Analysis vs. Algebra …
Leave a reply
Monthly Archives: July 2012
A mathematician strikes back!
Math doesn’t ….. (NSFW language).
By way of Steven Strogatz
One of Robert A. Heinlein’s characters expressed a similar opinion, slightly more politely and much more concisely.
Red-Shirt Risk
How Likely Is It That You’ll Die?
Reporting on Matt Bailey’s Analytics According to Captain Kirk, which begins with a quantitative summary of what all Star Trek fans know: “red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.” — 73% of crew deaths.
However, Bailey does not stop there. The rate of red-shirt death varies considerably, and in some shows is much less than in others. Those shows share another well-known feature of the original series, which suggests a risk mitigation strategy:
Monday Night Irish Class, July 23, 2012
Irish Class, July 23, 2012
Rang Gaeilge, 23 lá Mí na Iúil 2012
<!–
Fadas: áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ
08/09/12
Rust removal again
Another year has past, and thanks to our midwestern summer humidity, I again faced the challenges of Maintaining Gaffneyis Gear. However, I managed to improve my process somewhat. Continue reading
Fun picture for today
Hilbert’s Grand Hotel Paradox
I can think of a local science fiction convention that could use this hotel, except that Hilbert did not say how to deal with the congestion at the elevators. An exercise for the reader, I suppose.
Epic Fraud
How to succeed in science (without doing any)
Note the first “tip:”
01. Fake data nobody ever expects to see. If you’re going to make things up, you won’t have any original data to produce when someone asks to see it. The simplest way to avoid this awkward situation is to make sure that nobody ever asks. You can do this in several ways, but the easiest is to work only with humans. Most institutions require a long and painful approval process before anyone gets to work directly with human subjects. To protect patient privacy, any records are usually completely anonymized, so no one can ever trace them back to individual patients.
Entomologists: Producing their own raw materials for research
Why do physicists subtract infinity from infinity?
From Jennifer Ouellette
Note: Quantum Electrodynamics works. The predictions it makes have been experimentally confirmed to many decimal places.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 