Category Archives: sciences

One Of These Things

I’m looking at a banner ad that says Q. Which is not like the others? 63 57 98 01 I saw quickly that none are prime (1 is usually not counted as prime, so that each integer’s prime factorization is … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics | 3 Comments

time-sink of the week

Planarity, a Flash puzzle: rearrange the vertices so that no edges cross. (Cited by Joshua Burton.) When a solution is near, the program gets very slow, which seems backward. (Thursday: It has been changed to test only on the player’s … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics | 3 Comments

the asynchronous world

WiReD summarizes the work of Kiwi maverick philosopher Peter Lynds: His answers make the mathematics of space and time look strange. If instants don’t exist, then calculus – in which equations depend on fixed before-and-after positions in space – doesn’t … Continue reading

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fun with topology

It’s surprising that I had not heard before of the mathematical sculptor Rinus Roelofs. His Möbius-double could be seen as a metaphor for half-spin particles.

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

distributed knowledge wins

I’ve heard that Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) started thinking about spontaneous order because of an incident in the Great War. Austrian forces were routed in a battle in Italy, and fled leaderless through the mountains; and far more of them … Continue reading

Posted in economics, security theater | 1 Comment

Almost Invented Here — again

Once upon a time, probably 1983, I had an idea to maximize diversity in a representative assembly. You vote for more than one candidate. The ballots are counted once for each seat. On each count one winner is chosen, and … Continue reading

Posted in constitution, economics | 7 Comments

go read somewhere else

Tom Knapp on the land problem (inter alia) (cited by Mutualist). (2006: that site has been reorganized; I think this is the same piece, and as a bonus here are two followups.) why drink beer a Martian dust-devil, close up … Continue reading

Posted in astronomy, economics, humanities | Leave a comment