January 2012
5 posts
Fun with math: Dividing one by 998001 yields a...
iheartchaos:
There’s all sorts of magic to be had with numbers, and many mathematicians have made entire careers in finding these little tricks that are mostly useless, but fun anyway. Unfortunately, a lot of calculators are going to truncate the results of this trick, but if you manage to get a hold of one that doesn’t, solving 1/998001 will generate all the three digit numbers from 000 to...
The myth of the Indian middle class →
Alex Perry in Time:
The size of India’s middle class is 300 million people. No, it isn’t. The size of India’s middle class was 50 million in 2005, according to this report by McKinsey, and won’t be quite 250 million by 2015. And yet the 300 million figure has been pervasive for years, cited by everyone from the UN to multinationals to the US President: I was in New Delhi in 2005 when George W....
The real cost of piracy and anti-piracy efforts →
Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute, writing on Ars Technica:
As a rough analogy, since antipiracy crusaders are fond of equating filesharing with shoplifting: suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifiting is a bad...
Gingrich and Co fail to activate federal judge →
Hypocrisy is never a problem for the Right since they are explicitly the party of double standards! This is amusing nonetheless:
Gingrich has even suggested that Congress subpoena and arrest judges who make controversial rulings.
“I was, frankly, just fed up with elitist judges imposing secularism on the country and basically, fundamentally changing the American Constitution,”...
December 2011
8 posts
Most chimp experiments unnecessary - New Scientist →
Andy Coghlan:
The US should be doing much less research on chimpanzees because new, alternative methods yield equally valid results, says a committee of the US Institute of Medicine in a report published this week.
Only in the US and Gabon are experiments on chimps explicitly allowed. In the European Union, no experiments on great apes have been recorded since 1999; a year ago, the EU...
Girls and the hard stuff, revisited →
[For my earlier post on this, see http://0sum.org/?p=11]
Part of the takedown:
Now, researchers Jane Mertz of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Jonathan Kane of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater have performed the most comprehensive exploration yet of math performance. They took in data from 86 different countries, many of which had not previously kept reliable records of math...
The bizarre world of Android →
We already knew that Microsoft makes more from Android than it does from Windows Phone 7: Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who…
Immigrant Detainees: The New Sex Abuse | NYRB →
David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow:
The PBS show Frontline, documenting harsh conditions in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) detention facilities, recently told the story of an immigrant whom it called “Mary.” During a routine traffic stop in Florida, police discovered that Mary’s visa had expired. They sent her to the Willacy Detention Center in southern Texas; there, over the course of...
November 2011
10 posts
The Rube Goldberg immune system
A post (transcribed from a podcast) on SciAm lays out how the number of T-cells in our body increases with rising temperature. The hypothesis:
So when you’re sick and you get the chills, the authors say, your body may be trying to tell you to hop under some blankets. Lie down, warm up and send a message. The heat is on.
In other words, your body sends a message to you (your mind, that...
India is still rising, but it is not shining |... →
Examination of the Indian economy reveals a less rosy outlook – in the short term at least. A poll of more than 20 economists, surveyed by Reuters during October, showed that most had cut their growth forecasts. Admittedly, GDP will still expand at rates that much of the developed world can only dream about. But September industrial output numbers saw growth of just 1.9 percent year on year,...
Nudge vs Democracy →
Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi in New Scientist:
Economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein (now a senior policy-maker in the Obama administration) present the latest, and subtlest, version of this temptation in their influential work on “nudging” people into making wiser choices. They argue that wise decision-makers should tweak the options and information available...
“My own mathematical works are always quite unsystematic, without mode or...”
– Hermann Weyl, born Nov 9, 1885
“The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute, and yields to the...”
– Conservative DC Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman, upholding the Obama healthcare law and the individual mandate (via NPR)
Are You a Moral Relativist? Take This Test | SciAm →
From the article:
Participants who carefully go through all of the possibilities and arrive at this answer turn out to also be more likely to endorse a “relativist” view in which moral questions do not necessarily have a single objectively true answer. This result suggests that moral relativism might be especially appealing to people who have a tendency to vividly imagine...
October 2011
8 posts
Pankaj Mishra reviews ‘Civilisation’ by Niall... →
‘The Chinese have got capitalism,’ Ferguson exults towards the end of the book. At this point, one hardly expects him to explain whether this is an adequate description of an economy on whose commanding heights a one-party state perches, controlling the movement of capital and running the biggest banks and companies. Writing in 1920, Stoddard was more insightful: Asian peoples are ‘not merely...
Bad Arguments: The Roberts Court & Religious... →
Ronald Dworkin summing up recent SCOTUS decisions:
Roberts and Alito both promised, in their Senate confirmation hearings, to respect precedent. But they both qualified the promise: they would not need to respect past decisions whose rationale had been “undermined” by later decisions. Perhaps they are now engaged in an undermining process, step by step, so they can later justify overruling...
