Kate,

As so sagely observed by The Tick:

"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit."

Were these people serious?????
Mathematics reactionary? Chemistry serves the elite?
These people have bigger problems than just their political philosophies.
Good Grief! Yikes!

Never underestimate how stupid people can be.
enough

From Rabble:

"The uses of mathematics are primarily to serve the elites and powerful within society. Thanks to mathematics, the United States was building rocket ships to collect pebbles on the moon while they had hundreds of millions of their own citizens at home starving to death. Mathematics is great for building nuclear war heads, weapons technology, software to line the pockets of millionaire fat cats, or creating non-sense to feed the bullshit rationale for junk sciences such as economics. But for the poor working family just trying to get by, mathematics has very little to offer."

...hundreds of millions of their own citizens at home starving to death.

Gee, the US is suffering from genocide!?! Talk about disconnected from reality.

Mathematics in and of itself is evil!

What a stunning moral deduction.

I won't even start to dignify such utter balderdash.

I loved the polymer comment.Should we go back to mercury based tooth fillings?

Breathing consumes oxygen, and produces greenhouse gases as a result. This is part of a capitalist-zionist plot. Capitalist robber barons breathe. Christians breathe. Zionists breathe. Men breathe.

Is there a progressive way to breathe? Or should all progressives stop breathing?

From "The Great Leap Forword"

"A more radical faction led by Mao Zedong argued that the best way to finance industrialisation was for the Government to take control of agriculture, thereby establishing a monopoly over grain distribution and supply. This would allow the State to buy at a low price and sell much higher"

Where have I heard this plan before?

Also, I find that Rabble thing more than a little disturbing.
"I've come to realize that probably one reason I struggled with algebra, geometry et.al., was that it seemed to me that these were basically reactionary academic disciplines"

Or maybe it's cuz you're a complete IDIOT?!?!?

"Thanks to mathematics, the United States was building rocket ships to collect pebbles on the moon while they had hundreds of millions of their own citizens at home starving to death."

Nice to see math not getting in the way of that claim. US population during last moon landing 210 million. I had not realised that in 1972 the US had the entire poulation starving. And I had heard the great depression was tough.
enough

Maybe, shaken, that it's just that all the "progressives" want a tax to be collected on all the oxygen consumed?

(Sorry Kate, couldn't resist a tie-in plug to my website.)

rabble.

Where unemployed arts majors discuss their fantasy world. And don't understand why reality doesn't match up with their fairytopia.

Stultifying.

If hundreds of millions of Americans really are starving to death, shouldn't the noble lefty who wrote that post be down there right now, feeding them, instead of noodling around on their computer up here in Canada, talking to a bunch of fellow idiots about nothing?

Just askin'

Must have been posted by an NDP economist.

How could they possibly know if there are 'millions' starving? Isn't that using MATH!?!? EVIL EVIL MATH is making millions starve!!!! If we didn't have MATH, we wouldn't be able to tell you that MILLIONS were starving!!!

Okay, I'm convinced one of us is in there writing material for Monty Python skits. Who is it? Someone is joking about doing away with language and thought, as 'tools the powerful use to oppress the poor'.

"I'd appreciate it if people could show me how this discipline can have progressive uses."

-as he types the message into the magical communication box on his desk.

Wow, what's the point of even trying to talk to people this stupid?

I do not understand why anybody is surprised by any of this. These moonbat/dippers live in another dimension. I remember back in the late 80's, I was campaign manager for a gent running for local council. We were debating welfare housing projects, and where they should be located(NDP MPP pulled a NIMBY). The moonbat candidate, after the pushing of a few hot buttons, actually said that if she had her way, all households would be forced to house strangers, if the space was available. So, in effect, she was saying that I would have to house a crackhead in my spare bedroom. MIND BOGGLING!

Jesu Chriti!

Is this Rabble twit for real? This is really dumb assertion even by the bone-stupid standards of the leftard set.

Good god man! No wonder the dippers have no understanding of economics, they can't even count!

