I don't keep up on politics much, but someone linked me to a picture of this graph:
If you're like me it might take you a minute to notice what's wrong with the graph.
Reuters, I am dissapoint. I mean, I could understand FOX news pulling a stunt like that to keep the rabid right wing happy, but Reuters? I mean, yes, the graph was probably provided to them like that by the FL Dept of Law Enforcement, but how hard is it to show the data in the correct manner?
For clarity, the report was done by Christine Chan who works for Reuters. Apparently she claimed she was trying to display deaths as negative numbers as inspired by
this infographic. I'm inclined to believe this story that it wasn't intended to be misleading, but it's still an extremely awful artistic decision on her part.
Why isn't there a religion based around ϕ yet?
Because that'd be like basing a religion around the square root of two. Sure, it's got some interesting properties (it's the intersection point of a sine and cosine! Its inverse plus its imaginary inverse has an absolute value of 1!), but these values are mostly the same thing when you think about it and it's not much of an interesting number otherwise.
But the Golden Ratio is literally everywhere.
Not in as many places as a lot of other, similar constants, like 1 or 2 or sqrt(2).
There's a lot of myths regarding the golden ratio.
Snail and nautilus shells have a logarithmic spiral, not a golden ratio spiral.
Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Egyptians used the golden ratio in their architecture (or anywhere else).
There is no golden ratio of human body parts (or any fixed ratio at all, human body proportions vary a hell of a lot), nor are golden ratios particularly beautiful to the human eye be they found in nature or architecture. Nor has the golden ratio been used in architecture much at all.