Scientific and mathematical inaccuracies, misconceptions and errors that get under your skin

[ClockworkPenguin]

It's really annoying to hear people say that it's impossible to divide by zero.
It's entirely possible, it just opens up rifts in the space-time--similar to black holes. Some astronomers and scientists hypothesize that many of the universes black holes are the result of alien civilizations mass acceptance of the possibility of division by zero.

Not sure if you're being facetious, but I have it on the good authority (I understand that from your point of view I could be making it up, but I promise I'm not) of a 1st class maths graduate, that dividing by zero is indeed impossible.

Eh, it's quite easy, actually.

x / 0 = infinity.

DONE.

I to, used to think this, before it was violently beat out of me by said mathematician.

Also, you can prove it by contradiction.

x =/= 0

x/0= infinity

x=0*infinity

x=0

Furthermore, if you allow division by zero, there are several ways of proving that 1=2=3= any number. So it just isn't mathematically possible.

 

[Boba Frag]

11) "Ancient" or natural cures for anything (especially herbal supplements). Yeah, sometimes people stumbled upon stuff. That's how we discovered aspirin. However, our ancestors also drank Mercury and shit on the walls of their buildings.

An entire thread devoted to inaccuracies, broad, sweeping generalisations, myths, misconceptions and general ignorance....

And you post that.

Cue me disregarding an otherwise decent argument.

Drinking Mercury generally precludes people from having descendants, as does poor personal hygiene.

 

[Simonoly]

as a microbiologist the thing that realy REALY shits me is the anti-vaccination movement. i can not think of a single group of people doing more to drag humanity back into the dark ages. i just want to cry every time i hear of someone dying of whooping cough or diptheria because they thought the vaccine would give them autism. that claim alone drives me nuts. it was in 1 paper, which has been retracted cause of shit science, 9 of the 11 authors have distanced themselves from the conclusions of the paper, and the lead author, and the papers only defender has now lost his medical licence, there is no way that can be more disproved, but no its all "I wont protect my child, and by proxy the community from this easaly preventable disease because it will give my child down syndrome. i know this cause a woman who could tell you what a fucking T-cell is said so" sigh, so much lost hope for humanity.

otherwise, as said above, arguments agaist evolution, "you cant prove evolution" I can think of at least 3 simple experiments to prove evolution happening in a clear and disticnt fashon, but even if i showed them, they would sill argue against it.

I wish I could go back in time and assassinate Andrew Wakefield. That man ruined everything.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

snip

That makes me a sad panda. D:

I'm no maths genius (bwahaha that's an understatement.) but even I can see the difference between something being extinct and it being present in 3 cases.

 

[Azuaron]

It's really annoying to hear people say that it's impossible to divide by zero.
It's entirely possible, it just opens up rifts in the space-time--similar to black holes. Some astronomers and scientists hypothesize that many of the universes black holes are the result of alien civilizations mass acceptance of the possibility of division by zero.

Not sure if you're being facetious, but I have it on the good authority (I understand that from your point of view I could be making it up, but I promise I'm not) of a 1st class maths graduate, that dividing by zero is indeed impossible.

Eh, it's quite easy, actually.

x / 0 = infinity.

DONE.

I to, used to think this, before it was violently beat out of me by said mathematician.

Also, they you can prove it by contradiction.

x =/= 0

x/0= infinity

x=0*infinity

x=0

Furthermore, if you allow division by zero, there are several ways of proving that 1=2=3= any number. So it just isn't mathematically possible.

 

[Azuaron]

snip

That makes me a sad panda. D:

I'm no maths genius (bwahaha that's an understatement.) but even I can see the difference between something being extinct and it being present in 3 cases.

I'm reminded of... possibly Hitchhiker's Guide... where they talk about, since the universe is infinite, the average population of the universe (which is a finite number) is zero, and there is, therefore, no life in the universe.

 

[Vivi22]

OK, what the fuck? Thermodynamics and evolution? Where the fuck do you find someone who manage to mix those two? I hope that was a troll.

It's an argument thrown about by a lot of creationsits and the like. They basically think evolution defies the laws of thermodynamics because it represents an increase in order within a system when entropy should make that impossible.

They completely miss the fact that the Earth isn't a closed system and entropy can therefore decrease temporarily thanks to the energy we receive from the sun on a daily basis.

 

[YuberNeclord]

"Human beings only use 10% of their brains."

This one really bugs the crap out of me. I usually hear it said by 'experts' on late night tv who are trying to sell books to expand our memory or unlock our psychic potential or some such rubbish.

Human beings don't only use 10% of our brains, we only use 10% of our brains at any one time. The parts of our brains that are active while we are for instance, reading a book, are inactive or less active when we are listening to someone talk, singing a song, playing jump rope, etc.

 

[Bloodstain]

People who think that evolution means that a species just magically transforms into something better. Those are also the people who think that humans, due to 'evolution', will look very differently in a few hundred years.
No.

