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The personal opinions of the proprietor of "crankdot" are insufficient to prove any particular idea "cranky", hence the qualification
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* [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html The crackpot index questionnaire]
* [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html The crackpot index questionnaire]
* [http://www.crank.net/index.html Crankdot], a site listing hundreds of cranky websites, roughly organized by subject area
* [http://www.crank.net/index.html Crankdot], a site listing hundreds of websites considered to be "cranky" by its proprietor, roughly organized by subject area
* [http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt A similar proposal for rejecting crackpot email anti-spam technologies, presented as a tick-box form]
* [http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt A similar proposal for rejecting crackpot email anti-spam technologies, presented as a tick-box form]
[[Category:Humor]]
[[Category:Humor]]

Revision as of 17:10, 6 November 2006

The crackpot index is a number that rates scientific claims or the individuals that make them, in conjunction with a method for computing that number. The method, proposed (most likely as a joke) by mathematical physicist John Baez in 1992, computes an index by responses to a list of 34 questions, each positive response contributing a point value ranging from 1 to 50. The computation is initialized with a value of −5.

Presumably any positive value of the index indicates crankiness.

Though the index was not proposed as a serious method, it nevertheless has often been cited in discussions of whether a claim or an individual is cranky, particularly in physics.

See also

External links