HE’S A SCIENTIST — you can’t expect him to be good at math:
Heh. Of course, in fairness, given that Gleick only has a B.S. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from Berkeley, there is a very good chance that he never took much in the way of math or statistics courses.
As I’ve previously noted, one of the dirty secrets of science education is that most science majors study very little in the way of logic, history, math, or statistics, which is why they so often reveal themselves to be every bit as clueless as the average individual whenever they venture outside their very narrow areas of education and professional expertise.