From the UK:

An urgent call for a public enquiry was echoing around the internet this morning following the revelation that some simple mathematical equations that guide UK policy across a wide spectrum of areas might be flawed and the flaw deliberately concealed. For many years, it has been accepted by the establishment that if you add two and two together, you get four. But emails hacked from a leading UK university’s maths department show, it has been alleged, that this is far from established fact. “It’s just a theory, nothing more than that”, one commentator said. Another added, “You can do anything with numbers, get any result you goddam like”, whilst a third said “they probably do make four, but it’s only a small number and there are bigger things to worry about”.

A university spokesman wearily explained to me that the overwhelming consensus among mathematicians was that two and two indeed did make four, had done so for a very long time and that sceptic claims of some of the twos being written in bold or italics had absolutely no bearing on the outcome. Meanwhile, in a related development, the BBC has come in for criticism for giving airtime to a prominent sceptic, who said on this morning’s Today programme that, in the case of two and two, the maths was far from settled and that it could quite possibly make five. The BBC defended their position, stating that their inclusion of the sceptic argument was “in the interests of balance”. But academics say that the situation is too dangerous to allow any more confusion of what should be acknowledged as settled elementary mathematics. One pointed out that this could otherwise have severe and unpredictable consequences for many people, from darts players to banking executives, “and especially darts players, as their ability to add numbers up correctly is an essential skill in their career development”.

Lifted from : http://climateprogress.org/2011/04/01/climate-progress-blogger-joe-romm-has-tea-party-movement/#more-45899