Can the trace hear the shape of its field?

27Apr11

(A post about Guillermo Mantilla-Soler’s paper posted on the arXiv yesterday.) The most natural arithmetic invariant of a number field K is its discriminant D_K, an integer congruent to either 0 or 1 mod 4 whose prime factors are precisely the primes where K/Q is ramified.  Oftentimes D_K is a squarefree, in which case it’s [...]

Filed under: math   |  2 Comments
Tags: algebraic number theory, guillermo mantilla-soler, number fields, number theory, quadratic forms

Angry Birds is less popular than television

25Apr11

Andrew Sullivan, via Hillel Fuld, reports: Another mind boggling statistic about Angry Birds, and you should sit down for this one, is that there are 200 million minutes played a day on a global scale. As Peter [Verterbacka, Angry Birds creator] put it, that number compares favorably to anything, including prime time TV, which indicates [...]

Filed under: bad statistics, economics, offhand   |  3 Comments
Tags: angry birds, television, tv

Is Zipcar offering too little insurance?

24Apr11

Ron Lieber in the New York Times says Zipcar is underinsuring its customers: Today, customers who are 21 or older have $300,000 of liability coverageper accident. That would have to cover mangled limbs, brain damage, pain and suffering and anything else that might befall all the people that a Zipcar vehicle mowed down or plowed [...]

Filed under: bad statistics, cars, commerce   |  4 Comments
Tags: insurance, new york times, zipcar

Living in the past

24Apr11

CJ and I played Galaga last night.  Galaga is great.  When those spaceships go off the bottom of the screen, except they haven’t quite gone all the way off the bottom of the screen, and then they curl back up and destroy you — that is classic. Another thing I cannot deny still liking is [...]

Filed under: cj, computers, nostalgia, offhand   |  1 Comment
Tags: 80s, arcade, galaga, jethro tull

Living in the future

24Apr11

I just learned that my father orders his breakfast cereal from Amazon.

Filed under: commerce, computers, economics, family, food, offhand   |  7 Comments
Tags: amazon, cereal

Stephen Burt interviewed in Publishers Weekly

19Apr11

Steve Burt interviewed in the PW series, “The Art of the Review:” Classes can reveal the properties of their members more fully (to understand the differences between calcium and magnesium, for example, you should know why they are both alkaline earths) but classes can also obscure them (the Pagans and the Germs were both American [...]

Filed under: friends, harvard, magazines, poetry   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: classification, clustering, interviews, reviews, stephen burt

Close election? Flip for it

12Apr11

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Post advocating the use of randomization devices to determine the winner of close elections. Some will balk at the idea of choosing our leaders by chance. But that’s actually the coin flip’s most important benefit! Close elections are already determined by chance. Bad weather in the big city, [...]

Filed under: news, politics, writing   |  2 Comments
Tags: elections, modest proposals, probability

It matters little whether we progress with understanding the diophantine approximation

12Apr11

Jared Diamond on the Lang-Huntington affair, 1987: As to the relative importance of soft and hard science for humanity’s future, there can be no comparison.  It matters little whether we progress with understanding the diophantine approximation.  Our survival depends on whether we progress with understanding how people behave, why some societies become frustrated, whether their [...]

Filed under: academia, math, politics   |  8 Comments
Tags: huntington, jared diamond, lang

Under the bridge

10Apr11

CJ:  “Trolls are not nice.” Me:  “That’s true, but they aren’t real.” CJ:  “Some trolls are real, they are on the computer and they start flame wars.”  

Filed under: cj, computers, offhand   |  4 Comments

Two more maps of Wisconsin

08Apr11

Looking now like David Prosser will hold on to a narrow victory in the final count with about 50.2% of the vote. From the Huffington Post, a map showing the county-by-county change from Scott Walker’s share of the vote to David Prosser’s. The image on the original post has a nice mouse-over where you can [...]

Filed under: news, politics   |  1 Comment
Tags: elections, germans, kloppenburg, maps, norwegians, prosser, wisconsin