Lynne Kiesling Here’s some outstanding geek attire! Monsters of Grok is a line of t-shirts that use rock band t-shirt logo designs, but the names are instead famous scientists and intellectuals such as Ada Lovelace (done as a Ladytron logo), Isaac Newton (as Iron Maiden), and Benjamin Franklin (as Black Flag). I fell over laughing …
Michael Giberson Is this an unpriced external effect of shooting off fireworks on July 4? July 5 tends to have an unusual number of animal-related traffic problems, as pets, spooked by the fireworks on the previous day, have a greater propensity to wander onto freeways. From Eric Morris at the Freakonomicsblog, “Road Blocks: The Strange …
Michael Giberson A fool and his money are soon parted. –Thomas Tusser. Potassium iodide supplies in the United States have run low and the price shoots up. What sold for $10 or $20 dollars a week ago is now priced from $30 to $75 and more. Some cry “price gouging!” Regulation magazine has just published an …
Michael Giberson At Knowing and Making, Leigh Caldwell writes about “a charming pop song by the delightful young artist Jessie J” about “the important and neglected issue of pricing.” Initially he is pleased with the song, but ultimately “his faith in humanity is shaken. Shattered, in fact.” A great deal of drama for a short …
Singing About Pricing (Is It, Too, Like Dancing About Architecture?) Read More »
Michael Giberson When an essay about ups and downs in the natural gas industry ends suggesting we need energy sources “as steady as the rays of the sun and as clean as the wind on plains” …. Well let’s just say the weather over the last 24 hours in this part of the plains doesn’t …
Michael Giberson Since December 30 I’ve been responding to twice-a-day prompts to report how I feel and what I am doing. Loosely speaking I am taking part in the Mappiness research project, but Mappiness is primarily focused on mapping “subjective well being” over time and place within the U.K. No guarantee that my data is …
Michael Giberson Nate Silver runs some numbers on public Huffington Post information to get an idea on how much the posts of unpaid bloggers on the site are worth to the company in gross advertising revenue: “Do the multiplication, and you find … the median blog post, with several hundred views, was worth only $3 …
Nate Silver’s Valentine to Huffington Post Bloggers… Read More »
Michael Giberson In WIRED, Jonah Lehrer reports on how Toronto geological statistician Mohan Srivastava discovered a flaw in a lottery scratch-off game. As a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket. In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day …
Better Living Through Applied Statistics: Cracking Scratch-off Lottery Games Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Today’s Google banner celebrates the 172nd birthday of Paul Cézanne, my favorite artist. I love how he unpacks the underlying layers of geometry in landscapes. When I first saw the painting above, Le lac d’Annecy, in the Courtauld Gallery in London when I was a college student, it literally took my breath away. …
Michael Giberson As any reader of Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age knows, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer would be quite handy to have. Unfortunately, technology hasn’t quite advanced to the point necessary to actually produce such a thing. A recently published research report seems like one small step in the right direction. From a …
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