Hat tips: Max Fisher; AirTraffic LIVE (Zurcher Hochschule school of Engineering).
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Map of Manhattan Island
New York City, the city that never sleeps, is one of the greatest cities in the world, especially the Island of Manhattan, but what is your favorite neighborhood in the City? (According to the map below, there are over 40 separate neighborhoods in Manhattan alone.) Also, what criteria would you use in deciding what your favorite area of the City is?
Hat tips: Frank Jacobs.
Sunday puzzle
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the shortest possible route connecting the three corners or vertices of an equilateral triangle, as shown in the illustration below:
Hint: in searching for the shortest possible route connecting all three points of the triangle, your route may also need to run through or connect to one or more extra points within the boundary of the triangle. So, now, ask yourself a different question: how many extra points would you add to this triangle and where would you place them?
Postscript for my law students: although the geometrical problem above has a correct solution, can we really say the same about problems in law? In short, why is it that some legal problems, especially hard cases, do not necessarily have a “correct” solution? Consider one of the short essay questions on my Torts final: what’s wrong with Judge Cardozo’s opinion in the Palsgraf case? One possible answer is that Cardozo’s “zone of danger” test is too indefinite and indeterminate. That is, how can we say (with any level of certainty) whether Ms. Palsgraf was really in the zone of danger or not when the scale fell on her head; after all, wasn’t she standing on the platform of the train station when the explosion occurred? The larger and more important question, however, is this: how should we approach such hard problems in law? What should we do when we are confronted with a difficult legal problem, i.e. one with no right answer or correct solution?
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No Internet Week
That is the title of this provocative film project. So, my fellow web friends, could you survive a week with no internet? (Or, while we’re at it, with no cable TV?) Consider the upside:
The first thing that struck me after a day of abstention wasn’t so much what I lost, but what I gained. Time. So much time. Not taking my phone into the bedroom with me was giving me at least two hours extra a day. The second thing that became apparent was how much “dead time” I spent looking at my phone for stimulation. And how “dead time” had become “all the time”. Pretty much anywhere and everywhere. In bed, at both ends of the day, in cabs, on toilets, during meetings, during meals, whilst watching TV. Suddenly, without the internet, all those things became what they used to be. Things in their own right rather than providing background to me using my phone.
From James Brown, editor of the fun website Sabotage Times.
Self-explanatory?
This is a “GDP map” of the US in which each State is renamed for a country with a similar level of economic output or GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Although GDP is an imperfect and crude measure of economic prosperity, this unorthodox map paints a dramatic picture, showing how wealthy the US is relative to the rest of the world. You can read more about this strange map at Strange Maps and also at The Big Picture.
Gran Colombia
The great liberator Simon Bolivar once proposed the creation of the Republic of “Gran Colombia” (see map below), a south-of-the-border constitutional democracy or United States of South America consisting of the modern-day countries of Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador (the same regions which Bolivar’s brave men had liberated from Spanish colonial rule). Alas, Bolivar’s bold project ended in failure. Imagine, however, how much different the world would be today if Bolivar’s beautiful and quixotic idea had succeeded. Would these states have become more prosperous and politically stable had their fleeting federation lasted? Would the other states of Spanish South America have eventually joined this federal republic ? Would Bolivar’s Republic of Gran Colombia, had it lasted, now rival and perhaps outshine the United States in influence and prestige?
Happy Three Kings Day
By the way, why is Three Kings Day, or Epiphany, not really celebrated in the Anglo-American world?
Should Afghanistan become the 51st State?
The United States launched “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan in October 2001, and although US forces quickly removed the stubborn leaders of the Taliban from power and shut down the training camps of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, we have not defeated these formidable enemies yet. Indeed, the War in Afghanistan is still not over.
Here’s a thought. Why don’t the people of Afghanistan petition Congress to become the 51st State? As a State, Afghanistan would have more direct influence over US foreign policy in the region, since she would be entitled to two senators and more than 40 representatives in the Congress, based on Afghanistan’s population of 31 million. (By comparison, the State of California, with a population of 38 million, has 53 representatives.) The US would also benefit from this arrangement, since Afghanistan would be subject to federal taxation and would be required to maintain a “republican form of government” under Article IV of the US Constitution. This proposal may sound crazy, but wouldn’t both countries be better off if Afghanistan were to become the first Islamic State of the US?
Who reads academic papers?
It turns out that no one does, not even academics! According to this devious but brilliant little paper published in the journal Complex Systems by Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, researchers at UCLA who found an ingenious way [*] of estimating what fraction of academics actually read the papers they cite, the truth is that most “scholars” do not bother to read all the papers that they themselves cite in their published works. (Alas, the paper does not distinguish between tenured and untenured scholars. It would be interesting to measure which of these two groups of academics is engaged in greater amounts of scholarly deception.)
[*] Without getting into the technical details of their paper, suffice it to say that their method focuses on the distribution of misprints in citations.
Hat tips to xkcd for the cartoon and to Spartacus for taking me to Daniel Luzer.
prior probability 