math — Page 2

→ November 19, 2021
→ By keith

Infinite Powers.

I’m a sucker for a good book about math, but a lot of books about math aren’t that good – either they’re dry, or they don’t do enough to explain why any of this matters. (Sometimes it doesn’t matter, as in Prime Obsession, but the author did such a good job of explaining the problem, and benefited from the fact that it’s still unsolved.) Steven Strogatz’s Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe manages to be entertaining, practical, and also educational, as the author builds up the reader through some essentials of pre-calculus before getting into the good stuff, to the point that I recommended that my daughter check it out before next year when she takes calculus in school.

Calculus underlies everything in the universe; it is the foundation upon which the universe, and everything in it, functions. It is also one of humanity’s most remarkable discoveries, one that required multiple leaps of mathematical faith to uncover hidden truths about the universe. Physicist Richard Feynman quipped that it is “the language that God talks,” although he meant it in a secular sense, while mathematician Felix Klein said that one could not understand “the basis on which the scientific explanation of nature rests” without at least some understanding of differential and integral calculus.

The story of how both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz simultaneously discovered calculus in the late 1600s, doing so both with their own remarkable insights and by building on the discoveries of mathematicians before them, going back to the ancient Greeks, would by itself be enough for an entertaining history. Strogatz does start with that, and uses the history as scaffolding to bring the reader up from algebra through geometry and trigonometry to the mathematics of limits, which is the essential precursor to calculus, before getting to the main event.

Or I should say “events,” as differential and integral calculus, while two sides of the same analytical coin, were discovered at separate times, with separate methods, and Strogatz tells their stories separately before bringing them together towards the end of the book. Differential calculus is what we learn first in schools, at least in the United States. It’s the mathematics of the rates of change; the rate at which a function changes is the derivative of that function. Acceleration is the derivative of velocity – that is, the rate at which velocity is changing. Velocity, in turn, is the derivative of position – the rate at which an object’s position changes. That also makes acceleration the second derivative of position, which is why you see a ² in the formula for the acceleration of an object falling due to Earth’s gravity (9.8 m/s²): a position might be measured in meters, so velocity is measured as the change in position (meters) by time (seconds), and acceleration is the change in velocity (meters per second) by time (seconds, again).

Integral calculus goes the other way – given an object’s acceleration, what is its velocity at a given point in time? Given its velocity, what is its position? But Leibniz and Newton – I expect to hear from Newton’s lawyers for listing him second – conceived of integration as a way to solve an entirely different problem: How to determine the area under a curved function. Those two didn’t think of it that way – the concept of a function came somewhat later – but they understood the need to find out the area underneath a curve, and came up, independently, with the same solution, which broke apart the space into a series of rectangles of known heights and near-zero widths, giving rise to the infinitesimals familiar to any student who’s taken integral calculus. They aren’t real numbers, although they do appear in more arcane number systems like the hyperreals, yet the sum of the areas of this infinitesimally narrow rectangles turns out to be a real number, giving you the area under the curve in question. This insight, which was probably Leibniz’s first, opened the world up for integral calculus, which turns out to have no end of important applications in physics, biology, and beyond.

Strogatz grounds the book in those applications, devoting the last quarter or so of Infinite Powers to discussing the modern ways in which we depend on calculus, even taking its existence for granted. GPS devices are the most obvious way, as the system wouldn’t function without the precision that calculus, which GPS uses for dealing with errors in the measurements of distances, offers – indeed, it’s also used to help planes land accurately. Yet calculus appears in even less-expected places; biologists used it to model the shape of the double helix of strands of DNA, treating a discrete object (DNA is just a series of connected molecules) as a continuous one. If your high school student ever asks why they need to learn this stuff, Infinite Powers has the answers, but also gives the reader the background to understand the author’s explanations even if you haven’t taken math in a few decades.

Next up: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: highly recommended, history of science, math, non-fiction

→ September 21, 2021
→ By keith

Seven Bridges.

Seven Bridges is a “stroll-and-write” game based on the famous mathematical problem, eventually proved unsolvable by Leonhard Euler: Can a pedestrian walk through the German city of Königsberg, crossing each of its seven bridges exactly once? Euler’s proof became a foundational one in the history of graph theory, but that’s beyond the scope of the game. (The game is currently unavailable, but I’ll update this post when Puzzling Pixel gets the next print run.)

In Seven Bridges, all players begin by marking in the same square on their pages, showing a grid map of the city with, indeed, seven bridges, along with thirteen ‘landmarks,’ some trees, lots of buildings, and numbers around the map’s edge. On each player’s turn, they roll the game’s six dice, which the players then draft, one at a time. The dice show seven different shapes of roads: a straight line, a cross, a T, an elbow, a half-street, a 2 with a straight line, or a 3 with a straight line. You must fill in roads on your map using the shape of the die you select, connecting one of the edges of the shape your existing network of roads. (In rare instances when you can’t legally do so, you may ‘downgrade’ to a less valuable shape.) The 2 | and the 3 | die faces mean you may draw a continuous line up to that many spaces long; you can go shorter than that, but you can’t break it apart or turn its direction. Each player gets to roll five times over the course of the game.

