...a companion blog to "Math-Frolic," specifically for interviews, book reviews, weekly-linkfests, and longer posts or commentary than usually found at the Math-Frolic site.

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"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show." ---Bertrand Russell (1907) Rob Gluck

"I have come to believe, though very reluctantly, that it [mathematics] consists of tautologies. I fear that, to a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-legged animal is an animal." ---Bertrand Russell (1957)

******************************************************************** Rob Gluck

Friday, October 13, 2017

Potpourri


It's Friday the 13th; what could be more fitting than having Donny Trump as president...
Oh well, here's some math:

1)  The “power pose” and more (or less):

2)  And relatedly, also from Gelman, I suspect anyone involved in psychology or social science research, ought read this post (and comments):

3)  Meanwhile Kaiser Fung warns about the ubiquity of fake data:

4)  Lot of talk about neural networks these days, which has John Cook worried about the problem of ‘overfitting’ the data:

5)  Transcribed interview with Dr. Holly Krieger here:

6)  Devilishly-tricky little problem from Futility Closet:

7)  And this lovely little problem from Ed Southall:
(some nice explanations in comments)

8)  You just never know what Ben Orlin will teach you about next:

9)  I wouldn’t normally bother citing yet another piece on the Monty Hall Problem… except that this one is from Keith Devlin and connects it to the more general backsliding of scientific thinking evident in today’s citizenry:

10) I reported on Brian Hayes’ new book, “Foolproof,” last weekend:

Potpourri BONUS! (extra NON-mathematical links of interest): 

1)  Krista Tippett with Daniel Kahneman on “On Being” last weekend:

2)  Lastly, in important news of the week, kneeling at the national anthem may be problematic, but maybe flipping the bird at it is constitutionally-protected:



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