Water's quantum weirdness makes life possible -... →
Water is one of the planet’s weirdest liquids, and many of its most bizarre features make it life-giving. For example, its higher density as a liquid than as a solid means ice floats on water, allowing fish to survive under partially frozen rivers and lakes. And unlike many liquids, it takes a lot of heat to warm water up even a little, a quality that allows mammals to regulate their body...
“In a society geared toward the specialization of each of its members and subject...”
– Albert Jacquard
The Duct Tape Programmer - Joel Spolsky →
An old one from Joel:
You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because they just can’t keep enough facts in their head at once to make multiple inheritance, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of that stuff work. So they sheepishly go along with whatever faddish programming craziness has come down from the architecture astronauts who speak at conferences and write...
September 2011
8 posts
The Epidemic of Mental Illness | NYRB →
From the New York Review of Books, a slightly old but important article, a piece of which I have reproduced below:
When it was found that psychoactive drugs affect neurotransmitter levels in the brain, as evidenced mainly by the levels of their breakdown products in the spinal fluid, the theory arose that the cause of mental illness is an abnormality in the brain’s concentration of these...
The cost of the War on Terror →
David Cole, NYRB:
[T]he United States today spends about $80 billion a year, not including expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan (which of course dwarf that sum). Generous estimates of the strength of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, Blair reports, put them at between three thousand and five thousand men. That means we are spending between $16 million and $27 million per year on each potential...
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he...”
– Edmund Burke // via Gary Wills in the NYRB
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he...”
– Edmund Burke
John Searle and the mystery of consciousness
This is from the New York Review of Books, where the philosopher John Searle answers a question regarding the mystery of consciousness:
[H]ow is [it] possible that “a bunch of firing neurons in any kind of network produce consciousness.” I entirely agree that, at present, the way neurons produce consciousness remains mysterious.
But before despairing we should remind ourselves of two things....
Guardian on Federer's churlishness after loss to... →
Kevin Mitchell:
“It’s awkward having to explain this loss,” a tetchy Federer said, “because I feel like I should be doing the other press conference.”
There followed a string of excuses and justifications which not only were barely sustainable given the evidence but seriously disrespected the winner.
Asked about the quite remarkable forehand winner Djokovic hit to save match point, Federer...
Which lives matter? And why?
John Horgan has a [piece](http://l.ravi.be/qtcA86) in his Scientific American blog pointing to a recent analysis by John Muller and Mark Stewart of US government reaction to 9/11. His conclusion echoes their own that the US not only over-reacted but did so at a cost:
In fact, Mueller and Stewart suggested in Homeland Security Affairs, U.S. counterterrorism procedures may indirectly imperil more...
August 2011
12 posts
Winston Churchill →
From Chandak Sengoopta’s review of Churchill’s Secret War by Madhusree Mukerjee, in The Independent:
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” Winston Churchill famously declared in 1942. That passion for empire did not, however, entail the duty of protecting the lives of the King’s distant...
"Cheap Grace" →
Andrew Bacevich lays out the spectacle that passes for supporting the troops in TomDispatch. First, the spectacle:
“On this Independence Day,” the voice of the Red Sox booms over the public address system, “we pay a debt of gratitude to the families whose sons and daughters are serving our country.”
[…] Navy veteran Bridget (annual salary approximately $22,000) throws the ceremonial...
“We spend less than half a percent of our budget on all of developmental aid. Not...”
– Former Republican Senator Bill Frist speaking to AP about Somalia (via NPR)
Poultry Farms That Stop Antibiotics See Resistance... →
Conventional poultry farms use antibiotics extensively, which contributes to the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. But farms that turn to organic practices, including a ban on antibiotics, can greatly reduce antibiotic-resistant bacteria within only the first year of the change.
Chimpanzees and altruism →
From Scientific American, a report of experiments by De Waal and collaborators that contradicts long held notions of lack of altruism among non-human animals:
The current study by Horner and De Waal now joins this chorus of research that reverses a decade of scholarship claiming that humans are profoundly different where it comes to regarding others. According to a highly reported 2005 study...
A common man's defence of Helvetica
(image courtesy of Wikipedia)
There is a lot to lament about modernity, utopianism, the conformity and soullessness of the corporate world - the sort of stuff that keeps European philosophers and American intellectuals awake at night. Among the resultant evils one can count Nazism, fascism, alienation… and… a font. Yes a font. So holds Edward Mendelson in a scattershot and ill-tempered...
From a contradiction, anything follows!
Again, Paul Krugman:
Given a crisis that should have been relatively easy to solve — and, more than that, a crisis that anyone who knew macroeconomics 101 should have been well-prepared to deal with — what we actually got was an obsession with problems we didn’t have. We’ve obsessed over the deficit in the face of near-record low interest rates, obsessed over inflation in the face of stagnant...