Bloody lefty retards.

Apparently "progressives" don't value electricity all that much. Ton 'o math involved.

"The uses of mathematics are primarily to serve the elites and powerful within society."

That and toasters.

Hahaha. The 'moderator' Michelle is so entertaining. Right now she is scrambling to cover/translate for the stupidity of the original post. Michelle the moderator is posting what the poor math deprived bozo 'meant' to say. And she is busy, busy suspending people who do not show the proper 'respect' for the bozo.

I recently read a book called "Intellectual Impostures" by Sokal and Bricmont. In part it details how many academic postmodernists consider science to have no more validity than any other world view - indeed these academics question the very existance of "objective reality".

The book arose out of the famous "Sokal Affair", where one of the authors submitted a paper to a leading postmodern journal. The science discussed in the paper was complete rubbish, but it appealled to the sentiments of the journal editors. When the article was published, Sokal announced that the article was a joke. The ramifications of this hoax still echo today.

The discussion on rabble should not come as a surprize. If, as some postmodernist contend, there is no reality and science is just a narrative among entrenched interests, then any stupidity must be treated with the utmost respect, so long as its politics are correct.

That these "mathematics denyers" write their opinions on modern computers and send them around the world instantly with a press of a button is the height of irony.

rabbit, you may call it irony, but I have a few other words to describe it:

stupidity
hypocrisy
idiocy
lunacy

And these losers are teaching are children variations of all this rubish. Should scare the hell out of all reasonable thinking folks.

I was impressed at how many people piled onto the babble thread and told the original poster he was a doofus.

What saddened me was the thought that all those smart people were even reading Babble/Rabble in the first place...

And yes, everyone should read about the Skokal Hoax. You may never believe a "study" in a "peer reviewed" journal again.

Sorry, I meant "our" children.

How come Paris and George Clooney, Britney et al aren't on their hit list after talk about doing nothing and sponging buckets of money. Wouldn't the collective bank accounts of Hollywood not keep all these folks living up to the standard they believe they deserve.

These people aren't stupid, they are however lazy, covet their neighbours lifestyle one in which they are unwilling to earn. Rather they would simply take what others produce because after all they are entitled. They have zero interest in helping anyone else not to mention hurting as much as possible anyone who is smarter richer or more industious than they are.

Kingstonlad:

They all work for me. A massive rupture in the mind-reality connector is my clinical diagnosis.

Two progressive uses of mathematics:

1. Determining the amount of wealth to confiscate from working Canadians.
2. Measuring the global warming consensus.

Meanwhile, here at home, Kinsella's been drinkin' that funny Kool-Ade again...

"Robert Pickton cannot receive a fair trial anywhere in Canada. It is
possible, in fact, that he can't receive a fair trial anywhere on the planet."

Ah... Warren... he had severed heads in his freezer.

Ahhh diddumms, did some nasty capitalist beat you up and steal your teen-talk Barbie. (Like,ya know the one that went "Math is hard, I like shopping" the one that mommie bought you instead that nasty toy gun)

Never mind Uncle Jack Liarton will solve all your problems for you, just keep voting for him.

I note the guy that got banned was expressing his surprise that the allegedly more intelligent people on the left would say things like this. I think somebody is going to be doing some tall thinking about his political orientation after this.

Rabbit, i remember that incident about the phony essay - i think the writer proved that gravity didn't really exist, it was just some kind of social, repressive construct. He used all the right terms and they bought it....

Looking at the Rabble's comments on mathematics in general and their mathmatical illnumeracy, it simply proves the old equasion = "Nothing mutilplied by zero is still Nothing."

Uhm, you do realize that those who are denouncing math are getting just as hard a ride on rabble as they are here, right?

Besides, rabble is a bulletin board, not a blog (reports on the CBC notwithstanding), so posts there are completely open to anyone.

I don't think you can judge rabble.ca on just this one post.