Passing landmarks, which are marked with single letters on the board, earns you the choice of eleven bonuses, seven immediate and four you can use later. The immediate bonuses match the shapes on the dice, so you can fill in one of those shapes on your board, following the usual rules. One of the extra bonuses allows you to fill in the handful of footpaths – bordered by dashed lines rather than solid ones – on the map. The other three are re-rolls, which either let you roll all remaining dice again, or stop the draft and distribute all remaining dice to players as you see fit.

You don’t have to cross all seven bridges to win this game, but you do get more points for crossing more bridges. You score for crossing bridges and passing by landmarks; the more of each, the more each subsequent one is worth. You score for the largest closed loop of roads/footpaths you completed by multiplying its number of bridges cross by the number of 90 degree turns in it; I think five is the maximum number of bridges you can possibly get, but you can absolutely get 8 or more right angles into a loop. You score a point for each building you pass, and for each tree you pass. You score for each road you take to the edge of the map, worth a number of points from 1 to 6 that is shown at that edge. And you score points for each bonus you received and used during the game, again from 1 to 6.

The game is kind of mathy under the hood, which strongly appeals to me; there’s a spatial relations aspect, and a clear push-your-luck aspect to the way you place your roads. You can go big, and end up without the shapes you need to complete a major route, or you can play it safe and hope no one else completes something larger. You can also head to certain areas of the map that are dense with trees but don’t promise you much in the way of other bonuses. There seem to be a lot of ways to win here, and just as many ways to screw it up.

I’ve only played this with two players, several times, however, and with a different opponent each time. Games took maybe 20-30 minutes, and if both players already know the rules, it could easily come in under 20. With two players, since you draft three dice on each roll, you only have ten total rolls over the course of the game. With the maximum of 6 players, you’d have 30 rolls, and that’s going to take some more time. Seven Bridges was first released at the very end of 2020, after my year-end list, so it qualifies for this year’s, and it has a very good chance to make my best of 2021 list. It’s quick to teach, offers very little downtime between turns, and does a fantastic job of bringing a mathematical puzzle into a board game format. It might be the best roll-and-write I’ve ever played.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, highly recommended, math, roll and write games

→ October 17, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

The New England Journal of Medicine has just weighed in on the election, urging Americans to vote Trump out of office, the first time it’s done so in its 208-year history. This comes on the heels of Scientific American and Nature doing the same. The Lancet published an editorial calling on governments to act now in accordance with the science, attacking the so-called herd immunity approach and supporting continued attempts to control the virus’s spread.

Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.

David Wallace-Wells writes for New York that there’s still no plan to stop the pandemic, a third crest is approaching, and we’re basically waiting until January – and hoping that brings a functional government – to do anything about it. Imagine how quickly this Administration would have committed a few billion dollars to responding if 200,000 Americans died from terror attacks rather than a virus.

The President and his children have turned the government into a sort of personal ATM, as exposed by this New York Times investigative piece, which you’d think would be the sort of thing to turn off the very voters who said they wanted him to drain the swamp.

Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.

Scientists confirmed that a Nevada man caught COVID-19 twice, requiring assistance breathing the second time around, which has some unpleasant connotations for the future of the pandemic and should end any discussion of a strategy based solely around herd immunity.

Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.

Earlier in October, a group of people who’ve lost loved ones to the pandemic set up 200,000 chairs on a lawn facing the White House to protest the government’s inaction.

One of those who’ve died from COVID-19 was a 44-year-old husband and father of two young children in northern New Jersey. He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son.

QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.

A new complaint alleges that ICE is torturing Cameroonian immigrants to try to coerce them into signing deportation documents.

A six-year period of horrendous weather may have exacerbated the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic.

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.

Neal Karlen was a close friend of Prince and interviewed him many times over a period of about a dozen years earlier in the musician’s career. He’s written a biography of Prince called This Thing Called Life (natch) and this excerpt tells how Prince was the loneliest person he’d ever met.

Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.

Project Veritas, the grift run by so-called journalist James O’Keefe, bribed the brother of a Minneapolis councilman to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a popular target of Islamophobes.

There may be a new, more efficient method of answering the traveling salesperson problem, which makes use of the geometry of polynomials to improve the results. A truly efficient solution probably can’t be found in polynomial time, which refers to the P vs. NP problem described in the book The Golden Ticket.

HBO Max has a new series called Patria, based on the bestselling novel by Fernando Aramburu. The Guardian explains how a novel about Basque separatists’ decades-long terror campaign became a global success.

Paul Heaton, former lead singer for the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, made a large donation to help the staff of the shuttered music magazine Q.

Several people sent me this story from the New York Times on how local bookstores are struggling to survive in the pandemic and lockdowns.

Irina Slavina, a Russian journalist who reported on excesses of the government’s security apparatus, killed herself via self-immolation in front of the Interior Ministry headquarters earlier this month.

This 2018 piece from Smithsonian magazine details some of the science behind the flavors of chocolate.

Board game news: The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game is out and exclusively on sale at Target.

