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Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Happy Three Kings Day
By the way, why is Three Kings Day, or Epiphany, not really celebrated in the Anglo-American world?
Should Afghanistan become the 51st State?
The United States launched “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan in October 2001, and although US forces quickly removed the stubborn leaders of the Taliban from power and shut down the training camps of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, we have … Continue reading
Who reads academic papers?
It turns out that no one does, not even academics! According to this devious but brilliant little paper published in the journal Complex Systems by Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, researchers at UCLA who found an ingenious way [*] of estimating what fraction of academics … Continue reading
The future of law and legislation?
A legislator in California, Mike Gatto (pictured below), recently set up the world’s first Wiki-bill in order to enable private citizens to act as cyber-legislators and help draft an actual law. According to Assemblyman Gatto: Government has a responsibility to listen to the … Continue reading
When will Cuba be free?
Yesterday, 1 January 2014, General Raul Castro (i.e. Cuba’s Pinochet) delivered yet another tedious and long-winded speech to commemorate the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. (Why are most revolutionaries, generally speaking, so much better at giving rousing speeches than respecting … Continue reading
What is the “optimal” number of U.S. States?
Put differently, what would a map of the USA look like if all the secession movements in US history had succeeded? This beautiful map [*], created by Andrew Shears, a professor of geography at Mansfield University, provides one possible to answer to this question. … Continue reading
Mindball
According to this article in Wikipedia, there are only seven Mindball game sets in all of North America. (A Mindball game set is a medium-sized contraption consisting of a table, a small magnetized ping-pong type ball, and some electronic sensors capable of … Continue reading
What does a micro-dissertation look like?
Check out the website LOL My Thesis to find out. In brief, it’s what you get when you cross a formal academic dissertation with a cyberpunk format like Twitter. Here’s one example: “I thought there was a solution to invasive lionfish, but there … Continue reading
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Tagged Education, Micro-Dissertations, new ideas, Technology
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What have you learned today?
The holidays are a good time to reflect on one’s life, including one’s intellectual life. Here is a brief excerpt from my own self-reflections in my (as of yet unpublished) intellectual autobiography: My intellectual life truly began during the summer … Continue reading
prior probability 