Neo:

Any fool can see that showing pictures of severed heads in Pickton's freezer would be highly prejudicial to a jury.

John,
This rabble posting is a pretty accurate sampling of rabble posts in general.
Then again, what do I know? That would entail doing math.
enough

A leftist paranoid when confronted with evidence sees reality (and math) as a plot.

Now the envirofreaks have completed the loop. They've quite amazingly managed to link climate change and terrorism:

news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070124/sc_nm/climate_security_dc

Climate change seen fanning conflict and terrorism

By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent Wed Jan 24

LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming could exacerbate the world's rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said on Wednesday.

"We have to reckon with the human propensity for violence," Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations, told a London conference on "Climate Change: the Global Security Impact."

"Violence within and between communities and between nation states, we must accept, could possibly increase, because the precedents are all around."

John Mitchell, chief scientist at Britain’s Met Office, noted al Qaeda had already listed environmental damage among its litany of grievances against the United States.

“You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries,” al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden wrote in a 2002 “letter to the American people.”

And I quote from the introduction to the book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos - tinyurl.com/2taddd

"Innumeracy, an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance, plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens. The same people who cringe when words such as "imply" and "infer" are confused react without a trace of embarrassment even to the most egregious of numerical solecisms.

"I remember once listening to someone at a party drone on about the difference between "continually" and "continuosly". Later that evening we were watching the news, and the TV weathercaster announced that there was a 50 percent chance of rain for Saturday, and and 50 percent chance for Sunday, and concluded that there was therefore a 100 percent chance of rain that weekend.

"The remark went right by the self-styled grammarian, and even after I explained the mistake to him, he wasn't nearly as indignant as he would have been had the weathercaster left a dangling participle. In fact, unlike other failings which are hidden, mathematical illiteracy is often flaunted: "I can't even balance my checkbook", "I'm a people person, not a numbers person", or "I always hated math".

"Part of the reason for this perverse pride in mathematical ignorance is that its consequences are not usually as obvious as are those of other weaknesses. Because of this, and because I firmly believe that people respond better to illustrative particulars than they do to general exposition, this book will examine many real-world examples of innumeracy -- stock scams, choice of spouse, newspaper psychics, diet and medical claims, the risk of terrorism, astrology, sports records, elections, sex discrimination, UFOs, insurance and law, psychoanalysis, parapsychology, lotteries, and drug testing among them."

(PS: Colby Cosh at www.colbycosh.com noted this matter on January 22 at 3:42 pm and provided a reference to Mark Chu-Carroll's tinyurl.com/24ozt3 blog entry from January 17 at 2:10 pm.)

No you can't judge rabble based on one post. BUT you will find that this one post (after you HAVE judged rabble on numerous posts) is very representative of rabble.

The scariest thing of all is that these people are allowed to vote. And drive cars.

I just wish they would identify themselves so I could ask them to 'break a $20' by giving me 3 tens and 2 fives.

Evidently, "their" aren't any progressive uses for spelling, either. Homonyms! Another reactionary neocon plot.

(Now some "progressive" is going to accuse me of being homonymophobic).

Mathematics only serves the elites????
Those dastardly Greeks with their geometry, and those sneaky Hindus with their zero, those evil Arabs with their "algebra"....oh forget it..

But, but, but... don't you UNDERSTAND???

If there were to be no math, well then... two plus two could be ANYTHING you wanted it to be.

To the liberal mind that is important.

Given that the topic title of the discussion is "Are their any progressive uses for higher math?" I think someone should ask if there are any progressive uses for English.

wisdom is not the same as knowledge. fools will continue to come forward as sad as this may be.

"Any fool can see that showing pictures of severed heads in Pickton's freezer
would be highly prejudicial to a jury.
Posted by: rabbit at January 25, 2007 02:54 PM"

hey, good old rabble rabbit... way to strike a blow for progressives,
but i'm guessin' it's not as prejudicial as this...

