CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

I'm surprised to see there isn't any thread for this show. Does anyone else watch it here?

I'd seen a piece of it but my television antenna is determined to only let me get a couple channels and I'd just tuned it for ABC to I can get Lost on Wednesdays. (No, I don't have/want cable a/t/m.)

What I saw of it seemed to be a clever concept, but the devil is probably in the details -- for example, I can't watch "hacker" shows or movies because their depictions of computers and networks are just stupidly inaccurate ("The Net" ... hrrraghtphthph). I do know there's at least one famous academic consultant on the show, but how do they handle the math? Is it hokey or at least semi-plausible? And does it flow naturally from the plot, or merely act as a sight gimmick?

I saw the first episode long long time ago. From what I saw, it wasn't too bad, but I think it kind of goes off into intangible ideas or concepts.

Like using a water sprinkler and it's splash ratio to help solve crimes...

The mathematical ideas themselves are actually reasonably sound, the problem is in their application. In the show unfortunately, they make the problems sound a lot easier than they actually are. In many cases, for example, they're attemping to perform some statistical prediction based on a very limited set of data, or working from some prior distributions that they simply would not have access to. As a drama it's not bad, and the writers do have some interesting ideas about mathematics and analogies to more concrete ideas; from that point of view it's a reasonably good show. That said, the apparent ease with which they use these methods to solve crimes is mostly BS. Unfortunately, really good mystery shows tend to be few and far between on television.

Like using a water sprinkler and it's splash ratio to help solve crimes...

As an idea it's not really that far fetched. You can use what you know about the splash pattern and the dynamics of the water droplets to solve the inverse problem of locating the sprinkler. However, that depends on having those models available; human behaviour on the other hand is far more complicated and is generally much less well defined. As an analogy to what was being attempted though, it was a pretty good one and explained the thrust of their solution.

I don't really watch broadcast tv that much any more.

i religiously watch the show every friday. the best bart about is a nerd in the main role!!!!!!

But i do agree with technomancer that the ideas are very overlysimplified and solve things out of no data.