Footnotes

1 Important paradigm shifts include evolution, plate tectonics, quantum mechanics, relativity, and the sun-centered universe.

2 Quantification is but one form of empiricism and some uses of numbers are erroneous, intentionally deceptive, or pseudoscientific.

3 In Arming America, Michael Bellesiles claimed his study of 11,000 probate records proved few colonial Americans owned guns. When scholars asked for his data for reanalysis, he said he had read them in federal archives in East Point, Georgia. When it became apparent there were no such records, he said he had read them in some thirty different places and that his original data had not survived a flood. When it became clear that much of his data was wrong, he claimed that someone had hacked into his files and changed his data, effectively suggesting that he had put data on his website that contradicted his own book, but that a hacker had altered it to support his book! Lindgren of Northwestern, Roth of Ohio State, Main of University of Colorado, and Gruber of Rice revealed other errors.

4 In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore claims that the NRA callously held a pro-gun rally in Denver immediately after the shooting at nearby Columbine High School. In fact, it was the NRA annual meeting scheduled over a year before the shootings. The NRA canceled all events except the annual business meeting required by law. Moore deleted Charlton Heston’s condolences and joined phrases as much as five paragraphs apart from five different speeches to make Heston seem callous and racist. Moore ignored Heston’s actual history as the organizer of Hollywood’s support for Martin Luther King, Jr. Moore linked the NRA and KKK, when in fact Union officers who opposed the KKK founded the NRA and selected Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan as NRA presidents in part because both worked to crush the KKK.

Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 contains over fifty errors—about one every two minutes in a film purporting to be a documentary. Moore implied that the Florida Secretary of State supervised vote counting: in fact, each county counts its own votes independently. Moore falsely claimed that Bush allowed 142 Saudi citizens to fly home before allowing any other planes in the air after 9/11. Richard Clarke had testified that he not Bush made the decision and the 9/11 Commission confirms proper handling of all departures. Moore claims Bush extended special favors to Saudis based on his relationship with the Saudi ambassador. In fact, the ambassador had been a Washington insider for decades and was just as close to Bill Clinton. Moore portrays Iraq as a prosperous country with contented citizens. In fact, a sixth of its population had fled, and Saddam’s regime tortured dissidents and had killed tens of thousands of its citizens. Fahrenheit 9/11 shows Bush giving a speech on an aircraft carrier saying “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” but cut out his next words which were, "And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country… We still have difficult work to do in Iraq…” Moore said that, “out of the 535 members of Congress, only one had an enlisted son in Iraq,” carefully worded to exclude six whose children were serving in Iraq as officers. He did not mention that 101 congressmen and 36 senators at the time were themselves veterans.

5 From Clio, the muse of history, and metrics, measurement.

6 US submarines sank 1150 enemy ships, many of them merchant rather military ones, totaling 4.86 billion tons with far fewer losses than the Germans. Airplanes, mines, and surface craft combined sank only 975 enemy ships totaling 2.94 billion tons.

7 The error lies in dividing by a - b, which = 0. It is impossible to divide something into 0 parts, so prohibited in mathematics.

8 John Gower in Pericles, Bedford in Henry VI Part I, Suffolk in Part II, and Warwick in Part III. The test picks Shakespeare for two roles we know he played, the ghost in Hamlet and Adam in As You Like It.

9 The highly expected not happening is also a Black Swan. The failure of the hounds of the Baskervilles to bark pointed to the culprit as someone the dogs knew.

10 Actually, “entia non sunt multiplicanda prater necessitate,” meaning assumptions should not be multiplied unnecessarily.