Web Roundup: More Links For May
Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish to know but to talk.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Joshua Bell, the Washington Post assures me, is a world-class musician and a Very Big Deal. The Post asked him if “he’d be willing to don street clothes and perform at rush hour.” The results? No one cared. (HT: Terry Tao)
Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars.
Do dogs know calculus? Well, they can’t take symbolic derivatives, but they can compute optimal paths.
Women who prefer the evening to the morning are more sexually, uh, liberated. This makes sense given the link between testosterone levels and night preference.
Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Dunbar proposed 150, but given data from online communities, it looks like the real number might be more like 50.
Hector is the name given to a cumulonimbus, or thundercloud, that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands.
Carl Shulman has a post up on scientific fraud: “1.97% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once”.
“each Apollo mission took about the same amount of work as each pyramid.”
Colin Wright has written a fun discussion of the mutilated chessboard problem.
So, in Montana, there used to be this 1 mile long, 1,780 feet deep open pit copper mine. When it closed in 1982, the company stopped pumping out water, and it became a lake. Nice story right? Except the water interacted with the exposed rock, releasing acid. It’s a lake of poison.
For anyone new to machine learning who’s ever wondered: Which algorithm do I apply? Try this graphic.
Guerino Mazzola is attempting to fuse algebraic geometry and music. Grothendieck reportedly calls it “Das ist wohl schon die Mathematik des neuen Zeitalters,” or “This is probably already the mathematics of the new age.” (It seems there has been much ink spilled on mathematics and music.)
“16 out of 22 hallucinating, profoundly deaf schizophrenics insisted they had heard some kind of communication.” Other patients hallucinate sign language which, interestingly, seems to imply that schizophrenia manifests more generally as communication wonkyness than anything specific to language.
From a former maintainer, an explanation of why GNU grep is fast. Thoughtful throughout. Ends with this gem: “The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.”
With regard to Isaac Newton: His successor in the Lucasian Chair described him this way, “Of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew.”
Numberphile has a (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsSeoGpiWsw), featuring part of an interview with John Conway. It’s a bit like if we found some really bizarre prime number and nobody could tell you why it exists or what it all means.
The story of a burglar who thought rubbing his face in lemon juice would make him invisible.
W.H. Coltharp needed to move 50,000 bricks to build a bank, but he couldn’t afford freight. So he mailed them.
A neat post on using color to gain intuition about four-dimensional space.
A probably apocryphal story: Bertrand Russel, when asked why he gave up philosophy, is said to have responded, “Because I discovered I preferred fucking.”
An survey of 33 quantum physicists. The authors describe the paper as “to our knowledge the most comprehensive poll of quantum-foundational views ever conducted.” Some of the interesting bits: a plurality expect a useful quantum computer in 10 to 25 years, the Copenhagen interpretation is still the most popular by far (42%), but currently most (58%) also hold that a choice of interpretation is a matter of personal philosophical preference.
Alex Tabarrok has a post up on implementing prediction markets to give not-yet-born citizens a say in policy debates.
According to Wikipedia, in 2013, $5.3 trillion dollars changed hands daily in foreign exchange markets. The New York Stock Exchange, in contrast, moves a paltry $169 billion per day. This means that at least 7 percent of the gross world product (total GDP of the world) is traded each day.
Occasionally, my sister will forget the name of a movie and I’ll offer to tell her the name, but she’ll say, “Don’t tell me! It’ll come to me.” It turns out that this might be totally rational: the harder time you have recalling something, the more that memory benefits from a successful recollection.