UPDATE: Kinsella sure knows how to pick 'em

If you were gonna set yourself up as a spokes-rocker for truth and justice...
bearing in mind that nobody is disputing that dishonesty and injustice are
legion in this wicked world... you might not want to kick it off by
defending poor ole' farmboy "Willie" Pickton...

"The most damaging witness is a woman named Lynn Ellingson, Staff Sgt. Adam says,
who has told police she saw Mr. Pickton "skinning a girl hanging on a hook.""

another great liberal tenet... don't show the jury any "really horrific" evidence
because they might take a dislike to the poor defendant.

think you might change your mind if pickton peeled your daughter like a grape?

just askin'.

*

No wonder dion has come up with a new measure for money, megotons. math is evil.

All of this reminds me of a quote (I think it was Einstein) who said:

"There are two things I know to be infinite: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe."

I'm not sure if the math guy was a troll (he sounded stupid enough to be a real Leftist). The chemistry and language opponents were assuredly taking the piss, just as the Dihydrogen Monoxide opponents do.

The sad thing is that so much of the rabble was taking the math idiot seriously and trying to explain the "progressive" uses for math. Arts majors arguing for math against Arts major opponents. Hilarious.

The only truly numerate folks were killing themselves laughing in the post and on other sites that linked in derisively. Math and Science have had problems with "progressives" becoming infatuated with abstruse investigations to avoid the taint of the real world and "complicity" with the power structure. Many of them jumped into number theory and topology as assuredly abstract subjects that would never have any use. Several decades of improvements in computers later and number theory becomes a key element in cryptography and is intimately entwined with the most "dastardly" military applications. God definitely has a sense of humour.

The true question is what use are progressives to society? Other than waiting tables and making lattes I can't think of anything, and these would be accomplished with much less surliness and political agitation by immigrants, as Mexicans in the US and Poles and Czechs in the UK have proved. Abolish Arts Faculties and open immigration from Poland and the Czech Republic!

And then someone says this:

"Let's talk about the average Joe"

Ooops. The irony: mathematics crept in.

Rabble is living proof that lefties are totalitarian dummies. There is clearly a segment that would banish mathematics, given the chance.

I said to myself after reading the first post, WTF?, but then after someone else agreed with him mere words failed me...

Neo Warren is right he can't get a fair trial til his life is on the line.

The math one is beautiful and is telling as to why canada is so screwed up.

Does anyone here really give a s--t what happens to Pickton?
Give him a fair trial then hang him high.
Quit worrying whether or not he gets a fair trial.
Get rid of the C-cks--ker and get on with life.

ya, thats right w kinf$%#head, he will not get a fair trial....it will not be fair because we will not be allowed to execute the motherf#$%er....I think it is time that a dialogue was started concerning the execution of extreme murderers...you know, olsen, bernardo, pickton....I mean, enough is enough...and do not worry WK, your scumbag lawyer friends will make bags and bags of money....

Neo:

Are you too dim-witted to recognize a joke when you read it?

Just askin'

Neo, you highjacked this discussion when at 2:46 above you wrote, "Meanwhile..." and completely changed the topic, and again at 3:59 when you compounded your error. Rattfuc and kingstonlad are complicit. I think you owe us an apology.

Vitruvius, you used numbers in that response. And to arrange them into times! How dare you!

Very droll, Shaken ;-) Here's an good example of how even simple mathematics can help us understand the world around us better: my Mark Steyn letter of the week award winning Guns, Fraud & Big
Numbers in Canada essay at tinyurl.com/ybnozb

I'm interested by the h/t comment,

"But, for all the faults of, for example, Small Dead Animals,"

Aside from off-topic posts, and perhaps Kate not having high-speed internet, it seems to me the main fault here is when lefties visit, they are inarticulate, illogical and usually ill-mannered.

Topic : Are there any progressive uses for higher math ?
Progressive Response : Who needs higher math ?
You had me at division .
This was a trick question and I won .....right ?

