prior probability

Just kidding! But we love the ingenious idea proposed by Mike Maneth (see above). Yes, President Donald J. Trump promised at a campaign rally to pay $1 million to a charity of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s choice if she could prove her Native American ancestry, but now, based on a recent DNA test, Senator Warren claims to have a remote Indian ancestor dating back many generations ago. (Six to ten generations ago, to be more precise. The full DNA report, via The Boston Globe, is available here.) To put this immense generational range into perspective, one has over 1000 ancestors if one goes back ten generations, or as The Globe itself notes, the Senator is at most between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American!

Emily Temple, a writer and senior editor at Lit Hub, describes 20 different rooms where many famous books were written. She includes Ernest Hemingway’s library (pictured below) in Finca Vigía, his home outside Havana, Cuba, where “he wrote seven books, including For whom the bell tolls, A moveable feast, and The old man and the sea, among others.” But Ms Temple mistakenly notes that Hemingway “wrote in the library, which Roxana Robinson describes as ‘a long, pleasant, high-ceilinged room, lined with tall bookcases. In front of the windows is The Desk, huge and magisterial, about ten feet long and three feet wide, and curved like a boomerang. It’s made of dark polished wood, with carved supports at each end. Hemingway sat in the center, the ends curving forward.'” In reality, however, Hemingway did not use “The Desk” to practice his craft. Instead, he wrote in an adjacent room, which was also full of books, and he wrote standing up.

Credit: Jana Crowne

That is the title of the shortest scholarly paper in the annals of academia. The entire paper, which was “published” in 1972, is pictured in the blank space below! (More details here; hat tip: @pickover.)

Say what?

Check out this blog devoted to control panels. (Hat tip: kottke.)

The phrase ipse dixit is Latin for “he said it himself” and refers to an assertion without proof or a dogmatic expression of mere opinion. (Here is the Wikipedia entry for ipse dixit.) This phrase now also refers to a new podcast series hosted by one of our favorite legal scholars Brian O. Frye, who teaches at the University of Kentucky. (FYI: the graceful logo of the podcast is pictured below. We have previously blogged about Professor Frye’s fascinating work on the Zapruder film (see here) and his revisionist history of the facts in Erie v. Tompkins (see here); in addition, here is a master link to his scholarship.) In his podcast Professor Frye interviews sundry legal scholars on a wide variety of topics, so check out the podcast at your leisure. By way of example, Professor Frye has already interviewed Eric Segall on “Originalism as Faith,” which explores the various shades of originalist constitutional interpretation; Valena Beety on “The Overdose/Homicide Epidemic,” which explores the role of coroners in classifying overdoses as homicides; and Ramsi Woodcock on “Efficient Queues,” which explores the theoretical relationship between queues and prices.

Reddit has an entire thread devoted to “desire paths,” like the one pictured below. (hat tip: @pickover)

Credit: u/Phoenixed

What if national borders were redrawn along latitude and longitude lines?

Source: u/Luciantang, via Reddit