If-Then Knots ---------------------->

Innumeracy Watch

I have no comments on the main point of this article expressing skepticism about Peak Oil.  It's not an issue that I have personally researched very much, though my sense is that when it comes to oil we've got most of the low-hanging fruit at least.  (There are other reasons besides Peak Oil to get off our petroleum addiction, like global warming and resource nationalism).  In any case, I wanted to call attention to an instance of innumeracy in a popular scientific article:

The reason we have seen so many bad guesstimates is that even the most advanced technology can't tell us how much crude the Earth holds. No method has been devised to search for new reserves with precision, or even to gauge the true size of known reservoirs. While the mainstream view is that oil resources are finite, no one knows just how finite they are.

Sweet Idea and Other Stuff

Eight.  Other interesting stuff: a shocking ethno-linguistic discovery; a story about fishish hands; here comes the sun (it's all right); I didn't know the bible said this; Starbucks lies;  Bushcronium discovered; liberalization is innevitable, but not too inevitable; Bush doesn't want a pen pal but maybe he should; and lastly, this is nifty.

Happy pi Day

3/14!!!  "a number that is irrational, transcendental. . . and unique."

Around the country Intelligent Design mathematicians are calling into question the existence of pi. Faith-based mathematicians doubt that there can be an "irrational" number that secularist mathematicians claim is also "transcendental," a claim they consider to be a direct challenge to God. ID-mathematicians claim to have derived the fact that pi is exactly 3.0, which is the value suggested in the Bible (Kings 7:23). Some ID-mathematicians have claimed that their calculations confirm the Bible while others have sought to distance their mathematical and theological views. A number of school boards are considering whether to "teach the controversy."