You know, I was absolutely dumbfounded by the third comment at that Rabble thread. Don't know the uses of math!?! Gee, let's try baking, growing vegetables in a garden, carpentry (jesus h. christ you need to know trig to frame a house!)and on and on! Do you suppose these moron think their bosses calculate their pay without math!?! wait a sec. Anyone this genuinely dumb is incapable of holding a job. I'm serious. You couldn't even work at MacDonalds, fercrissakes! Words fail me at how absolutely astounded I am at that thread. When I calm down I'll tell you a story about being math-addled. Jeezus.

"Da vision is da vision. What kind of da vision is da vision? Da vision is da vision and when you have da good vision, it's because it's visioned." --Paraphrase of Jean Chretien

Good Lord. Only communists really know how to attack a completely scientific endeavour through political means.

There are only 10 types of people in the world.
Those who understand binary.
And those who don't.

There is no such thing as a completely scientific endeavour. Are we not men? Are you Devo?

There are three kinds of people, those who can count, and those who can't.

Actually, when I started my technology consulting firm, I named it "Great Leap Forward". The intentional irony was lost on everyone.

Gee Ted, you are on a roll (as opposed to the dole)...

More proof , as if any where needed. That when the asylums where closed down. The indicted went into politics & journalism. Now the mental break down, known as Socialism Plus (meaning ant-Semitism combined with luddite emotional based hate for any innovation or truth.) has been contracted by Greater Toronto. With its supposed gurus of anti- intellectualism, to sound off. Utilize double speak with twisted minds inducted with nothing but false premises, drowning in fabrication. Employing Rabble & other like forums, to spread their psychosis.

That they fall so quickly into this dislike of any good judgment, is troubling. That there is no logic at all in their cognitive process. That to me, this is a symptom of barbarism. Mockery for any one who knows more than them .So they can live perpetually in rational defiance of social & moral authenticity.

Too sad!!!

sorry for going off topic

A truly superlative post Kate.

The author at Babble must be one of these self proclaimed liberal intellectuals.

I don't even like math--'never did--but even I know how important it is to my enjoyment of life. (Other people, who are good at math, keep a lot of things going, not to mention invent a lot of things that I enjoy having/using, etc.)

Just knowing that I'm late to this post involves some mathematics. Let's see, if there are almost 70 posts, there probably won't be that many more...not that many people are likely to read mine. Given these probabitlies, is it worth my while, or Kate's band width, to even bother...?

Hey, math is EVERYWHERE! It's not just for the powerful or the elite. I'm neither.

The best math teacher I ever had--who got angry! at kids who didn't care about math--used to say with messianic fervour, much to our amusement, "Numbers are everywhere dense!"

Well, so are the idiots over at Rabble.

The reality behind such a posting is the erroneous assumption that any academic discipline should have a "progressive" purpose - or any political purpose.
Universities are rife with this disease throughout almost all disciplines - that academic studies should serve the great utopian socialist revolution - as if recycled marxism was the only justification for the advancement of human learning.

In the current system the first step to learning isn't learning your ABC's - it is to learn to feel guilty for having enough brains, initiative and money to get you into university in the first place. Then you can take courses that teach you how to assuage that guilt by redistributing the property and wealth of successful people to failures.

Where Math comes in is the progressive formula:

"If Johnny has three apples apples and Sally has only one apple, how many apples should Sally take from Johnny so that everything can be fair and even?
Answer: three apples. Johnny is a white male member of the oppressor middle class and therefore for him to have anything is a social inequity."

I know why socialists hate math. Read this, and take note of the post by "Peter Bjørn Perlsø" on Jan 25 2007 @ 11:47 pm as he demolishes a lefty-frootloops pipedream about installing solar panels on every rooftop in the USA.

... Assume every household needs a 100 m^2 installation (this will decrease as PV becomes more efficient). 100 m^2 *1454 $/m^2 = 1.454 million US $/household.

... SO, the original figure for the whole US would be 800e12 US$ divided by (2*2*4*2) = 800e12/32 = 25 trillion US$.

