### You are not entitled to your opinion

Thanks to Prof. Joe Barranco for linking to an excellent, short article called No, You Are Not Entitled to Your Option. The author nicely articulates a feeling I've had for a while: "You are not entitled to your opinion, you are only entitled to what you can argue for."

This is something that is almost trivial when it comes to scientific beliefs among scientists. No one would ever give a colloquium talk and say, "Well, it's my opinion that the Big Bang never happened. I know everyone else says otherwise, and I know there's tons of evidence in support of it and that many different areas of science rest on the truth of an expanding universe. But, look, I just feel that it's not true, and I'm entitled to my opinion." Nope. Sorry. It doesn't work that way.

For anyone to challenge something like the Big Bang---or even something actually debatable, such as whether the initial mass function of stars is universal or not---they would need to present evidence to back that belief. This is obvious. It's just good science.

However, I find it interesting that even scientists fall victim to the mentality of "well, I'm entitled to my opinion" when it comes to non-science issues, such as teaching methodology or whether certain traditions should change or why students behave certain ways.

And, of course, we see this mentality quite a bit among politicians, particularly on one side of the aisle, when it comes to their level of belief in certain science-based conclusions about our world. Take the climate-change deniers, anti-evolutionists on the Texas and Kansas school boards, or anti-vax people who think that vaccines cause autism. As stated in the article

So what does it mean to be “entitled” to an opinion?
If “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion” just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true, but fairly trivial. No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven.
This isn't just elitist, high-minded academic thinking. Adhering to the rule of entitlement to only opinions you can defend is the only way that we can reach sound conclusions about our world. There are truths out there. The world does, in fact, work a certain way, and we can figure this out. But only if we are to be intellectually honest and avoid sloppy thinking that allows us to wiggle out of uncomfortable challenges of our beliefs. I'm saying this to myself as much as preaching to the choir that is my audience :)

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…

### The Long Con

Hiding in Plain Sight

ESPN has a series of sports documentaries called 30 For 30. One of my favorites is called Broke which is about how professional athletes often make tens of millions of dollars in their careers yet retire with nothing. One of the major "leaks" turns out to be con artists, who lure athletes into elaborate real estate schemes or business ventures. This naturally raises the question: In a tightly-knit social structure that is a sports team, how can con artists operate so effectively and extensively? The answer is quite simple: very few people taken in by con artists ever tell anyone what happened. Thus, con artists can operate out in the open with little fear of consequences because they are shielded by the collective silence of their victims.
I can empathize with this. I've lost money in two different con schemes. One was when I was in college, and I received a phone call that I had won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. All I needed to do was p…