Tag: Real world math
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Before wipers
Why did windshield wipers start relatively late in the development of cars? Partly because closed cars with glass windshields were late. But windshields were common for 10 years before wipers became standard. Visors were an adequate solution for quite a while, just as porches and roof overhangs are adequate for houses. Some visors were extensions…
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Missing the main point as always
Via RealClear, a sane and sensible article on school homework in math classes. Education is all about fads and fashions. Trends come and go, but parents consistently hate homework and cheer when a school abandons it. The article says it’s hard to quantify whether homework helps. Naturally mathy types get good grades without spending time…
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Monster stopped killing. GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE.
Paul Unehrlich, the philosophical source of total genocide, finally stopped killing. Unehrlich persuaded all governments and corporations that life is exponential. Corporations loved him because their God, the Dow, is exponential by definition. Infinite orgasm for billionaires. Governments loved him because an exponential happens when you eliminate negative feedback. Governments require open-loop systems because open-loop…
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π Day
Keeping up a tradition… π Day again! Since I’m talking typography lately, I’ll hash and rehash a couple items from 2019. = = = = = Thinking about Trump as Pied Piper. When the metaphor first appeared in those DNC emails I didn’t quite understand it. After learning that Trump is Roy Cohn’s protege, I…
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Used to be called 1
Via Protos, the big digital betting casinos like Kalshi and Polymarket are making profits from bets on assassinations. Some of the bets are phrased indirectly, but everyone knows what it means. You win when a politician is killed. It appears that many of the bettors are politicians with an obvious motive. Before the Wall Street…
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Worse than Altman’s eyeball
Noticed via New Scientist, which properly considered it as a candidate for the next Ig-Nobels. You thought Altman’s soul-stealing Eyeball was intrusive? How about a new industry devoted to wearable fart detectors? The fartup sees an oppootunity in the well-known hianus of infartmation. Most people aren’t aware of their actual fartquency**, either under or overstating…
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Moore’s Law? No, Less’s Law.
I’ve always figured my own income tax. A long time ago when I had a circle of friends, I often figured taxes for friends because I enjoyed the work. Now I hate it. Why did I enjoy it then and hate it now? Easy. Paper vs computer. Even for a relatively simple situation, tax involves…
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Says more about humans than aliens
This cartoon is splendid. It tells us how Altman thinks of himself. More importantly it reveals our basic brain structure. A single little 0 doesn’t cause dissonance. We feel it as nothing and we calculate it as nothing. A BIG zero like 0,000,000,000,000 feels BIG, even though our language processor tells us it’s still nothing.…
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It’s not an algorithm.
We constantly bitch about the obnoxious results of algorithms on the web. New thought: The most obnoxious shit happens when there ISN’T an algorithm. An intelligence, whether you call it a brain or an algorithm or a program, does three things: 1. Take input from the world. Different types of intelligence take input in different…
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Happy 68th, Sputnik!
I’ve saluted Sputnik many times, focusing on a different topic each time. Today is the 68th birthday. I’ll repeat the 2021 version, which seems most appropriate now. = = = = = Browsing through more of the ACM magazine. From Nov 1957, a remarkably sane and objective IMMEDIATE response to Sputnik. Author Edmund Berkeley gets…
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Rererereprint on real value
Reprinting this for the thousandth time after mentioning the Soviet reliance on REAL VALUE in previous item. This one piece encompasses everything I know and believe. = = = = = START EVERYTHING: Robert Shiller is arguing that economics pays too much attention to theories and numbers. Perfectly correct. He’s also arguing that real economies…
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Hard currency?
The ex-Soviet auto history podcaster often mentions that trade between the US side of the world and the Soviet side was difficult because the ruble wasn’t a ‘hard currency’. I used to hear that phrase in the news and didn’t question it at the time. The news told us Soviet money wasn’t hard, so it…
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Too much adaptation
Press release at Spokane News: (Condensed) On Tuesday, September 16th, 2025, after a months-long investigation, DEA, ATF, local police seized 50,208 pills from a defendant at a Centralia gas station. … Lab tests revealed the pills did not contain fentanyl, instead they were carfentanil and acetaminophen. Carfentanil is a synthetic opioid originally developed to tranquilize…
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SubSPAC
SPACs are money-laundering devices for new entries in the stock crime index. The sole purpose of a SPAC is to evade the few remaining regulations on initial offerings of crime shares. When a fake company wants to enter the NASDAQ Murder Index but knows it’s too blatantly bankrupt to get past the weak rules, it…
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Ponzi is a fake argument
Too many arguments sink into irrelevance when one side insists A is a Ponzi scheme and the other side says it isn’t. Bitcoin and Social Security are both called Ponzi at times. The definition of Ponzi is much more nuanced and fuzzy than we usually think. Intention is important. Two classic examples show the real…
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