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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
Posted in Uncategorized
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 Here is a brief excerpt from my own self-reflections in my (as of yet unpublished) intellectual autobiography: My intellectual life truly began during the summer … Continue reading
The economics of Christmas
How “inefficient” is Christmas and the tradition of gift-giving generally? According to this paper, The deadweight loss of Christmas, published in the prestigious American Economics Review 20 years ago this month (and from which the figure above is taken), holiday gift-giving … Continue reading
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Tagged cheap talk, Christmas, Deadweight Loss, Economics, Gifts, scientism
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Bayes again …
Brian McGill, an ecologist at the University of Maine and fellow blogger at Dynamic Ecology, recently wrote (last June) a helpful overview and nuanced critique of Bayesian probability titled “Why saying you are a Bayesian is a low information statement“. We not … Continue reading
Madiba … Bayesian hero
The dramatic story of how Nelson Mandela reconsidered his long-held Marxist views and updated his political and economic priors is retold in this fascinating report “How Mandela Shifted Views on Freedom of Markets” published on 10 December 2013 in the New York … Continue reading
The Bayesian approach to sports
Consider the following image from ESPN Stats & Info (via Twitter): This past Sunday afternoon, the overrated Dallas Cowboys led the venerable and tenacious Green Bay Packers by a score of 26-3 at halftime, yet the Cowboys somehow blew their large … Continue reading
