This brilliant bit is almost a throwaway paragraph on page 304, near the end. [Two men in a satirical dialog] managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite sequence of “doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable when the ‘something doubted’ is still a preceding statement ‘unknowability’…
Category: math
The remarkable (and prolific) Stephen Wolfram has an idea called Wolfram Alpha. People used to assume the “Star Trek” model of computers: that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. Which has proved to be quite distant from reality. Instead But armed with Mathematica and…
Levy a $24,000, one-time tax, payable in installments over 10 years, against anyone who took out an interest-only mortgage (or various other high-risk instruments) during the previous 10 years, using the full nasty power of the IRS to collect (garnishing wages, etc.) Take the proceeds and give it to homeowners who did NOT engage in…
I was on the right page at the right time and spotted this: WIth zero votes for any candidate and zero precincts reporting, CNN calls it. Now, I’m no stats expert, but this one seems a bit extreme. Comments? -m