That is, twice the current GNP of the US. And this is with wildly optimistic expectations.

Socialists live in a dreamworld in which government intervention banishes scarcity and repeals the laws of physics, economics, mathematics, and primate behavior (among others).

But how do they excuse such willful ignorance? Prof. Von Mises put his finger on it:

According to the doctrine of Marxian polylogism, a man's ideas necessarily reflect his class position; they are nothing but a disguise for the selfish interest of his class and are irreconcilably opposed to the interests of all other social classes ... the Marxians say, the proletarians are right and the bourgeois are wrong. There is no need, therefore, to refute an author who disagrees with the "progressive" teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; all that is needed is to unmask his bourgeois background and show that he is wrong because he is either a bourgeois or a "sycophant" of the bourgeoisie ... [Russian Bolsheviks] distinguish between "bourgeois" and "proletarian" doctrines even in mathematics, physics, biology, and medicine.

In other words, just plain laziness.

"... Assume every household needs a 100 m^2 installation (this will decrease as PV becomes more efficient). 100 m^2 *1454 $/m^2 = 1.454 million US $/household."

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

First of all, 100 * 1454 = 145400, not $1.454 million.

The earth receives about 1360 W/m^2 from the sun. Of that, at mid-north-american latitudes, about 800w/m^2 reaches the earth's surface, for on average 1/3 of the day (ie none at night; little in the mornings, evenings, or cloudy days). That works out to 6.4 kW.hr per square meter per day. Typical commercial solar panels are around 10% efficient (with some experimental ones hitting 22%), so call it 640 W.hr per square meter. A house with 100m^2 of solar panels would thus produce 64kWhr of energy on an average day, or roughly 1920 kilowatt hours per month. Compare that to your monthly bill.

As for the high price of solar panels: High prices on existing technologies drive investment in exploration of newer, lower-cost technologies. I'm currently working on a Carnot-cycle heat engine electrical generator, which uses an array of Fresnel lenses to collect sunlight. These will be of much higher efficiency than PV panels (at our operating temperatures, around 60% - and yes, that includes losses for friction) and a much lower cost per square meter. The high price of PV panels is driving the demand for my company to produce these prototypes. Economics works :D

And yes, I use a lot of math...

Rattfuc also apologizes for off-topic comments.

"The uses of mathematics are primarily to serve the elites and powerful within society. Thanks to mathematics, the United States was building rocket ships to collect pebbles on the moon while they had hundreds of millions of their own citizens at home starving to death....hundreds of millions of their own citizens at home starving to death"

Do these people that write this 'babble' ever experience joy in their lives?

I knew this guy who was a socialist, he was always going on about the evils of free markets/capitalism, Americans, American Imperialism, McDonalds, big oil ....and Coca Cola.

Occasionally, he would invite me to a guest-lecture by some left wing professor to convince me to join the cause.(one of these clowns, I believe, was a contra from S. America trying to get people to boycott Coca Cola so that people would lose their jobs and really have something to b*tch about.) Anyways, we kept in touch. He really changed when he went back to school to get a degree in business and learned that capitalism/free market economics were not evil at all. He's now a financial planner, helping people make their dreams come true. He was always the one to try to get in the last word. Now, it was my turn again to say "see, I told you so."

Are there investment/financial planning seminars these people can go to?? I think they need hope so they can experience joy in their lives and not feel so down. What a bunch of sad-sacks.

Ed Minchau, good catch, I am guilty of laziness for not checking the newsgroup poster's math more carefully. Call me lefty. Your solar panels sound great. I guess you won't be needing any taxpayer subsidies then (I'm against subsidies for tried and true technology too)

BTW where does one store solar energy for use at night when it is most needed ... and how much should we knock off that 10% efficiency figure for said storage?

We're looking at evacuated flywheels on Halbach array bearings for energy storage. If we do them right, they could be 95% efficient. Whoops, there's that dang bourgeois mathematics again.