[pxeger1]

He seems to exaggerate the importance of things when they make for a good story and sound interesting. This is a classic flaw in popular science but I think he's got a lot more egregious with it over the years.

The worst example I remember, which is actually what drove me to unsubscribe, was when he said that the golden ratio was "a pretty five-y number" because it can be written as 0.5 + 0.5 * (5^0.5). Anyone with a good mathematical background could tell you there's nothing five-y about 0.5 at all. I'll grant him, the golden ratio is still a little bit five-y because of the sqrt(5).

The whole context and presentation seemed like it was designed to make the viewer feel like they'd learnt something even though nothing of substance was really delivered in those 20 seconds. He does that a lot.

[hilbert42]

"The whole context and presentation seemed like it was designed to make the viewer feel like they'd learnt something even though nothing of substance was really delivered in those 20 seconds. He does that a lot."

I can't disagree with that. He's not only a YouTube presenter but also a documentary maker, His documentary Uranium: Twisting the Dragon's Tail https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4847012/ has been repeated on TV where I am, I think, at least three times. He's also made others.

Unfortunately, that type of presentation is all too common in modern docos (probably couldn't get it past the director otherwise). As you'd know, this and similar techniques (which I find highly irritating) are also used to pad out half-hour shows to an hour and or to multi episodes when one would do adequately (thankfully, my PVR comes to the rescue and I rarely watch them in real time).

[interestica]

> Anyone with a good mathematical background could tell you there's nothing five-y about 0.5 at all.

Um, I disagree? Visually, the 5 is memorable here. "Fivey" just seems to mean "lots of the number 5"?

[koningrobot]

I think the point is that 0.5 is 1/2, and the 5 digit only appears because of our base 10 presentation of numbers.

[pxeger1]

I think the context was perhaps more important than I'd considered to explain the significance of "five-y". The implication was that the fiviness gives something of an intuitive explaination for why some shape had 5 sides. The presence of a √5 does (maybe) do this, but 0.5 definitely doesn't. (Because as sibling comment points out, 0.5 = 1/2 and the 5 only appears due to our (arbitrary, from a mathematical point of view) choice of base ten.