The Royal Institution
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2024
1:07:34 · 3.3M views · Mar 7, 2019
Matt Parker's Royal Institution talk based on his book Humble Pi, covering everyday mathematical mistakes and spurious patterns that went wrong in engineering and software. It mixes stand-up comedy with stories of coincidence and error.
Used as a funny, accessible reference for coincidences, spurious patterns and maths errors.
4 comments from Hacker News
Nothing, as long as we learn the art of discerning coincidence from causation. An important part of that is deliberately noticing how many possibilities we're picking amongst when we single out a coincidence. Here's a funny anecdote about the same topic: this video
He also covered this in a more recent talk [1] which has some better audio and a direct feed of the slides. It also comes with an entirely different set of interesting stories for anyone inclined to listen :) 1: this video
> A real artist already putting this much effort into it, would never make this mistake I'm not so sure that's true. See this video Granted - most of the examples in Matt Parker's talk isn't exactly work of art, but I'm sure effort were put into them. Edit: I agree the way the cogs don't work in the project's logo is of a different class, so maybe you have point.
Is this actually different from when Matt Parker discovered ancient alien wisdom by plotting the lines between Woolworths stores? ( this video ) Some of these maps are for time period not that distant from each other where the correlation is pretty straightforward, and those are probably telling at-least-partly-true narratives. For others, it's less clear. How many different modern and ancient maps are there which could conceivably have interesting (spurious) correlations?