Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle created The Game of Oligarchy, which “shows that the ‘free market’ leads inexorably to one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke. And fast.”
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Tag: mathematics
Do Not Erase: Jessica Wynne’s beautiful photos of mathematicians’ chalkboards
Fashion Institute of Technology photographer Jessica Wynne‘s “Don Not Erase” project documents the beautiful chalkboards of mathematicians, which will be collected in a book from Princeton University Press in 2020 (Christmas 2020 will be a lot simpler for me as a result).
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Stephen Wolfram recounts the entire history of mathematics in 90 minutes
Stephen Wolfram’s podcast features a 90-minute lecture that he delivered at the 2019 Wolfram Summer School (MP3), recapitulating the history of mathematics from prehistory to the present day.
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The world’s preeminent cryptographers can’t get visas to speak at US conferences
Ross Anderson (previously) is one of the world’s top cryptographers; the British academic and practitioner was honored by having his classic, Security Engineering, inducted into The Cybersecurity Canon; however, he was not able to attend the awards gala himself because the US government sat on his visa application for months, and ultimately did not grant it in time.
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Math against crimes against humanity: Using rigorous statistics to prove genocide when the dead cannot speak for themselves
Patrick Ball and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) (previously) use careful, rigorous statistical models to fill in the large blank spots left behind by acts of genocide, bringing their analysis to war crimes tribunals, truth and reconciliation proceedings, and other reckonings with gross human rights abuses.
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Independent study guide to logic for philosophers and mathematicians
Retired Cambridge professor Peter Smith has distilled his experience in teaching philosophers and mathematicians about formal logic into a free, frequently updated (last updated: 2017) study guide to logic, constructed to be easily accessible, with quick-start guides for different kinds of learners, written on the assumption of very little education in either maths or philosophy.
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Brain-aching list of counterintuitive probability riddles
In 2017, Leila asked Stack Exchange for suggestions for counterintuitive probability riddles for a course on probability; the assembled list is a brain-aching adventure in Monty Hall problems, neighbors’ daughters, Sleeping Beauty epistemology, colored lottery balls and birthday paradoxes.
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UC Berkeley offers its Foundations of Data Science course for free online
Berkeley’s “Foundations of Data Science” boasts the fastest-growing enrollment of any course in UC Berkeley history, and now it’s free on the university’s Edx distance-education platform.
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A critical statistics education that fits on a postcard
Economist and maths communicator Tim Harford (previously) presents a riff on Harold Pollack’s aphorism that “The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card,” and comes up with a complete set of rules for statistical literacy that fits on a postcard.
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NERD HARDER! FBI Director reiterates faith-based belief in working crypto that he can break
Working cryptography’s pretty amazing: because of its fundamental theoretical soundness, we can trust it to secure the firmware updates to our pacemakers; the conversations we have with our loved ones, lawyers and business colleagues; the financial transactions the world depends on; and the integrity of all sorts of data, communications and transactions.
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