I don't like to spend too much time highlighting and making fun of silly things on the internet; it's not like they are going to be stamped out by a few well-placed blog posts. But this awful little article by Chris Ormell in Times Higher Education merits an exception. It has been ably demolished Jon Butterworth at the Guardian, but is worth revisiting, because its badness illuminates a larger point. (Via @astroparticle.) Ormell's thesis is laid out at the start:
Mathematics tends to be both misunderstood and credited with magic powers, especially by those who are intelligent but not mathematically inclined. Arising from this, there is a perennial temptation for mathematicians to play to the gallery and to assume the role of magicians and, even more temptingly, high priests.
The worrisome sign here is not the explicit content, which is vague enough to be unobjectionable, but the gleeful indulgence in ...
