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Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Do you prefer people or solitude?
This map purports to show the most populous counties in the United States: half of the U.S. population lives in the red counties; the other half lives in the orange counties. (Hat tip: Conrad Hackett.)
Posted in Maps
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Powerball is a scam
Critical thinking question: If lotteries weren’t a State-run monopoly, would such scams have been shut down long ago under State and federal consumer protection laws? (Mathematical table above via Business Insider.)
Posted in Lotteries, Probability
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Applied game theory (A9 chip edition)
Successful firms tend to employ a wide variety of creative strategies for maintaining their “competitive advantage,” i.e. their dominance in a given market without running afoul of antitrust or unfair competition laws. Apple’s A9 chip for the iPhone 6 is … Continue reading
Posted in Game Theory
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The evolution of public law (cannabis edition)
Critical thinking question: Are the drug-policy preferences of the “median voter” in Texas different from those of the median voter in Colorado, or are these legal/policy differences the result of some failure of the political process in those States … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Law
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Happy Three Kings Day
Fray Nicolás Borrás, The Adoration of the Magi
Posted in Culture, History
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Type I vs. Type II errors
We’re almost done reading Deborah G. Mayo’s magnum statistical opus Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1996), a must-read for anyone interested in the philosophy of statistics. Her defense of conventional statistics or “Neyman-Pearson” methods … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Probability
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Why do politicians lie so much?
Is there an “optimal level” of truth telling in politics?
Posted in Cheating, Deception, Ethics, Politics
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“Shortest paper ever published in a serious Math Journal”
The one-page paper is titled “Can n2 + 1 unit equilateral triangles cover an equilateral triangle of side > n, say n + ε?,” authored by John H. Conway and Alexander Soifer, and you can find it here, along with … Continue reading
Posted in Mathematics
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prior probability 