Logarithmic jihadism

From the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. counterterrorism officials have been on guard for homegrown recruitment by radical groups. Intelligence analysts from the New York Police Department, in a study of radicalization in Western Muslim communities, warned that "jihadist ideology" is "proliferating in Western democracies at a logarithmic rate."

Maybe it's just me, but logarithmic proliferation doesn't seem all that scary.

Mathifying the oil bubble

House passes bill to reverse oil price increases.

Why am I writing about this? Because of the following sentence, which opens the article (emphasis added):

After the close of the markets Thursday, as the fear of a continued parabolic rise in the price of oil was still fresh on the minds of investors, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that that could help to reverse the direction of oil prices.

I don't know, the runup looks linear to me, at least in the short term -- although everything looks linear in the short term. That doesn't mean it hasn't been fast. This is mathification at work.

By the way, The 2006-2008 Oil Bubble and Beyond (D. Sornette, R. Woodard, W.-X. Zhou; arXiv:0806.1170) claim that the growth is actually super-exponential, which they claim is diagnostic of a bubble. (Via the physics arXiv blog.) So "parabolic" may be a massive understatement.

Mathifying Gore-Lieberman 2000

Gore-Lieberman: A Hyphen Apart? Try Poles, from today's New York Times, by John M. Broder.

The article points out that since Al Gore and Joe Lieberman ran together in the 2000 presidential election, Gore has gone to the left, and Lieberman to the right; would that have happened had they been elected in 2000?

The article ends:

Ron Klain, who was Mr. Gore’s vice presidential chief of staff, said the Gore-Lieberman schism reminded him of Algebra I.
"It’s like one of those old math problems,” he said. “Two trains leave Chicago at the same time traveling in opposite directions. How far apart are they in three hours? Very far apart."

I don't remember having to do problems like that. This may be why I still like mathematics. (And why is it always "trains" in these problems? I suspect they may actually have been more common in a time when trains were common; if the probems were written now they would be about cars or airplanes.)

The article's not bad re: politics; this is just yet another mathification, i. e. gratuitous insertion of math where it doesn't really make sense.

Searching for mathification

Over at Language Log (which a friend of mine claims is very widely read among grad students at Penn -- and it does come from Penn -- but I read it before I came here), one often finds references to "linguification". This is the rhetorical device of expressing true things about the world in terms of false statements about language. "It snows a lot where Eskimos live" is true. "The Eskimos have eight zillion words for snow" is false, but if you say it, or in general "The language spoken by X has lots of words for Y", everyone knows that you mean "Y is important to X-speakers" -- even though it doesn't matter that such a fact might not actually be true. (The snow example is both linguification and a snowclone).

A frequent example is claims that certain words are often followed by certain other words, like "It's difficult to find a piece of writing in the mainstream press which mentions the word 'bisexual' without finding that it is immediately followed by the word 'chic'." The folks at Language Log don't like this much, in part because the write word there is not "difficult" but "trivial", especially in the age of Google.

Anyway, around the same time I came across that Language Log post, I came across "The knights who say "nerd": 20 pop-cultural obsessions even geekier than Monty Python", from The Onion's AV Club. It begins:

It's the elephant in the nerdy-obsessions room, and in the Venn diagram of nerd-dom, it may be the meeting point for everything else on this list, with good reason.

. Venn diagrams surface again later on in the article, when they're talking about Joss Whedon: "We need a Venn diagram for this one, too. (Maybe diagram-making deserves its own entry?)" Why do Venn diagrams always come up as what seems like a bad example of something that the author seems to think is mathematical? And who was Venn, anyway? So I'm starting to keep an eye out for what one might call "mathification" -- mathematical statements which occur in the popular media which clearly intend to get across a true point about the real world by making a false point about mathematics. I could swear I see this a lot, but I don't think I've seen it since seeing the Onion article ten days ago.