Dr. Graham Tattersall - Geekspeak: A Guide to Answering the Unanswerable, Making Sense of the Nonsensical, and Solving the Unsolvable

GEEKSPEAK

A Guide to Answering the Unanswerable,
Making sence of the nonsensical,
and solving the unsolvable

Dr. Graham
Tattersall

This book is written in memory of my father, who helped raise six children as well as quietly going through life inventing, analyzing, and mending anything and everything.

All photos, unless stated, taken from Stock.XCHNG.com

Introduction: Living with Numbers: #347053, Aleksander Milosevic, Belgrade, Serbia

1. Scrabbling for Words: #650192, Steve Woods/Pinpoint, Essex, UK

2. Pumping Iron: #313419, Josef Lluis Caldentey, Spain

3. Safe as Houses: Author

4. Well Connected: #368906, Cory McKenzie, Canada

5. Fatal Attraction: #696930, Marcos Santos, Brazil

6. Home Alone: #656412, Liv Crazy, Australia

7. Beam Me Up, Scotty: #757924, Artiom, Ukraine (StockExpert)

8. Hidden Death: #97469, Ken Kiser, US

9. Its for You: #6926, Stephen Gibson/BudgetStockPhoto.com, Australia

10. War Chest: #522105, Marcin Barlowski, Poland

11. When the Wind Blows: #739813, George Bosela, US

12. Youre Rubbish: #315128, Liton Ali, London, UK

13. The Cunning Fox: #769992, Lynne Lancaster (weirdvis), UK

14. Fly Wheels: #735390, Asif Akbar, India

15. Bus Stop: #198141, Tomasz Kowalczyk, Poland

16. Stirring Airs: #442256, Steve Ford Elliot, Eire

17. Dream Flight: #748302, Martin Brooks, UK

18. Processing Power: #370098, Max Brown, Sydney, Australia

19. Soul Mates: #264203, Paul Preacher, London, UK

20. Idiot Calculus: #282161, Anka Draganski, London, UK

21. The Ghostly Present: #708887, Robert Rosmond, New Orleans, US

22. Bad Breath: #398156, Tudou Mao, Shijiazhuang, China

23. The Final Judgment: #19734, alxm (StockExpert)

24. Heavenly Body: #707105, Wojtek Wozniak, Zabrze, Poland

25. Passing Water: #633517, Emin Ozkan, Zmin, Turkey

26. The Man in White: #700514, Joan Koele, Netherlands

How much can you work out about your own world?

For as long as I can remember, Ive been fascinated by how things work. Theres a whole world of cogs, circuit boards, and equations behind familiar objects and events, or the figures and statistics in the media. I can remember the exact moment when this fascination was born: it was as an eight-year-old child on a family trip to the Scottish Highlands. Frantic to distract his squabbling children, my father announced that The first person to tell me the weight of that mountain gets to sit in the front of the car. I took on the task, excitedly shouting out wrong answers.

For me, this was powerworking out a new number, a new piece of knowledge about the world that hadnt existed ten seconds earlier. And, it all happened in a persons head. It was amazing.

And that was it. I became a Geek.

A family friend dropped by after our return. He was an amateur radio enthusiast, and his car was festooned with all sorts of antennas. Watch this, he said as he placed his finger at the bottom end of an antenna.

The faint, sweet smell of burning flesh drifted toward me as the current flowed through his skin, heating and burning its outer surface but without causing any pain or real damage.

I was transfixed. How had that happened? Why hadnt it hurt? How deep had the current penetrated? And how much energy had been spent in his finger? Here were more questions, more knowledge to attain, more facts and figures, all calculable inside a persons head.

The fascination with the simple conjurors trick of the burning skin has stayed with me, as a desire to explore the hows and whys lurking behind everyday life. And that, in a nutshell, is what this book is about: how to analyze and understand your world.

Its also about your ability to judge and check expert opinion for yourself rather than take it for grantedabout using your numeracy to be better informed.

Have a look at a couple of expert assertions. Do you believe them? How would you judge their validity?

Developed nations should focus on the development of wind and wave power to meet its electricity generation needs.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) greatly increases the risk of breast cancer.

Neither statement can be tested without using numbers: the amount of power that can be generated by a wind turbine and the electricity needed to run a country; and the statistical significance and experimental controls used to make the HRT assertion.

But the numbers themselves are of little value. To understand the issues, the assumptions, caveats, and uncertainties need to be understood. And the only way to understand all those is to do the calculation yourself.

Many people think that to perform that kind of calculation you need to be an expert in a given fieldwhich is why we tend to rely on experts. You might decide that its best to leave it to the professionals, the politicians, and the people in white coats.

But there is another way: a path of knowledge, learning, and understandingthe way of the Geek. Not an obsessive, narrowly interested, malodorous Geek but a nice, thoughtful, sweet-smelling Geek, the kind youd like as a friend.

A true Geek is interested in the mathematics of body size, and of God, sex, food, and a whole load of other things that also interest quite normal people.

And this is the rub. We live surrounded by figures: the power of a wind turbine, the amount the average family spends on food, the fuel consumption of a Boeing 747, the weight of sewage you create each year. Not being able to estimate such figures yourselfnot speaking any Geekis like living in a foreign country and not being able to communicate.

How can you trust statements made by academics, architects, scientists, and politicians without checking the underlying numbers?

You cant!

But you can work it out for yourself. And whats more, once youve done that its better than just knowing the fact. Youll understand the basis and limits of the truth.

This book is about empowerment, by combining common sense, straightforward arithmetic, and a little questioning of received wisdom.

This book shows you how to speak Geek.