Archive for December, 2010
Slate reposted an old piece of mine about the lottery, on the occasion of tonight’s big Mega Millions drawing. This prompted an interesting question on Math Overflow: I have often seen discussions of what actions to take in the context of rare events in terms of expected value. For example, if a lottery has a [...]
Filed under: ethics, math, philosophy, psychology, slate | 8 Comments
Tags: expected value, less wrong, lotteries, probability, rationality, reader survey, utility
2010 booklist
Below please find the books I read in 2010. Only four of these came out this year, and two of those were books I reviewed; so I think I’m officially out of touch again. (Though four more on the list came out in the second half of 2009.) Best of the Year: Tough choice: I [...]
Filed under: books, lists | 1 Comment
Tags: matthew derby, super flat times
The New York Times recently revisited the case of Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychologist accused of research fraud. Nicholas Wade’s new article suggests that Hauser might be more sloppy than dishonest, the victim of a bureaucratic legal process that makes no allowances for innocent mistakes, and that the situation is starting to turn in Hauser’s [...]
Filed under: academia, ethics, harvard, news, psychology | 2 Comments
Tags: academic misconduct, cotton-top tamarins, hauser, marc hauser, new york times, nicholas wade
December linkdump
Noted with minimal comment: Add to Ellie Kemper another former student making it in showbiz: Damien Chazelle, who was actually in high school when I taught him number theory, had a feature in the Tribeca Film Festival. Can William Langewiesche write a boring magazine feature? If so, it is not this one about a Brazilian [...]
Filed under: children, language, madison, magazines, music, nostalgia, shows | 1 Comment
Tags: 1990s, damian chazelle, judybats, langewiesche, names, students, yellow ostrich
I thought I’d never see a definitive answer to this one, but thanks to the brand-new Google NGrams Viewer, the facts are clear: It is “another think coming,” and it has always been “another think coming.” A lot of words and phrases (though not these) show a dip starting in 2000 or so. I wonder [...]
Filed under: baseball, computers, language | 7 Comments
Tags: another think coming, English, google, ngrams, words
The initial “Why”
You know what’s a lost art? Starting a sentence with “Why.” It’s so antique, in fact, that I can’t articulate when you’re allowed to do it. I understand that the initial “Why” can denote mild surprise: Why, I had no idea you were from Boonestown! or some kind of vague intensification: Why, you dirty rat [...]
Filed under: language, offhand | 8 Comments
Tags: why words
Split-screen blackboard
From Andrew Gelman, an interesting pedagogical suggestion: The split screen. One of the instructors was using the board in a clean and organized way, and this got me thinking of a new idea (not really new, but new to me) of using the blackboard as a split screen. Divide the board in half with a [...]
Filed under: math, teaching | 2 Comments
Tags: andrew gelman, blackboard, pedagogy
I am the Ian’s Pizza Fanatic of the Month.
Filed under: food, madison | 4 Comments
Tags: apotheosis, ian's pizza, look on my slice ye mighty and despair
Neil Sloane’s invaluable OEIS has just launched its new page, featuring among other things a wiki and a backend that allows the encylopedia to grow with much less personal supervision from Sloane himself. But not all the changes are welcome: William Stein points out the new end-user licensing agreement, which is much more restrictive than [...]
Filed under: commerce, math, politics | 4 Comments
Tags: intellectual property, oeis, online encylopedia of integer sequences, william stein
At the American Museum of Natural History with CJ and AB, I learned that the best modern thinking gives Tyrannosaurus Rex just two fingers on each hand, not three. It must have been very demeaning to be killed and eaten by a creature making the ironic quotation gesture.
Filed under: cj, offhand, travel | 2 Comments
Tags: dinosaurs, irony, paleontology, t.rex, tyrannosaurus
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