May 2013
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“The Manhattan-based firm will net $253 million from the deal, mostly from a...”
– Union Square gets 5,000% return on Tumblr | Crain’s New York Business (via softwarepatent)
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“The population of Asia in 1500 was five times as big as that of Western Europe...”
– Angus Maddison / OECD
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“As soon as an Analytic Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future...”
– Charles Babbage (1864)
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“Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong...”
– scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins, Postmodernism Disrobed. A review of Intellectual Impostures published in Nature 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143.
Above we read an assertion without evidence. Dawkins posits that an intellectual impostor with nothing to say would write in a certain...
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“ $150 billion per year is spent on text messaging.
Recorded music is a $17...”
– Tom Standage of The Economist
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“The definition of a hillbilly is someone who can solve their own problems. A...”
– Mason Snyder,
IQ of 180
drives (and keeps in repair) a 33-year-old automobile
likes to set things on fire
shoots and eats rabbits, squirrels, and turtles
self-proclaimed hillbilly
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WatchWhat is Eastern Europe? How did places like Gepidia, Nitra, Great Moravia, the Avar Khaganate, Habsburgia, Pannonia, Thrace, Dacia, Moesia, nomadic Göktürks under the Rouran Khaganate, Dalmatia, Cimmeria, Anatolia, the Great Seljuq Empire, Corinth, Onoghuria, Scythia, Syrmia, Vojvodina, Bulgaria, Carpathia, Illyria, Hamangia, Bosnia, Budim, Egri, Sigetvar, Temeşvar, Pomorje,...
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“The critic who doesn’t make a personal statement, in re measurements he himself...”
– from ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound (1934)
in re: reblogging via cmnotes
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How I Use The Pythagorean Theorem Every Day
OK, not every day. But whenever I shop for packaged retail goods like a coffee or in the grocers.
The Pythagorean theorem demonstrates that a slightly larger circle has twice as much area as a slightly smaller circle.
(Since the diagonal of that square is √2 long relative to the “1” of the interior radius=leg of the right triangle. So the outer radius=hypotenuse=√2, and √2 squared...
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Watch16 pages for non-brainiacs on the Hopf fibration by David Lyons
mapping from S³→S²
ƒ(a,b,c,d) = (a²+b²−c²−d²,,)
in general a linear transformation in 3-D requires 9 parameters (3×3 matrix — see general linear group)
but a rotation only requires ≤4 parameter
mapping from S³→S²
ƒ[a,b,c,d] = [a²+b²−c²−d²,2(ad+bc),2(bd−ac)]
but a rotation only requires ≤4 parameters
understanding maps...
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Postmodern Economics I
Some people think of postmodernism as the rejection of the existence of objective facts. Another take is that po-mo comprises broader methods of getting one’s point across than didaction. For example: joking, insinuating, or ending sentences with question marks.
For example this sarcastic remark:
A theory is something which nobody literally believes except the person who invented it. An...
April 2013
35 posts
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2^2^2^2^2
$ bc -l
bc 1.06.95
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'....
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Late spring. Just after the last frost. I was walking home barefoot, facing the sun. Above one yard with plenty of white dandelion heads I saw in the polarised light golden motes dancing, circling each other, bobbing and teasing each other. They looked like golden fairies.
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An interesting story about industrial rail in the...
Decomposition: Optimal Descriptive NFL Rankings →
seanjtaylor:
…Rankings are the simplest possible model that can represent a total order, which you can think of as a function that allows you to compare all possible pairs in your set.
In the NFL regular season, … 256 binary outcomes, ….
… how well can you describe the season with a ranking of teams? There are 32! possible rankings, so a ranking of all 32 teams...
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philosophy & quantum mechanics
@jtc_19 asked:
@condoroptions @epicureandeal @munilass Any good books relating quantum physics and philosophy?
— Clark (@jtc_19) April 13, 2013
The isomorphismes links (last three tweets) might be worth sharing with everyone. (I’ve been accused that this site is hard to browse—sorry!)
@jtc_19 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://t.co/g9QwMVxwfT) is the...
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Tracks in the Snow
We went hiking and I noticed animal tracks in the snow.
rabbit
bighorn sheep
fox
dog
something hard to identify
It occurred to me that these are curves γ(t) and that I’m looking into the past at them.
In Zelda: Twilight Princess, when Link turns into a wolf, his world is dominated by the sense of smell.
It’s an interesting way of interacting with the world, seeing the...
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∂ Campbell's
Cylinder = line-segment × disc
C = | × ●
The “product rule” from calculus works as well with the boundary operator ∂ as with the differentiation operator ∂.
∂C = ∂| × ● + | × ∂●
>Oops. Typo. Sorry, I did this really late at night! cos and sin need to be swapped back.
Oops. Another typo. Wrong formula for circumference.
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