Category Archives: sciences

the price of life

No comment on the thesis of “The economic logic of executing computer hackers” (Slate; cited by ACB), but this caught my eye: When we say that a human life is worth $10 million, we mean nothing more or less than … Continue reading

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domequest

My fullerene page was the first webpage I made, in 1998. The C programs whose output is shown there – to enumerate pentagon-hexagon topologies, and to estimate their 3D shapes – were lost years ago; I wanted to improve and … Continue reading

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QotD

Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle The generally negative-sum struggle for fascist state power is diametrically opposed to the positive-sum logic of cooperation that is the very heart of capitalism, and the justification of democracy.

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the weather up here

I am tall enough to wish I were two inches shorter. Do any very bright minds wish they were dimmer? A few weeks ago I read – I’ve forgotten where – an article reporting with a bit of worry that … Continue reading

Posted in me!me!me!, medicine | 2 Comments

the swarm

I spent the Seventies in Champaign, Illinois, which is on the boundary between two cicada broods: X (1970) and XIX (1972). Yet I seem to remember that the bugs were out every summer, though not in Biblical numbers. Does my … Continue reading

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as we suspected

Ellipsoids can be packed denser than spheres can. (Cited by Oliver Xymoron.) One of these days I must make a doodle of this result.

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that gun gave up smoking

Dave Muse thinks the Michigan state lottery has a mechanical bias favoring smaller intervals. (Cited by Jon Handler.) So I wrote a short program that generates all C(50,6) = 1589 0700 possible lottery draws and counts the resulting intervals. The distribution … Continue reading

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