Oreo Innumeracy

"30% Less Fat per 2 Cookies"? How much less fat per 1 cookie?

OK, I can think of a plausible reason* why it's phrased that way, but mathematically, it just sounds stupid.



* Because 2 cookies is the serving size, and maybe there's a legal requirement that any claims about "less fat" must be expressed in terms of the serving size.

Strange Duck Behavior

It feels like something out of a Gary Larson cartoon.

The local ducks have suddenly learned to hang out on rooftops. I've lived in the same house for 18 years, and I've never seen this before, but suddenly, this year, more and more ducks and geese are perching and even sometimes nesting on rooftops.

Here are two pictures I took yesterday of a duck on the house next door, a good 20 feet above the ground. It looks like he is surveying the territory prior to swooping down and nabbing some unsuspecting child.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Royalists in France

One of the things I find embarrassing about Canada is its devotion to the monarchy; it seems remarkably childish to me. As columnist Allan Fotheringham once remarked, "Grown-up nations do not need, as head of state, a woman -- however nice --who lives across a large ocean in a castle in a foreign country."

But on a recent trip to France, I saw something even more strange: a poster for the Alliance Royale. This is, believe it or not, a political movement to restore the monarchy in France. It seems largely spearheaded by someone named Yves-Marie Adeline, who actually has a blog for his royalist views. There is also an FAQ which is remarkable for its obliqueness, although it does forthrightly admit that "A law that applies uniformly to everyone leads to injustice".

Luckily, this party hasn't won any seats, as far as I can tell. Indeed, they seem to be garnering something like .03% of the vote.

Is IDiocy Genetic?

Far-right crackpot Phyllis Schlafly weighs in on Expelled, repeating the usual lie that "Dr. Richard Sternberg, a biologist ... lost his position at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution after he published a peer-reviewed article that mentioned intelligent design."

Now I see that her son, Roger Schlafly, has the same affliction: about the transparent effort to relabel creationism as intelligent design in the book Of Pandas and People he writes: "Judge Jones found that the Pandas book was subsequently edited to remove references to creationism, and made inferences about the motives of the Pandas authors. I think that it is bizarre to denigrate folks for complying with a court decision."

This transparent effort to exonerate the writers of Of Pandas and People for their editing just won't fly. It is completely obvious to anyone with connected brain cells that the replacement of "creationism" with "intelligent design" was not a good-faith effort to "comply with a court decision", but a dishonest and deceptive way to make an end-run around the intent of the decision.

Roger Schlafly thinks "Evolutionists [are] preoccupied with motives". But in the law, as in everyday life, motive is often taken into account when judging the actions of people: Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea.

It seems that, in this case, IDiocy has a genetic component.

Science Quiz

This is the laboratory of a Nobel-prize winning scientist, located on a street in Europe bearing the name of that scientist. Whose laboratory is it?

Paris

One of the nicest things about France is that streets are named after writers, painters, mathematicians, scientists, and other people of accomplishment. Here's a picture of a street sign in the 14th arrondissement, showing a street named after Étienne Bezout (1730-1783).

I became interested in Bezout a few years ago when I wrote an article entitled "Origins of the Analysis of the Euclidean Algorithm" for Historia Mathematica. One of Bezout's accomplishments was his textbook, Cours de Mathématiques à l'Usage des Gardes du Pavillon et de la Marine, which went through dozens of editions, first under Bezout, and later, at the hands of others. Supposedly even Napoleon I learned mathematics from Bezout's book.

Do Books on Atheism Belong in the Science Section?

Here's a picture of the science section at a bookstore in Trudeau airport in Montreal:



Among the books prominently displayed are

• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
  
  
• Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist
  
  
• Michael Onfray, In Defense of Atheism
  
  

I don't understand why these books aren't in the religion or philosophy section.

Denyse O'Leary Will Teach You The Craft of Writing

Oh, boy, I really can't wait for this workshop, where I can pay $359 to hear Denyse O'Leary, dean of Canadian journalism, instruct me on how to construct sentences --- like this one:

Phyllis Schlafly, the nemesis of radical feminists who is just SO not invited to Hill Clinton's inagural (which may never happen anyway, the way things are going) puts in her two cents worth on the Expelled movie about the trials of being an intelligence design theorist in an ivy league of Darwin cultists:

It really takes an exceptional talent to combine this much fatuousness, name-calling, misspelling, and an inability to provide the correct name of her own movement, all in a single sentence.