Nerd Humor and the Anti Science Movement in Education

I’ve personally seen (anecdotal evidence alert!) both sides of the free speech religion and science debate in school.  As a student, one general science teacher was fired for his regular sermons.  Traditional sitting in church kind of sermon.  Which by the Constitution is not allowed.  Another, a biology teacher, was forced into a leave of absence because biology insulted the parents of their precious little snowflake in his class.  The inconsistency with one’s termination and the other’s relative slap on the wrist - reminds me of arbitrary YouTube Community Guidelines strikes.

Teaching is a tough gig.  It’s right up there with law enforcement and medical fields where when something goes wrong it often goes wrong spectacularly.  You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  You’re supposed to have empathy and care about others to effectively do your job.  Yet now that we have nicer toys and the Cold War has eased we’re supposed to forget about empathy and not teach students actual history.

But today’s real story begins with nerd humor.  Specifically what I call, “Stupid Math Tricks”.  My favorite being the proof of how 2=1.  It’s a trick, and a fake since it requires a division by 0.  But if carefully presented it can slip the notice that this is what’s going on.

A short video from the Zachosphere was posted recently, and it has this thumbnail:

Because of course education requires taking Stupid Math Tricks nerd humor into conspiracy bullshit.  So the story in the video presentation is about the Golden Ratio and sines and cosines and the magic of 666 and 144.  Complete with forcing the length of the video to be 1:44 so profoundly dumb people can notice and post something profoundly dumb about that.  To give you an example of the profound dumbness in the comments somewhat noticed that the sine function on the calculator is sin.  Wow, that is fucking magical!  Attaboy!^TM, you win a cookie!

I can save you the trouble of investing the 1:44 + the finding and loading time.  The magic gematria that isn’t even really gematria was stolen from old nerd humor.  Probably even this article here:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinknudson/2015/10/29/devilish-trigonometry-linking-the-number-of-the-beast-and-the-golden-ratio/amp/

For the full math nerd the article gives the full math explanation on why this works.  For the not a math nerd that at least appreciates math and is smart enough to not believe in baseless conspiracies (and is likely to relegate conspiracy gematria to the land of stupid ideas it rightfully belongs in) I think this image might sum it up the best:

With a bit more text from the article and the video.  The golden ratio rectangles are broken into isosceles triangles.  Part of the trick involves multiplying by 2.  Notice that 72 x 2 = 144?  Good.  Now, sines and cosines work by mathing a 360 degree circle.  And as the circle loops around back to the beginning it cycles back.  So sine (number) is equal to sine (number +360).  360 x 2= 720.  720.  720-54=666.  Throw in how sines and cosines relate to each other through angles totaling 90 degrees and you’ve got yourself a nice little stupid math trick related to 72 disguised as 144 and 54 disguised as 666.

Just like a typical gematria narrative.  Forcing a number you didn’t like into another number.  Just like the anti science movement in general turns useful math that develops all the fun toys that make life convenient gets twisted into a spiritual mumbo jumbo that school administrators have to figure out how to deal with socially because people are assholes.

In many respects it would be nicer to just be a dictatorship based on theocracy without the social burdens. Yet the math beyond what’s needed for business degrees isn’t going to get funded for all the other stuff that makes life convenient.  And then there’s that part about dictatorship economics never work out.