prior probability

You may have already seen some variant or snippet of the video clip below in which Ander Christensen, a resident of Lincoln, Nebraska, asks his local city council to ban the misleading and deceptive term “boneless chicken wings.” Although Mr Christensen’s plea may sound trivial, I wholeheartedly agree with him, for as I see it, he is making a deeper philosphical point about truth and language. See here, for example. In brief, when we use a word or phrase to describe x, those words or that phrase should accurately reflect the contents of x, right?

Will the interstate highway system be the last major public works project to be built in the United States, or should we re-start the Cross Florida Barge Canal or the Big Cypress Swamp Jetport? I first learned about these two ambitious but ill-fated Florida public works projects in one of the books I was reading this summer: Drying Up: The Fresh Water Crisis in Florida (University Press of Florida, 2019) by John M. Dunn. The Cross Florida Canal would have connected the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, while the Big Cypress Jetport would have been the largest and most modern airport in the world, capable of handling supersonic aircraft. Alas, both projects were eventually cancelled due to their environmental impacts. In any case, I finally found a map of the proposed canal and am posting it here.

I am totally serious. In honor of the upcoming Labor Day Holiday Weekend, allow me to pose the following (non-rhetorical) question: Why do we still allow the federal government (and many State governments) to tax our physical and mental labor, which is what an “income tax” basically amounts to? Go ahead and tax my capital gains, or my leisure activities, or my property, or my inheritance, or my wholesale or retail purchases, but for goodness’ sake, stop taxing my labor! Simply put, I don’t need a bunch of fancy jargon to obfuscate the self-evident truth that taxing people’s work is regressive and unjust–the moral equivalent of theft or forced labor. At the very least, the first $100,000 of one’s earnings should be tax free. What am I missing here? (PS: If you Google the phrase “abolish the income tax,” some very interesting things will pop up!)

“I am so sorry, but …” Although the “random excuse generator” pictured below (play around with it here for yourself; hat tip: @pickover) is quite crude–awkward even–it does a fairly decent job of coming up with good excuses! Maybe if this random excuse generator combined forces with an online writing assistant like “Grammarly” it could revolutionize the business and academic communities, where so much time is wasted in unproductive meetings.

Via Kottke: “MIT’s biology department is offering a new online class this fall called COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and the Pandemic. The class will be led by Richard Young and Facundo Batista and will include guest lectures by several leading authorities on Covid-19, coronaviruses, epidemiology, and immune systems like Anthony Fauci, Michael Mina, and Akiko Iwasaki. Here’s the course description and syllabus.”

A colleague recently brought to my attention this impressive list of 39 medieval universities founded before the year 1500 (hat tip: Dr Paul Jarley), though some of these venerable institutions have been closed for brief periods; for example, the University of Siena was closed 1805-1815 during the Napoleonic wars. Among other things, what I want to know is this: Did professors have academic “tenure” back then?

Check out these artworks by IndieTheIntrovert, including the one pictured below, which is titled “Escher’s Other Dogs.” FYI: M. C. Escher, one of the major inspirations of Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach, was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically-inspired art. Among other things, his work features mathematical objects and operations including “impossible objects” and explorations of infinity, and his work has appeared on the covers of many books and record albums. According to Wikipedia (see footnote 71 of this Wikipedia entry), Escher’s art became well-known among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture, after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

Here it is! (Pictured below are the first two pages of my new syllabus.)

Thinkers as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, and Umberto Eco have used the concept of “family resemblance” to describe similarities among different objects/activities, so why not apply this concept to flags as well, such as those of Cuba 🇨🇺 and Puerto Rico 🇵🇷? The map below contains nine additional groups of national flags sharing close family resemblances.