The Kickstarter for Flora, a “semi-cooperative” game based on the Voynich manuscript, launched this week.

Greenbrier Games’ cooperative story-based game Lost Ones funded its Kickstarter in the first day.

Cascadia, from the publisher and artist behind the game Calico (which I haven’t played but hear is quite good), has already blown past its tiny funding goal.

The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, chocolate, coronavirus, delaware, hoaxes, links, longreads, math, Music, prince, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ September 5, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/5/20.

I had three pieces for subscribers to The Athletic around the trade deadline, wrapping up the Padres’ three moves, the Blue Jays’ and Mets’ moves, and five other trades in separate columns. I also had two new episodes of The Keith Law Show this week, one featuring Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson, authors of the new book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back (which you can buy here), and another one with Will Leitch, which we posted Friday morning so you’d have it before the holiday weekend.

On Friday night, September 11^th, I’ll be hosting a live talk with author Chuck Palahniuk about his new book The Invention of Sound through Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg. It’s a ticketed event, and with your purchase you’ll get a signed copy of the book as well as a link to the talk. (I just started reading the book about an hour ago.)

At Paste, I reviewed the tile-laying and set-collection game Succulent, and then ranked the five best tile-laying games I’ve played, which should include a few titles familiar to longtime readers.

I sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, describing how I went from someone who hadn’t run in any meaningful way since 1985 to running 5 km without interruption in about four months.

And now, the links…

In a story since confirmed by other outlets, including Fox News, the Atlantic reported that President Trump referred to soldiers killed in action as “losers” and “suckers,” which, in a rational world, would end any support he received from current or former members of the U.S. military.

We will need a vast, coordinated effort to convince Americans of the safety of an eventual COVID-19 vaccine, or we will have too few people getting it to stop the pandemic. This assumes that Trump doesn’t coerce regulators into approving one before it’s adequately tested, and that very possibility is why we are where we are.

Kuli Kohli was born with cerebral palsy, and in the village in India where she was born her parents were encouraged to drown her. They eventually moved with her to the UK, where she’s now a poet, a mother, and a mentor to other women writers.

Daniel Thompson, the only full-time Black journalist at The Kenosha News, resigned his position to protest the paper’s use of an incendiary quote that cast protesters in an inaccurate light.

Larry Flynt wrote a “final farewell to the Falwells,” and it’s a more nuanced and thoughtful note than you might expect, with kind words about Jerry Falwell, Sr., with whom Flynt waged a very public battle over his First Amendment rights, and damning words about Falwell’s hypocritical son.

How did T. Denny Sanford, the richest man in South Dakota and a major Republican donor, get out of an investigation into his alleged possession of child pornography? ProPublica is asking for possible sources to come forward.

Online hoaxes, like the myriad ones about COVID-19, are making doctors’ jobs harder – and the blame falls primarily on Facebook and other sites that have let this misinformation fester.

Ars Technica reports that Facebook’s “plan” to combat election misinformation is the same as its plan for pretty much everything else that goes wrong on its site – doing nothing at all.

Philly Inquirer columnist Will Bunch says that Trump’s “reelection scheme of a civil war” is kicking into high gear as the election approaches. I was always skeptical of those who said Trump wouldn’t leave office willingly, but my view is shifting as his rhetoric changes, and the rest of his party continues to enable him.

Jean Guerrero, author of the new book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, writes about how writers and critics have questioned whether she, as a Latina journalist, is ‘qualified’ to write a book about a white man. It’s another example of the longstanding white-centric and male-centric views of mainstream publishing.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine called for the elimination of Daylight Savings Time, citing a large body of evidence showing that DST is harmful to our health.

If you’re looking for an alternative to dairy milk, but are also concerned about the environmental damage wrought by almond production, the Guardian says oat milk is your best choice.

Three mathematicians have solved a longstanding question about straight paths on the dodecahedron, one of the five Platonic solids and the only one for which this question remained unsolved.

Board game news: Climate Crisis, a cooperative game with an educational goal, is about to end its Kickstarter run tomorrow.

The Days of Wonder crossover game Small World of Warcraft is now out in stores and online.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, environment, links, math, social media, south dakota, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ July 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/25/20.

