Archive for February 4, 2012
Where Art And Math Collide…
by John Weckerle
Some time back we asked what our readers would like to see more of. We were a little surprised that the responses pretty much ran the gamut of what we were already offering, which felt good but didn’t really help with any decision-making (except, in the end, not to make any new decisions). Today we turn our attention to the responses that expressed enthusiasm for seeing a little digital art.
Last December your editor created and/or resurrected a series of fractal images in part to create some Christmas gifts. These were uploaded to Unclejohnsplace.com, your editor’s site for selling items bearing his art and photography. Presented here are images designed for placement on Kindle sleeves, one of which your editor grabbed for himself. More behind the cut!
Truly Theirs?
by John Weckerle
Hardly a day seems to go by on which one simply can’t turn on the radio or television news – or browse the internet – without one of the Republican presidential primary candidates accusing one of the others of making false statements. Frankly, with available time for radio listening at a premium, we’re getting a little tired of hearing the same thing over again. However, we have had our interest piqued by a particular question: just how often are these accusations of falsehood justified? How much can we trust these people?
To get a feel for the veracity of the primary candidates, we visited the Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact.com, a project of the Tampa Bay Times. The site sorts through statements by various personalities and rates them as True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire. We looked into the files for each candidate and compiled it into a single table. What we noted immediately was that the raw data were less useful than we’d like, because the number of evaluated statements by each candidate varied substantially. To rectify that, we calculated the percentage of the total number of statements represented by the ranking in question for each candidate.