A few links, as I prepare some more substantive posts. Laurie Penny, I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in the New Statesman. (Opening lines: “Like scabies and syphilis, Manic Pixie Dream Girls were with us long before they were accurately named.”) I recently started using Amazon’s S3 for highly durable, inexpensive cloud-based backup system, …
Tag Archives: humor
Links: Probability and DNA Testing, 16th Century Executioners, Walmart as a Bank, Etc.
Jordan Ellenberg has an excellent article in Slate about probability and DNA testing for crimes. This is important to think about, especially as we consider the implications of the recent Supreme Court decision on such testing. (In particular, the larger the database, the bigger the problem.) What was it like to be an executioner in …
A Story about Bertrand Russell’s Plane Crash
In the past few days, a video has been circulating of an interview where Bertrand Russell credits smoking with saving his life.1 Russell explains: In fact, you know, on one occasion [smoking] saved my life. I was in an airplane, a man was getting a seat for me, and I said, “Get me a seat …
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Links: Number Theory, Mel Brooks, Garden Hermits, Gay Marriage, Passwords, etc
I promise to have some real posts soon—an announcement describing my freshman writing course about math, and a two-part series on the late economist Albert Hirschman, including a discussion of how his theories apply to the tech world—but for now a few links: There’s big news in math with Yitang Zhang’s proof of a big …
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A Sonnet for Morgenbesser: Dear Astrophil, Love Stella
Two summers ago, I sat in on a wonderful introductory poetry course taught by John Whittier-Ferguson. Among the poems we read was Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet Astrophil and Stella 63 (“O Grammar rules…”). In this sonnet sequence,1 Astrophil is less than successfully wooing Stella. By this 63rd sonnet he resorts to linguistic trickery: You have …
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Interesting Links
I imagine in the blog that I will be sharing various links to articles, etc., that I find interesting. Perhaps lightly annotated. Rather than overburden your RSS feed or whatnot with too many individual entries (cough, cough Andrew Sullivan, who I would subscribe to if there would be some way to do so without it …