As for the rest of your remarks. . . President Clinton may have left us with a recession (if he did, I wasn't aware of it, and I never liked the man), but his presidency was left a recession by our current president's father (remember all those massive layoffs that took place just as Clinton entered office?). Moreover, if one's fruits are how one is known, then our current president only pretends to faith. His actions are certainly louder than his words. He prefers to seek loopholes in the law, concerning the torture of prisoners, rather than to be faithful to Christ and not mistreat his enemies. He actively seeks to discover who leeks information about his administration (information which is not critical to national security) with a view to firing and prosecuting them, rather than follow Christ in turning the other cheek and blessing those who curse him. (Examples could go on.) Oh, and the major terrorist attack that Clinton left us with? That happened on our current "faith-based" president's watch! For the life of me, I can't see how that can be blamed on Clinton any more than the release of the Iranian hostages, during the early days of President Reagan's term, can be credited to President Carter.

After months of accusations FEMA wasn't helping Katrina victims quickly enough, CNN is horrified to learn the federal government may......

My brother has a PhD in Mathematics. He's undoubtedly a very smart guy, but I've never seen anyone so willing to utterly dismiss "inconvenient" facts, nor to focus on individual trees to the exclusion of the forest.

I work with numbers and at least in social science or decision-making, they aren't meant to be used out of their proper context. One still has to apply a bit of critical judgment when working with statistics. I have no patience with people who want what I like to call a single "Golden Number" (usually an average, for Pete's sake) that somehow explains everything. It doesn't exist.

Therefore, instead of majoring in my strong area (literature, or the humanities) I loaded up on math, statistics, and economics courses.

What I gained was invaluable: an entirely different way of thinking and of looking at the world. And one which, Nancy Hopkins aside, tends not to be the default mode for many women.

I think Richard Cohen may have inadvertently shown us what is wrong with most of his columns. The man never learned more than one mode of thinking, and this severely limits both his objectivity and his ability to examine many of the issues of the day.

But cocooned in his smug little world as he is, he will probably never be able to see that.

I do worry that someone who can not pass algebra perhaps won't be able to compute or estimate whether paying an extra $5000 for a hybrid vehicle makes financial sense if it gets 20% better mileage, gas stays around $2.50/gallon, they drive 12,000 miles a year, and they expect to keep the vehicle for 5 years.

As an engineer, when I look at headlines or articles in newspapers, I cringe at the complete ignorance of math or statistical reasoning, let alone probability risk assessment. It’s always the same:

if the problem is small i.e. 5000 people a year die of disease X, then they quote the number, (never mind that because of sample size the probability in any given year of dying maybe .000001%).

Reporting that special interest group K said that crime R occurs X times every Y seconds, even thought simple math would show that to be an impossibly large number.

Not understanding that cutting the RATE of growth, is not the same as cutting the funding.

Not understanding, that when an engineer says that chemical X could increase the mortality rate by one addition death over the next 20 years, he is not saying that someone will die because of chemical X.

That for most engineers, unless an idea violates a fundamental law of the universe, the idea is possible, hence, when a reporter asks “is it possible for this nuclear plant to meltdown?”, and the engineer responds “there is a one in 18.4 million chance per operating hour” the head line should not read “ENGINEER SAYS PLANT WILL MELTDOWN!!!!”

As for Cohen, I’m exactly the opposite, I have spell check and grammar check, why learn anything as useless as English, hell 80% of the people I work with, English isn’t even their primary language. What’s more, I have the ability to check the black box calculator, question the answer, and ensure that the answer makes sense. Unless reporters have the mental tools to rationally question the results, they are just passing along and printing what’s given to them. That truly is work for a computer.

This is an article by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. The gist of it is that he is replying to a young student that he, too, doesn't see a need for algebra to graduate:Here's the thing, Gabriela: You will...

For the most part, I’m pretty dismissive of the pundit class. Most odious among them are the ones who still carry the torch for liberalism — Krugman, Herbet, Dionne, Oliphant, etc. But there is one who has hit it out of the park with a r...

In university, he decidedly not going down the maths/sciences route, which if is fine as his true talents lay elsewhere. But he was still smart enough to take a Statistics class to learn how to understand an increasingly important (and plotical) aspect of modern life.

Innumeracy is the bane of journalists--Google the term and go to the Amazon links, it's an entire field of publication. Reporters cannot accurately report that which they do not understand. And numbers, as Cohen often demonstrates, are far beyond the majority. As a result, we all lose through misrepresentation of reality, intentional or not.

Cohen's a jerk.

Q: What do you call someone in math class doing the crossword and
fiddling with an iPod instead of paying attention?
A: A journalist.
Meet Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, who thinks kids shouldn’t have to take that darned old math. It&#8217...