You know how evolution works? Those who cannot survive in a new environment die off, whereas those who can survive keep on living. That's evolution.
And since we are pretty good at adapting and surviving, we won't change.

 

[Lukeje]

I to, used to think this, before it was violently beat out of me by said mathematician.

Also, you can prove it by contradiction.

x =/= 0

x/0= infinity

x=0*infinity

x=0

Furthermore, if you allow division by zero, there are several ways of proving that 1=2=3= any number. So it just isn't mathematically possible.

You skipped over a very important step.
Assume x=/=0.

Define x/0 = infty.

Multiply both sides by zero.

0 x/0 = 0 infty, i.e. 0/0 = 0 infty.

You have made the implicit assumption that 0/0 = 1.
If we leave 0/0 undefined then we avoid the contradiction x = 0.
The set of complex numbers including infinity (of which the set of real numbers including the point at infinity is a subset) is the Riemann sphere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere

 

[Yopaz]

OK, what the fuck? Thermodynamics and evolution? Where the fuck do you find someone who manage to mix those two? I hope that was a troll.

It's an argument thrown about by a lot of creationsits and the like. They basically think evolution defies the laws of thermodynamics because it represents an increase in order within a system when entropy should make that impossible.

They completely miss the fact that the Earth isn't a closed system and entropy can therefore decrease temporarily thanks to the energy we receive from the sun on a daily basis.

I guess I can get aboard with that thought. However I could make arguments against this without bringing up the fact that biology and physics are two different things. Evolution is not an increase in order, it is a decrease in order. Several species originating from single celled organisms and branching out into a massive diversity.

Also those things you said about the fact that we're not in a closed system. at times I am not sure if Creationists are entertaining or just plain frustrating. They sure come up with a lot of awesome reasoning proving they don't have any scientific standpoint when they debate our origin.

 

[Vivi22]

I guess I can get aboard with that thought. However I could make arguments against this without bringing up the fact that biology and physics are two different things. Evolution is not an increase in order, it is a decrease in order. Several species originating from single celled organisms and branching out into a massive diversity.

Also those things you said about the fact that we're not in a closed system. at times I am not sure if Creationists are entertaining or just plain frustrating. They sure come up with a lot of awesome reasoning proving they don't have any scientific standpoint when they debate our origin.

It is truly mind boggling the things they come up with. You kind of have to laugh to stay sane when even their attempts to misapply science rely on further misrepresentations and misunderstandings.

 

[Yopaz]

It is truly mind boggling the things they come up with. You kind of have to laugh to stay sane when even their attempts to misapply science rely on further misrepresentations and misunderstandings.

I couldn't agree more. Trying to point out logic flaws or misunderstandings wont lead anywhere. Laugh and move on is the only way to deal with it.

 

[ProtoChimp]

"Evolution is just your opinion"

>.<

Oh boy, tell me about it. I actually explained to a guy (in slow, easy steps, of course) how natural selection works. His reply was that God made the world perfect, therefore God steps in all the time to stop the process of natural selection. There are some folks who just can't be helped.

1) One of my big ones is photo enhancement as shown on TV. I've done photo enhancement. You can do a lot but you cannot extract detail that is not present in the image. Characters on procedural shows are routinely depicted extracting mugshot-quality portraits from images so grainy and indistinct you can barely tell they are of people. I even saw one episode where they digitally turned a guy's head so they could see his face! His back was to the camera, meaning no image could have been captured in any way, but they got a picture of sufficient quality to issue a warrant!

To a lesser extent, all TV science bugs me: people surviving explosions by leaping away, computer hacking depicted as if it were a video game, adding the word DNA to make things sound complicated, explosions made of slowly rolling blobs of fire, that sort of thing.

2) The idea that science and religion are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed, like it's a boxing match and only one of them can leave the ring with the title.

Science is about rational facts. Religion is about irrational truth. They've got little if anything to do with each other. Science isn't out to kill God. Science doesn't care whether people believe or not. Religion cannot destroy science because it's awful hard to deny the viability of a system that has proven itself by giving us electricity, cars, jumbo jets, and cable TV.

People like to point to cell phones, modern medicine, and other inventions as representing the triumph of science. Yet the majority of people still believe in a supreme being. The church I drive past every morning on my way to work is packed to capacity on Sundays. Continuing the sports analogy, it's more like science is boxing and religion is, I dunno, water polo or something. There's simply no way they could ever interfere with each other.

3) People who don't know basic units of measurement, e.g. how many pints are in a gallon, bug the shit out of me. I would advocate going metric as a solution, but how could people ever be made to understand another system when they can't handle the system they were raised on?

4) People who can't do simple math. These folks need to die. There is no excuse, none, for not being able to figure out how many times 17 goes into 4913. I have worked around people who could not do basic addition and subtraction. I learned that shit in the first grade and built on it almost daily for the next twelve years. Where was everyone else??