I wrote two pieces for subscribers to The Athletic this week – a season preview, with breakout candidates and team predictions; and a look at the top 100 prospects who made Opening Day rosters. I held a live Zoom Q&A via The Athletic’s Twitter account on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the new flick-and-write game Sonora, where players flick discs on to the same board, possibly knocking each others’ discs out of the way, and score on their personal scoresheets based on where the discs end up.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now. You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GEN looks at evangelical women who’ve left their churches and the Republican Party because they couldn’t reconcile Christian support for Trump with the ostensible tenets of the religion.
The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Thomas Chatterson Williams, one of the authors of the Harper’s letter decrying ‘cancel culture’ on the left; it’s an informative conversation, made better because Chotiner is unafraid to challenge Williams’ inaccuracies and to correct others in the final text.
The Jackson Free Press spoke to doctors and nurses at the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s dedicated COVID-19 ICU about how overloaded they are and how sick the victims become. The executive vice chair of emergency medicine, begging people to wear masks and keep distancing, says, “Please don’t make this worse.”
A SPLC Hatewatch investigation found that OANN employee Jack Posobiec went to Poland to meet with a Polish neo-Nazi party, promoting their messages through his popular Twitter account.
Customs and Border Protection is involved in far more cities than just Portland, and they’re not being transparent about their activities.
Florida’s former top coronavirus data scientist claims she was fired for refusing to manipulate data to make the pandemic there appear less serious than it actually was.
WIRED looks at the difficulty of calculating herd immunity requirements for COVID-19; the quick summary is that we need a vaccine to get there.
A group of over 100 scientists called for a rapid review system for research preprints so papers like the Stanford one that used highly questionable methods to claim that the rate of COVID-19 infection was 50 times higher in California than widely accepted don’t get widely reported before they’re further vetted.
To be a parent right now is to be a liar, writes Dan Sinker for Esquire.
Dave Grohl – yep, that one – wrote an op ed in the Atlantic in defense of teachers, saying we need better plans before we reopen schools.
Why have rates of premature births gone way down in some areas during the pandemic?
Here’s a list of all of the known QAnon supporters running for Congress this year, or who tried to run; fourteen have already secured spots on November ballots. Sixty-two of the 67 are Republicans. Meanwhile, Twitter has at least begun to ban or limit accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory, on the grounds that the ‘movement’ is associated with increasing violence. Facebook needs to do the same.
Over 280 Wall Street Journal employees signed a letter to the paper’s new publisher asking for a clearer distinction between the news and opinion sections, something the paper reported on itself (subscription required).
A Philadelphia attorney who makes her living evicting people on behalf of city courts is married to a city eviction judge who doesn’t recuse himself from cases involving her.
Quanta has a pretty good, concise explanation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced the release of a new RPG, Kids on Brooms, that is itself a spinoff of the game Kids on Bikes.
Capstone announced the late 2020 release of Renature, from designers Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer, which I assume is a sequel to their 2017 game Reworld. The two are probably best known for their collaborations on Tikal and Torres.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, math, philadelphia, stick to baseball

→ February 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/16/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, but my entire prospect ranking package is now up for subscribers, including the top 100, farm system rankings, and in-depth rankings for all 30 teams, with at least 15 prospects ranked in each system. Before my vacation I wrote up the J.T. Realmuto trade. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday and another back on February 6th.

My most recent board game review for Paste covered the light, fun engine-builder Gizmos, by the designer of Bärenpark and Imhotep, a very family-friendly title with no text to worry about that takes the engine-builder concept and boils it down to a simpler game that plays in well under an hour.

