Posted in Puzzles and Paradoxes, Teaching, Tidbits on Aug 7th, 2010
Some links: The Central Limit Theorem, Edges of Graphs, and Graph Layout, (Leland Wilkinson). The Monty Hall Problem, (The New York Times). Take this question out back…, (Language Log). Finally, the great Lenny Pickett, (circa 1973). He is the one in the bow tie.
Posted in Tidbits on Mar 30th, 2010
Here are some new papers that I will be peddling over the next few weeks. A lot of this is in preliminary form, so I am keen to have comments. “Character Matching and the Envelope of Belief”, at the APA-Pacific [slides][paper]. “Robustness of Evidential Probability” (with Choh Man Teng), NYU Bioinformatics Group, Courant Institute of [...]
Posted in Tidbits on Jan 7th, 2010
What’s the most efficient way to pack a group of identical spheres? It is to stack them like your grocer stacks oranges, which Kepler conjectured would yield a packing density of 74%, and Thomas Hales proved Kepler right in 1998. What’s the most efficient way to pack a group of identical, regular tetrahedron? Here answers [...]
Posted in Tidbits on Dec 31st, 2009
The foiled underpants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, raises anew the question of how to spot a terrorist. Clear hindsight obscures how hard a task this is. After the 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the German authorities analyzed data for some 8 million potential terrorists living in Germany by a variety of [...]
A nice discussion over at Junk Charts about the “Climategate” scandal, which boils down to a self-inflicted wound from speaking too loosely about scaling time series data.
Discovery magazine has put together a forum for scientific tattoos, in which you can find: ZFC Curry’s Y combinator, in no less! A glottal stop and Michael Ruse!
Posted in Tidbits on Aug 29th, 2009
I’ve updated LaTeX for Philosophers. Among the new items: LineByLine.sty – Designed to run inside the equation environment, LineByLine provides a quick and uniform format for line by line derivations. This is beta and works better than alternative solutions I’ve been able to find, but I’m keen to hear about bug reports, things-you-wish-it-would-do reports, or I’ve-got-a-better-idea [...]
Posted in Social Epistemology, Tidbits on Aug 3rd, 2009
Eric Gilbert, a 2009 Google Fellow, and his colleagues at Illinois Urbana-Champaign devised an empirical study to test whether blogs isolate readers from dissenting opinions by comparing the ratio of agreeing to disagreeing comments in several top blogs. They write that As early as 1996, Nicholas Negroponte theorized about The Daily Me, a newspaper perfectly [...]
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