I have an excuse for number 3, I was never taught units of measure ever. Or what verbs and pronouns and the terms of words like that. In fact I've only just learned them. I'm now 18. [sub]I hate my primary school [/sub]

 

[Vicarious Reality]

Gambler's fallacy is one that annoys me quite a bit. We like to call it Role-player's fallacy actually, after those times when you're convinced the universe owes you a natural twenty after an hour of nothing higher than a four, even though you know low rolls are random and owe you nothing.

Oh dear lord, do my gamers ever pull this. It's amazing how quickly they can turn from rational scientific minds to promoters of ritual superstition.

It's complete ridiculous poppycock.

However, keeping your D20s 20 side up so that the weight will slowly shift to the lower side of the die is a completely understandable and logical habit. I will not hear any dismissals of my logic.

OT: People equating energy(science) to energy(woo). The amount of pseudoscience that has been with that is painful to see.

OR, you could melt the die to shift the mass of it to the rear of the 20 side
Assuming your die is meltable

 

[Vivi22]

3) People who don't know basic units of measurement, e.g. how many pints are in a gallon, bug the shit out of me. I would advocate going metric as a solution, but how could people ever be made to understand another system when they can't handle the system they were raised on?

To be fair on this one, the metric system at least follows the same logic as our base ten number system and should be easier to understand by extension. People would still need to remember the names of each unit like anything else, but there's at least a logic to it.

I'm terrible with the imperial system because it seems so haphazardly thrown together. Plus I'm Canadian and was only formally taught the metric system. Despite both of these, I still regularly use pounds for weight, and inches and feet for short distances.

 

[AnarchistFish]

Weird how everyone is saying stuff to do with evolution. I don't think I've ever met someone who's denied evolution's existence.

2) The idea that science and religion are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed, like it's a boxing match and only one of them can leave the ring with the title.

Agreed.
but,

3) People who don't know basic units of measurement, e.g. how many pints are in a gallon, bug the shit out of me. I would advocate going metric as a solution, but how could people ever be made to understand another system when they can't handle the system they were raised on?

4) People who can't do simple math. These folks need to die. There is no excuse, none, for not being able to figure out how many times 17 goes into 4913. I have worked around people who could not do basic addition and subtraction. I learned that shit in the first grade and built on it almost daily for the next twelve years. Where was everyone else??

Really? I live in the UK and I don't know how many pints are in a gallon. I've probably been told but I'll always forgot a system that needlessly complicated. Metric triumphs all, that's what I always try to use if I can.
As for the maths thing. Wow, chill out. Actually, I'm doing A Level maths but not properly learning how to do division like that was always one of my secret shames. I kinda understand your point there, but with languages. Pisses me off how stubborn people in this country can be about not learning other languages. In some ways it's almost arrogant because they expect everyone they meet to be able to speak their language. Maybe they would if they never wanted to go out and discover the world. This is not really relevant to the topic though.

Global Warming is completely man made and IS KILLING THE ENVIRONMENT AND WE ARE ALL HORRIBLE PEOPLE FOR PRODUCING CARBON DIOXIDE AND SUFFOCATING MOTHER EARTH!

Except Global Warming is a natural process that's been going on for millions of years

This really really bugs me too. I also really hate the idea that people have that the Earth is screwed and that it's all our fault. I'm trying to read a book called "The Sceptical Environmentalist" which talks about something along these lines, although I haven't gotten far.

People incorrectly giving the definition of schizophrenia is a minor annoyance.

 

[Iron Criterion]

I dislike the whole notion of "Planet X cannot sustain carbon or silicon based life, therefore life can not conceivably exist here."

That seems stupid to me, because evolution shows us that life can flourish almost everywhere and anywhere, even in hostile environments lacking basic requirements.

Anyway this debate is of course dependent on whether aliens exist. Which leads me to my other pet hate - The Fermi Paradox.

 

[C. Cain]

OK, what the fuck? Thermodynamics and evolution? Where the fuck do you find someone who manage to mix those two? I hope that was a troll.

Well, someone else already answered this, but I feel compelled to say something anyway.
It is indeed a common argument among creationists. And for their standards it's not even far fetched. It boggles the mind.

 

[MasterJuice]

In space, when the engine stops the ships stops for some reason... This makes me RAGE. I mean, when a freaking video game series with the worst ending ever is telling people off about this, you know you suck at science! I don't have the video but it is the ME2 one with the drill instructor telling people about sir Isaac Newton.

This does depend on how the ship is moving in the first place. In Firefly, for example, they have a technobabble that makes the ship and everything on it appear to have no mass to the rest of the universe, allowing them to move at great speeds with very little force. When the technobabble engine dies (as in Out of Gas), the ship regains all its mass relative to the rest of the universe, and the tiny amount of force that had been pushing it is suddenly insufficient.

This "works" *cough* because, for a mass-less object, F=ma breaks down if m = 0, but, if the mass returns, something something and you stop.

Actually, this is still a bad explanation for a ship to stop moving in space. The technobabble may work to explain how they get the ship to start and stop without using much force, but once the ship is moving at a constant speed, force and acceleration become zero. Changing the mass no longer matters, because anything multiplied by zero is still zero.