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3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 …
The enigmatic irrational number π … to 100 decimal places. While you contemplate this strange and infinite number, do you detect a pattern, or is all you see pure randomness? Happy National π Day! Go celebrate with your favorite π product. (Hat tip … Continue reading
Argument by analogy
If the executive branch of the US government — starting with President Nixon — has declared a federal “war on drugs” as US national policy, aren’t all lower-level federal officials who carry out this stupid war the equivalent of “war … Continue reading
Snowden speaks
Edward Snowden spoke via satellite to an audience at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas earlier today. Here is the complete transcript of Snowden’s remarks, and here are Snowden’s thoughts on the lack of judicial and political accountability of U.S. public surveillance programs: … Continue reading
Taxonomy Project
We love the music in this song by Beyonce’. But what type of music is it? It’s not really rap; nor is it pure hip-hop. It’s definitely not rock or reggae; neither is it a slow jam or a traditional … Continue reading
“You and Your Research”
That is the title of this thought-provoking talk given by Richard Hamming at Bell Labs on 7 March 1986. Among my favorite sentences from Dr. Hamming’s great talk is this one: “If you don’t work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll … Continue reading
Hobby Lobby Case, Part 4
This post marks our fourth foray into the important case of Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., which will be argued before the US Supreme Court on 25 March 2014. Anne Tucker, a law professor at Georgia State University, recently explored … Continue reading
Constitutional dataset
Check out this comprehensive constitutional dataset at the Comparative Constitutions Project or CCP. In the meantime, props go (once again) to economist extraordinaire Alex Tabarrok for bringing the CCP to our attention in his recent post “Constitutions Quantified.” Alex’s excellent post sums up the constitutional … Continue reading
Undiluted Hocus-Pocus
That is the title of Martin Gardner’s autobiography. Mr Gardner, who wrote the popular Mathematical Games column for Scientific American for 25 years, is one of our intellectual heroes and role models. Here are three of our favorite excerpts from his last book: 1. … Continue reading
A natural experiment
The City Council of St. Petersburg, the sprawling city where the Tampa Bay Rays play during the regular season, voted 6-2 yesterday to discontinue the use of red-light cameras. (There are a total of 22 red-light cameras at ten intersections … Continue reading
