Is there an app for that? - Dilbert Strip - why aren't we all lying less with the advent of the internet?
Why aren't we all lying less?
Read MoreWhere there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.
The smartphone is making our children lonely and sad.
Read MoreWhat are their names?
Get rid of all the guns
Read MoreIts all about hate
Ta-Nehisi Coates tells it like it is in the Atlantic "The First White President" . Its very well articulated and fully agrees with an earlier post. White America says it isn't racist, but it certainly acts that way. One interesting thing is a short comment from a Russian about how this makes the country susceptible to many problems.
“ In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where “necessary conditions” and an “existing background” were present. In America, that “existing background” was a persistent racism, and the “necessary condition” was a black president.”
Republican policy is now being driven as the reverse of what Obama or any Liberal did - it has nothing to do with what might be good for the country, and that has now been the case for the last decade.
Hopefully I can have normal posts about Math and running away from homework soon.
And the UK could listen to some people who know what they are doing too...
Quarterly growth in UK GDP per head - Simon Wren-Lewis
Read MoreHow a lack of curiosity can kill a country.
The United States government is being destroyed by neglect and a complete lack of interest in what it does.
Read MoreBrad Delong asks how leveraged should we be in the S&P 500?
How about 2X leverage int eh S&P 500?
Read MoreThe source of Republican crazy in the US
Here is via Lawyers Guns and Money, a paragraph from a New York Times article describing the right wing hate today: “The idea that moral hypocrisy hurts you among evangelical voters is not true, if you’re sound on all of the fundamentals,” said Wayne Flynt, an ordained Baptist minister and one of Alabama’s pre-eminent historians. “Being sound on the fundamentals depends on what the evangelical community has decided the fundamentals have become. At this time, what is fundamental is hating liberals, hating Obama, hating abortion and hating same-sex marriage.”
Lets focus on the key sentence:
The Rush Limbaugh's, the fox news, the rest of AM talk radio, the white supremacists, the Koch brothers, the tax dogers, the Grover Norquists wanting to drown American government in a bathtub, the anti women, anti intellectual, anti education, anti black, anti healthcare, anti retirement anti commonsense, anti everything - The entire party is all now about hate. The fact that no one wants to admit this in decent company means that have to lie in public all the time, but in the policies proposed in republican state houses, and in the republican house, senate and white house the details are now all their for anyone to see.
What our allies in Australia think of the current US administration.
He managed to isolate his nation, to confuse and alienate his allies, and to diminish America...
Read More
Book review - Jordan Ellenberg's "How not to be wrong"
Why is Math interesting? Jordan Ellenberg starts out with the critical student question "When am I going to use this?" and has written this inspiring defense of thinking as an answer to that question. In the very first page he notes that the usual answers to this question are not satisfying to anyone. His short good answer (in the first page or so - I'm not giving anything anywhere) is something like this (My words not his) "mathematics classes are training for your brain to amplify your common sense. Just like in sport you would never do drills during a game, when you use math you won't be doing drills but solving problems, but you have to do the drills to get good. And just like in sports the fun and fitness are useful even if you aren't a world star math professional." from there the student/reader asks to go beyond the practical and for some specific examples, which leads into the Book proper and the first example of Abraham Wald and amplifying the un-intuitive common sense of missing bullet holes to better armor war planes in WW2.
I think the book fails in that mission as it drifts to a larger one of defending thinking and mathematical thinking in general - the last chapter is a particularly strong and literate defense, but unfortunately all of the students I know asking that question will not find the connection to their math classes. Still the larger question - a defense of thinking and intellectualism in general is far more important, and probably a greater work.
Usefully Ellenberg is also a fan of literature a writing which in an alternate universe would have been his career. This leads to extremely good writing with many literary references, as he plys his way through a grab bag of mathematical stories aiming for stories that are profound and simple - although perhaps a little too much emphasis on some fascinating stories from the lottery. The stories are very well told, and when it is meandering it is well worth the read, but for my purposes - to understand what a well educated person in the 21st century should know about math it feels like the simplification for the general audience - staying with the simple and the profound, but not allowing some introduction to the intermediate levels of complexity and the laundry list of things (I wonder if some of the chapters could be in a different order without changing the book at all) make this book less than it could be. Perhaps it is interesting to contrast this book to Risk Savvy by Gerd Gigerenzer where the simpler mission and more straight forward and precise writing leads to a directly successful but slightly less emotionally satisfying book.
