Expensive wine doesn’t taste better: “In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.” A 1987 meta-analysis finds a modest .3 correlation between price and quality. Rao 2005 suggests that people generally overestimate the strength of the price-quality relationship. Tax revenue has recently declined in Slovakia, so officials have created a bizarre lottery system.

I hope most mathematicians continue to fear and despise category theory, so I can continue to maintain a certain advantage over them. —John Baez The above is a graph of the number of times the phrase “category theory” has been used in books, from about 1950 through the present. It speaks for itself. But why? What’s the big deal? Why does category theory matter? I’m about a quarter of the way through Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories and still not sure why I’m bothering with fleshing out all this theory.

From most recommended to least (roughly): The movie Manufacturing Consent details Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the media, covering Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and media bias generally. Highly recommended. Much more balanced than his written work. “NSA operation ORCHESTRA: Annual Status Report:” A FOSDEM talk of the form if-I-were-the-NSA-here’s-how-I’d-do-it. Foresees the heartbleed bug. Alan Kay talks about The Inner Game of Tennis and quieting the ego in pursuit of learning.

Hot air balloons take people on adventures. Books do, too. Widely used calculus books must be mediocre. — W. Rudin I’ve noticed a phenomenon, especially in mathematics, where anyone asking for book recommendations invariably is recommended the least-gentle-but-still-reasonable textbook imaginable. A high school student might ask for an introduction to calculus and someone will tell them to read Principles of Mathematical Analysis. Looking for an introduction to programming?

Andrew Drucker has a paper where he mentally multiplies ten-digit numbers by exploiting human image recognition. Does money matter in politics? A much needed critical examination of a popular narrative. Cousin marriage is a common practice in the Middle East. Steve Sailer details how this may explain some of the difficulty of forcing Democracy on these nations. A flying snake. It’s called a Chrysopelea. Recent welfare reform has siphoned money from the very poor to the almost-poor.

The AMS has a 2005 paper “Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor” which is — delightfully — filled with math jokes. Excerpts: Q: What’s sour, yellow, and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice? A: Zorn’s Lemon. Q: What is a topologist? A: Someone who cannot distinguish between a doughnut and a coffee cup. Theorem. All positive integers are interesting. Proof. Assume the contrary. Then there is a lowest noninteresting positive integer.

Seibel: So that explains why the book is the way it is. But in general for programmers, how much math and what kinds of math are important for working programmers to know? Abelson: I don’t even know anymore. We have these arguments at MIT all the time. People say, well, there’s math. Other people say, well, what they really need to know are algebraic structures so you understand abstract data types, how you think about axiomatizing them.

Architect Sam Sloan coordinated a project in which employees … were able to select their own office furniture and plan office layout … Since both the Seattle and Los Angeles branches of the FAA were scheduled to move into new buildings at about the same time, the client for the project, the General Services Administration, agreed with architect Sloan’s proposal to involve employees in the design process in Seattle, while leaving the Los Angeles office as a control condition where traditional methods of space planning would be followed.

A reformed thief, telling of his success, put it this way, “I’m telling you, if I had a hundred dollars for every time I heard a dog owner tell their dog to ‘shut up and go lie down’ while I was right outside their window, I’d be a millionaire.” —from The Design of Everyday Things Presumably, if he were any good, he’d already be a millionaire.