I also resumed my email newsletter, so feel free to sign up for that if you just can’t get enough Klaw in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Jessica Luther and Dan Solomon have a massive piece up at Deadspin looking at how Baylor football became a haven for sexual assault, building on their great work over the last few years at Texas Monthly.
The Verge interviews Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who has made millions of scientific papers available ‘free’ online, violating copyrights to do so – but should scientific research not just be copyrighted, but held behind prohibitive paywalls that may slow the progress of other research by denying people access? Should copyright laws, which predate the idea of research journals and existed to protect the rights of publishers and content creators, treat scientific papers the way they treat novels or films?
SkepticalRaptor has a long review of a bad book from last fall that claims the HPV vaccine isn’t safe. The book’s authors aren’t scientists, but two lawyers and a homemaker, so nobody with a science background, and it shows in the text.
Amanita phalloides, the deadly mushroom colloquially known as the death-cap, is spreading across North America.
My friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch ranked every film that won the Oscar for Best Picture. I’ve probably seen only 20 or so of these, but I at least agree with their praise of numbers 1, 3, 6, 12, and 17.
Why don’t we have a vaccine for streptococcus A, the aftereffects of which, including rheumatic heart disease and sepsis, kill half a million people a year? It’s a combination of a regulatory screwup, successful medical interventions in developed countries, and the low profit margins of vaccines.
In a Guardian longread, Tom Yarwood writes about surviving being sexually molested by a music teacher when he was a child. He’s specific about the nature of the abuse, in case you might find this triggering.
The BBC looks at how Helsinki ended street homelessness through progressive policies designed to get such people off the streets into stable housing, even if they have substance-abuse problems.
Laura Snapes writes in the Guardian that the Ryan Adams allegations are just the start in a field where such “beta male misogyny” is rampant.
Measles is on the rise in Europe thanks to anti-vaxxers, and our state laws here need to keep up by eliminating all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren.
Facebook’s role in spreading vaccine-denial bullshit has come under fire in two directions – the rise of closed groups that freely share false information against vaccines, and now anti-vaxxer groups using Facebook ad targeting to serve ads to pregnant women scaring them away from vaccines.
Some unvaccinated teens are now going around their parents to get vaccinated or doing so as soon as they’re of age. I’d drive any unvaccinated kid to the doctor if they had the legal side sorted out to get their shots.
There’s a measles outbreak in the Philippines, including the capital city of Manila, with nearly 13 million people in its metropolitan area.
Now some especially dumbshit parents are refusing the vitamin K shot for newborns. It’s essential to help newborns’ blood clot properly, so look for a bunch of babies bleeding to death needlessly because their parents are morons and the law lets them stay that way.
Climate change may melt most Himalayan glaciers in the next 80 years, which, I don’t know, sounds like a national emergency to me.
Scientific American looks at proposed policies to combat rising temperatures in Phoenix, although I notice water conservation, an outright failure of the city and state governments there, isn’t mentioned.
Math geeks may enjoy this paper (PDF) on the Sheldon Conjecture, based on an episode of the Big Bang Theory where that character says 73 is the perfect prime number – and it’s possible that the writers were more right than they knew.
Harvard professor Jill Abramson stands accused of plagiarism as well as inaccurate quotes in her latest book, and she seems to think she’s above the fray. I’ve emailed multiple deans at Harvard to ask for any sign they’re even aware of these problems – she teaches seminars on writing there, for crying out loud – but so far I’ve had no response.
Instagram “influencer” Rachel Hollis has also been accused of plagiarizing quotes on her social media account.
Bernie 2020? Not so fast, if you look at his history of embracing pseudoscience.
Julian Edelman’s title as Super Bowl MVP exposes our ‘selective morality’ on performance-enhancing drugs in sports, Hunter Felt writes for the Guardian.
Oh, we back on that again? New York’s City Council is considering a ban on foie gras, based again on a misunderstanding of how the delicacy is actually produced. I’m not a huge fan myself, at least not commensurate with its reputation among foodies, but this is a needless regulation, and shouldn’t be near the top of anyone’s priority list of rules on food production and sale.
I shouldn’t laugh, but I did: “Investors” in a cryptocurrency exchange might be out $137 million because the founder died and no one knows his passwords.
Jane Coaston wrote in Vox about conservative pundits’ bad faith arguments around Gov. Ralph Northam while also arguing that the governor, who appeared in blackface in a yearbook photo from his time in graduate school, should resign. I feel like we should just turn Virginia off and turn it back on again.
George Will argues in the Washington Post that Democrats can bail out Trump by nominating someone too liberal/progressive in 2020. I don’t agree, but I think Will makes a cogent argument about the center (without, I think, considering voters on the far left who might have abstained in 2016).
A great podcast from the BBC explains why we don’t care about the war in Yemen, which we support by funding our ‘friends’ the Saudis.
Two unrolled Twitter threads worth reading: Harvard professor Juliette Kayam depantsed Rep. Dan Crenshaw over border security and the wall.
Writer Anand Giridharadas was invited to fill in as guest speaker at a dinner, only to have the ‘liberal’ crowd defend the Koch brothers. The dinner took place at The Players, a private social club founded by Edwin Booth, which has also been accused of labor law violations (detailed within).
Board games! Floodgate Games’ Bad Maps is now available for pre-order.
The board game Evolution is now out as an app for iOS, Android, and Steam. I have a review coming for Ars Technica, but I’ll report here that it’s pretty great – it looks fantastic and I think it’s easy to read, learn, and play on a tablet screen.
Villainous: Wicked to the Core, is a new standalone expansion to last year’s hit game Villainous, and will be available exclusively through Target starting on March 3rd, with pre-orders through that link. I’ve played it five times already, and it’s more of the same but with better rules explaining each villain character’s unique powers and victory conditions. This comes with three new characters – the Evil Queen, Doctor Facilier, and Hades (no James Woods, thank goodness) – and may be combined any way you like with the six villains from the original game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, boardgames, climate change, frauds, links, math, metoo, oscars, vaccines, virginia

→ July 21, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/21/21.

For Insiders this week, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors and posted analyses of the Manny Machado trade and the Brad Hand/Francisco Mejia trade. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My next game review for Paste will go up next week; this week I reviewed the app version of Istanbul, a great strategic game of pathfinding and set collection, here on the dish.

I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm to talk Smart Baseball and sign copies.

And now, the links…

Before I hit the longreads, I want to highlight this editorial from The Daily Barometer, a student-run newspaper at Oregon State, which states what probably should have been obvious all along: “OSU supporters who cheered Luke Heimlich have embarrassed the entire community.” It placed winning baseball games over believing the words of a sexual assault victim and over the impact of the trauma that Heimlich caused. I wish this had run a few months ago, but I am proud to see OSU students put this message out there themselves, knowing the backlash they’ll likely receive for doing so.
OK, longreads: Popula’s Maria Bustillos has the last great interview with Anthony Bourdain, a wide-ranging piece that runs over 10,000 words. Their argument over Obama’s tenure and legacy is outstanding. There are so many wonderful quotes in here, but I’ll pick just one: “We live in a world where we cannot, if you’re running for political office, you cannot admit to speaking a second language, extensive travel, or a familiarity with arugula.” Maybe that’s why our dear leader nicknamed the North Korean dictator “Rocket Man?”
There will be no Nobel Prize in Literature this year in the wake of a scandal involving a serial sexual abuser married to an Academy member, where the two of them also misused Academy funds. Eighteen women spoke about against him, two accusing him of rape. Resignations of other members in protest left the Academy without a quorum for its vote on the candidates for this year’s honor. The story is one of men protecting men, but also symptomatic of the rot of small institutions that operate without oversight.
You’ve probably seen this already, but just in case: Mina Kimes spoke at length to Aly Raisman about the gymnast’s vault to prominence as a forceful advocate for sexual assault victims and for change in the corrupt hierarchy of U.S.A. gymnastics.
Anti-wolf activists ruined the career of a tenured professor who researched the canines’ habits and pushed for conservation efforts, including extorting his employer, Washington State, by threatening to withhold state funding for a new medical school on campus.
George Will’s op ed’s title sums up its message: “This sad, embarrassing wreck of a man” who is now our President.
The Guardian also ran an excerpt from Michiko Kakutani’s forthcoming book The Death of Truth, in which she argues that ‘truth decay’ and alternative facts gave us Trump and are eroding our democracy.
I enjoyed the Atlantic‘s piece calling this the “moment of truth” for Republicans as if there was a damned chance in hell of any of them stepping out of line to criticize their dear leader.
And why would they, when the Supreme Court nominee they’re about to confirm promises to roll back voting rights sixty years.
Actually, one Republican found a backbone here: Will Hurd, a Republican House member from Texas, wrote a searing op ed for the New York Times that Russia is manipulating the President, calling for Congress to act to protect our interests.
Another Republican Congressman broke with Administration on the issue of net neutrality, as Colorado’s Mike Coffman signed a petition to force a vote on legislation to reverse the FCC’s giant gift to the telecom industry.
Meanwhile, current Minnesota Congressman Jason Lewis said African-Americans have a “cultural” problem and an “entitlement mentality” on a previous radio show where he pushed the idea of a race war.
The Treasury will no longer collect information on large donations to 501(c) nonprofits, meaning ‘dark’ money can flow unimpeded to political groups. “The news was well-received among conservative groups and congressional Republicans,” whom I’m sure have nothing at all they’d like to hide now that they can do so without fear of disclosure.
There’s scant good news on the rationalist front, but some scientists running for office have fared well in elections this year. Hiral Tipirneni nearly won a special election in a crimson-red district in Arizona this spring, and she is running for the same seat again in November.
A new investigative paper published in JAMA found that the poor quality of sleep received by hospital patients slows their healing, so stop waking them up for routine tests that might not be necessary for all patients.
Should lab-grown meat be labelled as meat? It’s biochemically identical to meat that came from an animal’s carcass, but is cultured and grown in a lab, obviating some ethical and environmental concerns. Of course, the meat manufacturing and processing industries are trying an end run around the technology, hoping to ban those products from calling themselves ‘meat,’ rather than, you know, telling consumers what the product is and letting the market decide.
Wild optimism over CRISPR-based therapy has been slapped with several large charges on its latest reality bill, including potential long-term DNA damage to patients, some of which could lead to cancer.
CNN got played by a pseudoscience-pushing conspiracy theorist who claimed on air that cell phones cause cancer – but didn’t disclose his conflict of interest, working for a company that sells equipment to “protect” people from such radiation.
An arcane type of numbers called octonions (beyond real and complex numbers) may provide the unifying math behind the Standard Model of Physics.
No one can quite explain those $2000-plus used book prices on amazon, charged by third-party sellers with murky identities.
Eritrea and Ethiopia have signed a peace deal promising to end their pointless, twenty-year border war, giving hope that democracy may finally come to Eritrea, Africa’s last true one-party state.
Every time I bring up offensive team nicknames like those of the baseball teams in Cleveland or Atlanta or the football team in Washington, some chud shows up with a “What about Notre Dame?” Here’s a well-written editorial from Irish news site The Journal that explains why the analogy isn’t just wrong, but ignorant of history.
r/Dodgers has solved the mystery of Kiké Hernandez’s (tight) pants.
Alan Sepinwall reviewed Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show and says it’s about 15 years out of date with its conceit of trying to shock the audience by what victims of his pranks will say or do.
Your brain is always looking for problems to solve, so when problems become a bit scarce, it can try to find problems where there are none.
Eagle-Gryphon published a Kickstarter for Escape Plan, a new game from Vital Lacerda, known for overlong, complex games like Lisboa.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, links, math, metoo, nobel prize, racism, science, stick to baseball

→ May 24, 2018
→ By keith

A Brief History of Infinity.

Infinity is a big topic, to put it mildly. The mere concept of a limitless quantity has vexed mathematicians, philosophers, and theologians for over two centuries. The Greeks developed some of the first infinite series, some divergent (they approach infinity) and some convergent (they approach a finite number), with Zeno making use of these concepts in some of his famous paradoxes. Galileo is better known for his observations in astronomy and work in optics, but he developed an early paradox that he argued meant that we couldn’t compare the sizes of infinite sets in a meaningful way, showing that, although we know intuitively that there are more integers in total than there are integers that are perfect squares, you can map the integers to the perfect squares in a 1:1 ratio that appears to show that the two sets are the same size. Georg Cantor later explained this paradox in his development of set theory, coining the aleph terminology for infinite sets, and then went mad trying to further his theories of infinity, a math-induced insanity that later afflicted Kurt Gödel in his work on incompleteness. There remain numerous – dare I say infinite? – unsolved problems in mathematics that revolve around infinity itself or whether there are an infinite number of some entity, such as primes or perfect numbers, in the infinite set of whole numbers or integers.

