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Meta
Category Archives: sciences
precision ≠ accuracy
Go get ’em! The LP responds to the notorious infamous “if you buy dope you’re supporting terrorism” spot with this newspaper advertisement. (Thanks to Ananda, who credits Declan McCullagh.) Pet peeve nº 17000: false precision. When you write “boosts . . . … Continue reading
Posted in drugwar, mathematics
1 Comment
hyperbolic, baby!
Pretty things: hyperbolic planar tesselations by Don Hatch. Presented in the conformal Poincaré disc mapping, which is the most common; it’s analogous to stereographic projection of a sphere. Another favorite mapping is the half-plane, which has no analogue that I … Continue reading
Posted in eye-candy, mathematics
1 Comment
it’s a dog-trade-with-dog world
Peter Hollo cites an interview with Richard Dawkins, at an address which has unfortunately gone bad since January 15. Hollo writes: . . . you can read Dawkins distancing himself from a kind of Thatcherite, “Darwinian”, dog-eat-dog world of the … Continue reading
Posted in economics
2 Comments
guns, butter
Steve White scores a good one: Can someone explain to us why we expect the military budget to scale linearly with the GDP? Isn’t it the whole idea of a federal government that it will scale sub-linearly? Are we just … Continue reading
Posted in economics, militaria
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specialize!
on Samizdata, Brian Micklethwait writes In praise of renting and to hell with owning: In general, the relationship between owning-or-renting and freedom is surely the opposite of what it is so often said to be by British Conservatives. Renting equals … Continue reading
Posted in economics, futures
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activities
One of my friends is thinking of organizing an ‘activities day’ for our circle, and invites me to run a workshop relating to my most visible hobby, mathematical beauty. Okay, I said, but what would we do?
Posted in mathematics, me!me!me!
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this is serious!
An old friend calls my attention to this proof of the irrationality of pi, which happens to be a mere link or two away from this favorite essay in historical linguistics; each is in a perhaps surprising literary form.
Posted in language, mathematics
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