Links: Crowds and the Recession, Snowden, Win $1 Million with Circuits, Social Choice Theory, and More

As promised, more substantive posts (including a reflection on my freshman seminar on math, linguistics, and writing) to come soon, once I finish my thesis.1 For now, assorted links accrued over procrastination during thesis-writing. Terry Tao has a really cool idea about using circuit design from electrical engineering to solve the million-dollar Navier-Stokes problem. A …

Links: SWAT Teams, Nostalgia, Lemonade Stands, Why Ice Cream Sounds Fat, Gluten Intolerance, Etc.

An interesting article by Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky on why different sounds have different associations, e.g., why “ice cream sounds fat”. I’ve always been interested in the Saussaurean arbitrariness of sign—the notion that the sound or form of a word is independent of the meaning. (I hope to write on this in the future.) This …

Links: The Math of Genealogy, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Techno-Utopianism, Eric Holder, Pope Francis, etc

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, …

Interesting Articles, Links, Etc.

Some more links. Why do companies buy out startups just to get their employees, rather than just offering them higher salaries, which seems like it would be cheaper? An interesting article in the NYT gives some answers to this puzzle about so-called acqui-hiring in Silicon Valley.1 See also the longer law article by the original …