Via Chris Rodley: “A runaway trolley is about to create five trolley problems. Do you pull the lever and divert it, so it only creates one?”
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Blogs I Follow
Top three list
Here’s a listing of our three most popular/most visited blog posts over the last three years:
1. Probabilistic business hours (2016)
2. Consumer surplus: “Print Wikipedia” art edition (2015)
3. Chess piece survival rates (2014)
Happy New Year
Posted in Culture, Time
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Is the tree of life more like a web?
The great Charles Darwin visualized a tree of life (pictured below) consisting of separate species springing from a distant ancestor, but what if many of these “separate species” still share significant amounts of the same genetic material? Check out, for example, this recent report by Elizabeth Pennisi titled “Shaking up the tree of life” published in the journal Science, vol. 354 (18 Nov 2016), pp. 817-821. Here is one excerpt (p. 818): “Biologists long ago accepted that microbes can swap DNA, and they are now coming to terms with rampant gene flow among more complex creatures [such as interbreeding birds and butterflies]. ‘A large percent of the genome is free to move around,’ notes Chris Jiggins, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. This ‘really challenges our concept of what a species is.’ As a result, where biologists once envisioned a tree of life, its branches forever distinct, many now see an interconnected web.”
Darwin’s tree of life.
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Uncategorized
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Train Track Art
Hat tip: Cliff Pickover. (Happy Birthday, Sydjia!)
Posted in Art, Culture
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Nochebuena (Christmas eve): Lego edition
Feliz Nochebuena; Feliz Navidad
Posted in Uncategorized
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Merry Christmas: a “Blade Runner” sequel is in the works
We interrupt our sporadic Internet sabbatical with the following update: Forget the overhyped (and totally overrated) Star Wars franchise, because we just discovered that Blade Runner is coming back to the big screen. The “original” Blade Runner is one of our favorite films of all time (we put the word original in scare quotes because there are several different versions of the original movie), so we can’t wait for the sequel.
Posted in Culture, Science Fiction
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In memory of Thomas Schelling, the errant economist
Update (1/22/17): check out this touching tribute to Schelling by Glenn Loury. (Hat tip: Garrett Jones, via Twitter.)
We have been trying to stay away from the Internet during our “Christmas sabbatical” to spend more time with our family, attend to grading duties, and read Roy Sorensen’s beautiful book on thought experiments, but we just discovered that the author of The Strategy of Conflict and self-described “errant economist” Thomas Schelling (pictured below) died a few days ago. Because Professor Schelling had such a great influence on us (he was one of our intellectual heroes), we are interrupting our Internet sabbatical to describe his impact on our approach to law and life. In particular, here is an abridged excerpt (without footnotes) from an essay we published in 2015: Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Bayesian Reasoning, Cooperation, Economics, Game Theory
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Christmas sabbatical
It’s that time of year again: it’s time for us to get off the Internet to spend more time with our family and friends, so we are taking a sabbatical from blogging during the holiday season. In the meantime, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Posted in Uncategorized
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prior probability 