Still I highly recommend reading this one, despite it not being what I am looking for this great defense of thinking is needed in todays political world of deliberate no-nothingism, and attack on "experts" as a dirty word as seen in the UK Brexit. It is very well written, and very engaging to read, very much worth your time.
Find it at the Houston Library , amazon, or borrow my copy if your in town.
On the internet, stores comparison shop you.
On the internet AI comparison shops you.
Read MoreWhat did I learn from Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra course?
What did I learn after watching 34 linear algebra lectures?
Read MoreFinding Paul Revere - why are matrices interesting?
Ye Old NSA Finds Paul Revere with Matrices...
Read MoreBook review - Risk Savvy by Gerd Gigerenzer
Gerd Gigerenzer develops the idea of rules of thumb and fact sheets to help in decision making. The most interesting distinction is when to use rules of thumb and gut instinct - when complexity is highest, and when to use complicated mathematics - when the most is known. My review is below.
Read MoreResponse to a complaint about the Earth BioGenome project
Keith Robison posted some complaints about the earth biogenome project on his blog, titling the post Ill-concieved MegaProject Du Jour: I've been on the working group as a minor member, and here is my response, which is here in one piece, (it is in three parts in the comments on his blog due to character limits on comments). My main hope is that biologists can think big about the studying life on earth in the 21st century. Here is the response....
Read MoreGetting AI translation in your life....
After the previous post on the power of computer translation, the next question is how to use it in your life - after all "Il n’y a pas plus sourd que celui qui ne veut pas entendre"
1. Browser. I use safari on a mac, and have installed the translate extension for safari which adds a translate button to your tool bar at the top. Alternatively Google Chrome will automatically ask to translate a page in a foreign language - try a Japanese newspaper: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/ There are also extensions for firefox or internet explorer which has a bing add on
2. Phone - I expect that if you use the browser on android, the translate also comes for free, but I really like the google translate app on iOS (I assume it is also on android) which also adds speech recognition, and image text translation with downloadable language packs so you don't need an internet connection to use it whilst roaming internationally.
I am still thinking about suggestions for the correct test of human machine co-ordination for AI translation - is it to make French jokes funny? "Monsieur et Madame Ouzi ont un fils, comment s’appelle-t-il ? - Jacques."
A map of mathematics.
Here is a map of mathematics on youtube by Dominic Walliman. A whole list of things to understand for new mathematics for the million.
Dominic Wallimans map of mathematics - if you like it you can buy his poster.
The python jupyter notebook is the new calculator!
Here is the t-test example as a jupyter notebook - but you can also download the actual note book here, which you can open with the jupyter notebook software.
Why the hell would you do this? I think that mathematics has changed (for me at least) because of the tools we now use. It used to be pencil and paper, with much smart thought like using log tables, and others. The slide rule, came along and then the calculator. Today the tools are extensive, mathematica, matlab, R, and I am sure many others that I do not know about. After a lot of looking around, I am going to choose python, with scipy and numpy within the jupyter notebook as my example. Here are my reasons: 1. I think I would love mathematica - it looks lovely and does cool things in a way I would like, but I think to suggest something for everyone as a survey course it should be free - which also rules out matlab. R studio is also free and amazing for stats and what I initially used for the t-test - but it is really for interactive stats, and although it is a programming language - it isn't really. As a perl person I wanted to learn the new python thing, and think that everyone should be able to program a scripting language. If only so you realize the futility and danger of electronic voting. Python also comes with the science and math tools, as well as some symbolic tools, which I want to learn - so you can see the crazy cool equations. Python also scales as a scripting language, so you can work big as necessary.
How to install - the easy answer is anaconda, install it, and in anaconda navigator, you have an option to run the jupyter notebook in your browser. There you can type text in markup language, python code, and also see the results. - Have a look at the t-test notebook and see if you can get it to run.
