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Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
The facemash fiasco (Lessons 1 & 2)
Because our large business law class meets only once per week (on Mondays), we are going to combine Lessons 1 & 2 into a single lecture. In addition, we are going to re-enact Mark Zuckerberg’s fall 2003 “Ad Board” hearing … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law, Probability, Voting
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Bud Light for President?
Cheers! This lighthearted beer ad actually teaches an important lesson regarding statutory and constitutional interpretation–a fundamental lesson often lost on naive “originalists” or textualist legal scholars: a word or term of art like “party” (or “speech,” “arms,” “natural born,” etc.) … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Current Affairs, Language, Law
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Vertical history
Tim Urban invites us to think about history in vertical terms in this thoughtful blog post. (By the way, we discovered his post via jason kottke, one of our favorite bloggers of all time.) Mr Urban presents a beautiful botanical … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, History
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Is Judge Judy a fraud?
She is the highest paid “judge” in the world. In reality, she’s a private arbitrator who pretends to be a real judge on her famous court TV show, but that is not why she might be a fraud, at least … Continue reading
Posted in Deception, Ethics, Law
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Prime number update
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. The number 3, for example, is a prime number. Now the update: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime … Continue reading
Posted in Mathematics
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Is Senator Cruz a “natural born citizen”?
(P1) Major premise: Article II of the U.S. Constitution categorically states: “No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of President” (emphasis added). This proposition is thus our “major premise” or general principle of … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Language, Law
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Non-random coin toss?
How to not flip a coin What conditions must a coin toss satisfy in order for it to be truly “random,” and why isn’t this particular coin toss a “random” one … or is it? Perhaps another way of approaching … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Probability
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Tinder trailer
Questions about Tinder: How does the “Super Like” function described in the video above overcome or solve the problem of cheap talk or false signals? Also, does Tinder improve or reduce the overall level of “welfare” or “utility”–as economists define … Continue reading
Posted in Cheating, Cooperation, Culture, Current Affairs
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Review of Trivers (2016)
We’ve just finished reading Robert Trivers’s strange memoir “Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist.” But before proceeding with our short review, we must disclose up front that Dr Trivers is one of our intellectual heroes–along with Thomas Schelling, Gordon … Continue reading
Posted in Law, Science
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prior probability 