Science writer Brian Clegg attempts to make these topics accessible to the lay reader in his book A Brief History of Infinity, part of the Brief History series from the imprint Constable & Robinson. Rather than delving too far into the mathematics of the infinite, which would require more than passing introductions to set theory, the transfinite numbers, and integral calculus, Clegg focuses on the history of infinity as a concept in math and philosophy, going back to the ancient Greeks, walking through western scholars’ troubles with infinity (and objections from the Church), telling the well-known story of Newton and Leibniz’s fight over “the” calculus, and bringing the reader up through the works of Cantor, Gödel, and other modern mathematicians in illuminating the infinite both large and small. (It’s $6 for the Kindle and $5 for the paperback as I write this.)

Infinity can be inconvenient, but we couldn’t have modern calculus without it, and it comes up repeatedly in other fields including fractal mathematics and quantum physics. Sometimes it’s the infinitely small – the “ghosts of departed quantities” called infinitesimals that Newton and Leibniz required for integration – and sometimes it’s infinitely large, but despite several millennia of attempts to argue infinity out of mathematics, there’s no avoiding its existence and even the necessity of using it. Clegg excels when recounting great controversies over infinity from the history of math, such as the battle between Newton and Leibniz over who invented the calculus, or the battle between Cantor and his former teacher Leopold Kronecker, who disdained not just infinity but even the transcendental numbers (like π, e, or the Hilbert number) and actively worked to prevent Cantor from publishing his seminal papers on set theory.

Clegg’s book won’t likely satisfy the more math-inclined readers who want a crunchier treatment of this topic, especially the recent history of infinity from Cantor forward. Cantor developed modern set theory and published numerous proofs about infinity, proving that there are at least two distinct sets of infinities (the integers, aleph-null, are infinite, but not as numerous as the real numbers, aleph-one; aleph notation measures the cardinality of infinities, not the quantity of infinity itself). I also found Clegg’s discussion of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems rather … um … incomplete, which is understandable given the theorems’ abstract nature, but also meant Gödel earned very little screen time in the book other than the overemphasized parallel between his own descent into insanity and Cantor’s. I was disappointed that he didn’t get into Russell’s paradox*, which is a critical link between Cantor’s work (and Hilbert’s hope for a resolution in favor of completeness) and Gödel’s finding that completeness was impossible.

Let R be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. If R is not a member of itself, then it must be a member of R … but that produces a contradiction by the definition of R.

Clegg does a much better job than David Foster Wallace did in his own book on infinity, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, which tried to get into the mathier stuff but ultimately failed to make the material accessible enough to the reader (and perhaps exposed the limits of Wallace’s knowledge of the topic too). This is a book just about anyone who took one calculus class can follow, and it has enough personal intrigue to hold the reader’s attention. My personal taste in history of science/math books leans towards the more technical or granular, but I wouldn’t use that as an indictment of Clegg’s approach here.

Next up: I’m reading another Nero Wolfe mystery, after which I’ll tackle Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: history of science, math, non-fiction, physics

→ October 27, 2017
→ By keith

Everybody Lies.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz made his name by using the enormous trove of data from Google search inquiries – that is, what users all over the world type in the search box – to measure things that researchers would typically measure solely by voluntary responses to surveys. And, as Stephens-Davidowitz says in the title of his first book, Everybody Lies, those surveys are not that reliable. It turns out, to pick one of the most notable results of his work (described in this book), that only 2-3% of men self-report as gay when asked in surveys, but the actual rate is probably twice that, based on the data he mined from online searches.

Stephens-Davidowitz ended up working for a year-plus at Google as a data scientist before leaving to become an editorial writer at the New York Times and author, so the book is bit more than just a collection of anecdotes like later entries in the Freakonomics series. Here, the author is more focused on the potential uses and risks of this enormous new quantity of data that, of course, is being collected on us every time we search on Google, click on Facebook, or look for something on a pornography site. (Yep, he got search data from Pornhub too.)

The core idea here is twofold: there are new data, and these new data allow us to ask questions we couldn’t answer before, or simply couldn’t answer well. People won’t discuss certain topics with researchers, or even answer surveys truthfully, but they will spill everything to Google. Witness the derisive term “Dr. Google” for people who search for their symptoms online, where they may end up with information from fraudsters or junk science sites like Natural News or Mercola, rather than seeing a doctor. What if, however, you looked at people who reveal through their searches that they have something like pancreatic cancer, and then looked at the symptoms those same people were Googling several weeks or months before their diagnosis? Such an approach could allow researchers to identify symptoms that positively correlate with hard-to-detect diseases, and to know the chances of false positives, or even find intermediate variables that alter the probability the patient has the disease. You could even build expert systems that really would work like Dr. Google – if I have these five symptoms, but not these three, should I see a real doctor?

