prior probability

Check out this beautiful paper by Jöran Friberg: “A Remarkable Collection of Babylonian Mathematical Texts” — the final page of which is pictured below — hat tip: @pickover.

Are you ready to fly to Mars? In addition to my summer readings (see my previous post), I have also read this fascinating essay titled “The profound potential of Elon Musk’s new rocket: an aerospace engineer explains why SpaceX’s Starship will change everything.” See also the Starship explainer video below. All I can say is “wow!”

My family and I will be spending the weekend at Ormond Beach to celebrate the end of the school year, so I will be blogging less frequently, if at all, until Tuesday. (My youngest daughter’s last day of school was on Thursday.) In the meantime, below are some of the books, essays, and interviews — an eclectic collection assembled in alphabetical order by author — that I have recently read or will be reading during the weekend:

1. Simon Beard’s biographical essay about Derek Parfit’s “Repugnant Conclusion”
2. Samuel Bray, A student’s guide to the meanings of “equity” (via SSRN)
3. Liam Kofi Bright, Why do scientists lie?
4. Bryan Caplan, Why I am not an Austrian economist
5. Tyler Cowen’s conversation with David Deutsch
6. New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s 1967 Playboy interview
7. John Morgan, Financing Public Goods by Means of Lotteries
8. Haim Sandberg, What is legal innovation?
9. Robert Sanger, Gettier in a court of law (re-read)
10. David Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reassessing JFK’s Assassination (book cover pictured below)

“Deconstructing Darwin” was one of my first scholarly papers — it was published in Volume 14 of the Griffith Law Review, a law journal in Australia, way back in 2005! Below is the abstract:

“The paper considers Charles Darwin’s physical and intellectual journeys in Tierra del Fuego. In this account, there are really two Darwins. There is the young, brash, ambitious Darwin (D1) — an ugly cultural chauvinist who perceives the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego as ‘savages of the lowest grade’. However, there is another side to Darwin — indeed, there is metaphorically another Darwin. This is the older, mature, wise Darwin (D2) — an enlightened scientist and cultural pluralist who concludes that all men and women are members of a single species and that all religious beliefs and cultural practices are entitled to respect. This Darwin is also a part of an encounter with South America.”

My old Darwin essay is available here, via SSRN.

A Sanford law student posted the satirical poster pictured below and now Stanford has put his law degree on hold. As a card-carrying member of The Federalist Society myself, I object to Stanford’s anti-free speech administrators and call on Stanford’s president to suspend or fire them immediately. More details here and here.

Update (June 7): Because of negative publicity generated by this sorry state of affairs, Stanford has backed down, but no administrator has suffered any adverse consequences for unlawfully putting the student’s degree on hold in the first place.

Or at least require full disclosure, i.e. require bots on social media platforms to self-identify as such? A Twitter bot, for example, is a type of software that controls a Twitter account without human intervention (i.e. autonomously), performing such actions as tweeting, re-tweeting, liking, following, unfollowing, etc. Some of these bots are harmless, but which ones? Also, what fraction of all Twitter accounts happen to be bots? According to this 2017 study, up to 15% of Twitter users were automated bots, and according to this 2018 study, these bots generated 66% of all links on Twitter! I wonder whether these numbers have gone up or down since then.

One of the things I like the most about Selena: The Series on Netflix is how the series also features some of the lesser-known members of Selena’s band Los Dinos, like A.B. Quintanilla (composer and producer), Suzette Quintanilla (drums), Pete Astudillo (vocals), and Ricky Vela (keyboard). Below is one of my favorite songs and scenes from the series: