call it a "story" on their web page, either meaning to imply that it's coverage by an outside news source, or offering it as a "drop-in" story for cheap newspapers/magazines/web sites to use without making it clear it's a press release.

In the opinion of the author, the whole exercise is misleading and unethical and RPCI should be embarrassed.

What Makes My Spare Time Cool

So one reason this blog doesn't get updated so much: I work for I-CON. By now most people have heard of "cons". However, people may mistake all cons for something like San Diego ComicCon, or its New York equivalent, or Dragoncon in Atlanta.

All of those are fine events that bring many people great pleasure, but they're different from I-CON because they're for-profit businesses. We're a 100% volunteer organization. We have never paid anyone a salary in our 30+ year history. We do it because we find it satisfying and worthwhile.

Others may associate us with medium-specific or genre-specific things like Anime Next or Wicked Faire. Again, these are very cool events and I'm by no means criticizing them, but we're different. We are not specific. I-CON 31 will include:

• Media (TV and movies)
• Authors (written fiction and non-fiction)
• Comics
• Gaming
• Science and technology
  
• Anime
• Medieval and other historical recreations
• Anthropomorphics
• Performances
• More

This isn't adding a single game room to a traditional SF convention like Philcon, either. Our gaming, anime, or authors content would make small to medium-sized conventions by themselves.

(Again, no criticism of Philcon meant. I have been a speaker there several times and really enjoyed it.)

What I-CON gives, you, more than any other volunteer-run convention I'm aware of, is variety. You can find something for almost anyone. It's the perfect convention for families, in a way. One person can talk to famous scientists while another gets an autograph from the seventh Doctor , a third is playing poker, and the fourth watches anime music videos, and that's just the first couple of hours.

You can follow I-CON at the web site above (where you can join our non-spammy mailing list), or:

http://iconsf.posterous.com
http://iconsf.tumblr.com/
iconscifi on Facebook
I_ConSF on Twitter

One unique thing our crack Marketing team has put together: an online newspaper http://paper.li/I_ConSF/1312115140

I hope to see you at I-CON!

Carl Fink
I-CON 31 Assistant Event Chair

Pushing the limits of nitpicking

So, I was reading the quite funny Engineering Trivia page at the RF Cafe. At this writing, one item there reads, "If a passenger car with a stationary weight of 1000 kg (220 lbs) is accelerated from rest to 60 km per hour (40 mph), it gains something like the weight of a pinhead in the process. If the car could be made to travel at 100 times the velocity of sound (100 X 1200 km per hour) it would become about 100 kg heavier, and at 250,000 km per hour its weigh would be doubled. Traveling at 0.999% of the velocity of light, the car would weigh 2,000 times its stationary weight, and would plough deep furrows in the surface of the road."

And I immediately wrote to the owner of the RF Cafe, pointing out that this is totally wrong. In particular, at 250,000 km/hr (69 km/sec), the car's mass would actually increase by only a fraction of 1%, not double. The equation for mass increase with velocity is:

Where "C" is the speed of light in a vacuum, approximately 300,000 km/sec; V is the velocity of the mass, M1 is its rest mass, and M2 its relativistically adjusted mass.

So, in a sort of pinnacle of the nitpicking arts ... I just nitpicked relativistic calculations.

OK, clearly the original writer meant to say "250,000 km/SECOND", not hour, but that's why it's nitpicking.