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While I usually never find enough time to watch series (or even less telly!), I took advantage of those three weeks at the hospital to catch up with Game of Thrones and discovered Sherlock, thanks to Judith. As I have been reading George Martin’s epics, A Song of Ice and Fire, from the very beginning [...]
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Text extracted from "The magician's own book, or The whole art of conjuring" (1862) by George Arnold
This can be shown by a beautiful philosophical toy which may easily be constructed. Procure a glass jar, such as is here represented. Then mould three or four little figures in wax, and make them hollow within, and having each a minute opening at the heel, by which water may pass in and out. Place them in the jar, as seen in the figure, and adjust them by the quantity of water admitted to […]
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From an email I received the other day: Things are going much better now — it’s interesting, it feels like with both of my models, parameters are slow to converge or get “stuck” and have trouble mixing when the model is somehow misspecified. See here for a statement of the folk theorem.
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This month, I decided I would focus on one of the most famous theorems in all of mathematics: The Pythagorean Theorem. Though it sounds kind of dull on the face, it has a lot of extremely interesting things within it.First, let me go over what it is. If you take a right triangle, and label the measure of its shortest side a, its middle side b, and its longest side c, then you can count on the fact that:a2 + b2 = c2 This can be used in geometry problems, like to find the longest side, or
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Gödel had his doctorate at 23, completing all his university studies in about 5 years. In the U.S., for example, if one goes through the usual path of four years of undergraduate studies (after being admitted to a university at … Continue reading →
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History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports: Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, [...]
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I wish I could write four papers in three weeks. The title just means that I submitted four papers to the arXiv in the last three weeks—somehow, after the stress of doing my taxes ended, four of my papers converged to their final state very fast. Here are the papers with [...]
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Aunt Pythia is yet again gratified to find a few new questions in her inbox this morning, but as usual, she’s running quite low. After reading and enjoying the column below, please consider making some fabricated, melodramatic dilemma up out of whole cloth and, more importantly: Please submit your fake question for Aunt Pythia at [...]
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Recently I was in Chicago, on the subway, and a big dude came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around, and the big dude held up his index finger, to show me that he too was wearing a Hello Kitty band-aid.
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Jonah, I've posted a list of all of the school, government, and state offices involved in this case here: http://bit.ly/ZuDRYa. I posted this link and my contact information to DNLee. Perhaps you could post an express mail form here too so that people can immediately write to these folks on Kiera's behalf? There's also now a Crowd.it fundraiser started by another (angry and motivated) netizen. There's more to do!
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I just found out that Gareth Roberts and Terry Speed had been elected as Fellows of the Royal Society. Congratulations to both for this prestigious recognition of their major contributions to Science! (Another Fellow elected this year is Bill Bryson, in recognition of his scientific popularisation books.) Filed under: Books, Statistics, University life Tagged: Bill [...]
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Like the agents they study, evolutionary economics is highly heterogeneous. Models are ad-hoc and serve as heuristic guides to specific problems. This is similar to theoretical biology, where evolutionary models are independent of each other. Even the general theory of inclusive fitness does not provide a non-controversial unifying framework. Although there is no single framework, [...]
Hodgson, G. & Huang, K. (2010). Evolutionary game theory and evolutionary economics: are they different species?, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 22 (2) 345-366. DOI: 10.1007/s00191-010-0203-3
