Coached by a former Wall Street bond trader who studied the opposition and set up a pipeline that produces Superstar Mathletes: “You wouldn’t grab a kid in ninth grade who’s never played football and expect him to be a great high-school football player,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is th…
This (beautifully formatted and well-paced-and-delivered and surprisingly sparsely attended) talk by Gabriel Lebec on the fundamentals of Lambda Calculus is one of my favorite talks ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VQ382QG-y4 As Lebec explains, the lovely bird names come from this book called…
Eighth Wonder of the World indeed. Here’s a nice calculator that draws graphs, and allows for monthly contributions and rate variances.…
This is the city of Madras The home of the curry and the dal Where Iyers speak only to Iyengars And Iyengars speak only to God. I’d read this years ago some place and forgot where. Thought it would be in some Religious Studies textbook back from when I was (briefly) a Religious Studies major. Nope…
I love these etudes by Professor Yun Shin. I saw them at the Des Moines Art Center a few years ago. All images © the artist…
Lovely stuff. Cached here.…
Being a long and informative post that leads to “Use /dev/urandom” and features a quote by DJB and a list of computationally secure PRNGs. Cached here.…
The argument here being that, since the ‘general form’ of the conjecture is undecidable, TypeScript’s type system is undecidable. How does one even think of doing these things? I love Typescript, but it isn’t nearly ambitious enough. It would be vastly improved with an --extremelyStrict flag enforc…
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That’s from 2010. Here’s the 2020 revision.…
When you end up paying the price you bid (“first price”), you have a strong incentive to lie about how much you’re willing to pay. Suppose there’s an item for sale that you’d be happy paying up to $1,000 for if necessary, but of course you’d rather pay less. In a first-price auction, if you bid $1,…
Tyler Vigen maintains around 30,000 examples of “spurious correlations” (also available in book form). For instance: You can also “discover” your own. Like this one…
Dijkstra on why numbering should start from zero. Numbering is done with natural numbers. Let’s take zero to be the smallest natural number1. For the sequence (2, 3, 4, … ,12), using the convention (2 ≤ n < 13) is appropriate because For a sequence starting with zero, like (0, 1, 2, 3), the left…
by DJ Bernstein
Just beautiful.