I’ve just seen the end of Angel‘s third season, and what a startling revelation! Who’d have thought that Cordelia would drive a yellow Jeep?!
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 this: A typical person, faced with a 1-in-10-million chance of death, seems to be willing to pay about a dollar to eliminate that risk. We know this not from theory but from observation – by looking, for example, at the size of the pay cuts people are willing to take to move into safer jobs. On this basis, Harvard professor Kip Viscusi estimates the value of a life at $4.5 million overall, $7 million for a blue-collar male and $8.5 million for a blue collar female. (Viscusi acknowledges that it’s puzzling for a blue-collar life to be worth more than a white-collar life, but that’s what the data show.)
Perhaps white-collar workers, unfamiliar with the concept of death on the job, underestimate its likelihood.
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 extend them anyway.
I’ve worked on the new search program (in Python) at long intervals. Last weekend, a version with all the essential features ran, up to 24 faces. The bad news is that the file of partial solutions – on which the program would have built to proceed to 32 faces, and so on – was 5 gigabytes. I’ll need a more efficient way to handle partials, or else to abandon the concept.