Sex, like medical topics, is another subject people don’t like to discuss with strangers, and it happens to sell books too, so Stephens-Davidowitz spent quite a bit of time looking into what people search for when they’re searching about sex, whether it’s pornography, dating sites, or questions about sex and sexuality. The Pornhub data trove reveals quite a bit about sexual orientations, along with some searches I personally found a bit disturbing. Even more disturbing, however, is just how many Americans secretly harbor racist views, which Stephens-Davidowitz deduces from internet searches for certain racial slurs, and even shows how polls underestimated Donald Trump’s appeal to the racist white masses by demonstrating from search data how many of these people are out there. Few racists reveal themselves as such to surveys or researchers, and such people may even lie about their voting preferences or plans – saying they were undecided when they planned to vote for Trump, for instance. If Democrats had bothered to get and analyze this data, which is freely available, would they have changed their strategies in swing states?

Some of Stephens-Davidowitz’s queries here are less earth-shattering and seem more like ways to demonstrate the power of the tool. He looks at whether violent movies actually correlate to an increase in violent crime (spoiler: not really), and what first-date words or phrases might indicate a strong chance for a second date. But he also uses some of these queries to talk about new or revived study techniques, like A/B testing, or to show how such huge quantities of data can lead to spurious correlations, a problem known as “the curse of dimensionality,” such as in studies that claim a specific gene causes a specific disease or physical condition that then aren’t replicated by other researchers.

Stephens-Davidowitz closes with some consideration of the inherent risks of having this much information about us available both to corporations like Google, Facebook, and … um … Pornhub, as well as the risks of having it in the hands of the government, especially with the convenient excuse of “homeland security” always available to the government to explain any sort of overreach. Take the example in the news this week that a neighbor of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook mass murderer, warned police that he was threatening to do just such a thing, only to be told that the police couldn’t do anything because his mother owned the guns legally. What if he’d searched for this online? For ways to kill a lot of people in a short period of time, or to build a bomb, or to invade a building? Should the FBI be knocking on the doors of anyone who searches for such things? Some people would say yes, if it might prevent Sandy Hook or Las Vegas or San Bernardino or the Pulse Orlando or Columbine or Virginia Tech or Luby’s or Binghamton or the Navy Yard. Some people will consider this an unreasonable abridgement of our civil liberties. Big Data forces the conversation to move to new places because authorities can learn more about us than ever before – and we’re the ones giving them the information.

Next up: J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: data science, highly recommended, math, non-fiction

→ September 25, 2017
→ By keith

For the love of algebra.

I have always loved math, and I don’t think there’s any field within math I love more than algebra. I certainly enjoyed calculus, and there are parts of number theory that still fascinate me (Goldbach’s conjecture, an unproven hypothesis that dates back to 1742, more than anything else), but algebra just speaks to me like nothing else in the domains of math or science. So when I saw this week’s FiveThirtyEight Riddler problem, which boils down to solving two equations for two unknowns, I might have dropped everything I was doing and spent about a half an hour solving it – messily, but I think ultimately getting the right answer.

My own personal love of algebra dates back to when I was ten years old, and my junior high school, lacking an honors math class for sixth grade, decided instead to bump me up to the regular eighth grade math course, where I met a wonderful teacher and some awful kids. (I was three years younger than they were, and of course small for my age anyway.) I was told very little about the move but somehow understood that I’d be learning algebra, so I went to the school library and found a book, long out of print now, called Realm of Algebra, by an author I’d never heard of at the time but would later grow to know very well through his science fiction writing, Isaac Asimov. I devoured the book, which I credit to Asimov’s ability to make even abstruse concepts clear to readers, in a weekend, and ended up ahead of where I needed to be for the class. Algebra felt to me like another language, as easy to comprehend as English, maybe even more so – like this was my native tongue and everyone had been hiding it from me. I could always “think” in numbers, but algebra gave me an entire framework for it, and everything I learned that year, especially from Asimov’s book, still directs much of how I think about problems today.

It has also made me an easy mark for puzzles and games that revolve around algebraic questions. I often check FiveThirtyEight’s Riddler questions, but I rarely try to solve them – some look too hard or involved, some just don’t grab me. This week’s question, about finding the area of a missing rectangle, hooked me from the start. (I suppose I should disclose that FiveThirtyEight is part of the ESPN network of sites, and thus I am connected to it as well.) Here’s the question in brief: Find the missing area in the picture below, bearing in mind that it is not to scale.

I tweeted the link to the article last night and got a slew of responses from readers, some right, some I don’t think were right, and a few that gave me more insight into the problem – one of which made me realize my first answer was impossible – so I decided to take a few minutes and explain my method, in case it’s useful to anyone or still contains a mistake.

To figure out the area of the lower-left rectangle, you need to know its height and width, so this is a problem of two unknowns, which means you need (at least) two equations containing those unknowns to be able to solve it. To make the math a little less messy, I defined the height (vertical axis) of the target area as 11-x and the width (horizontal axis) as 14-y, meaning that the height of the upper-left area is x and the width of the lower-right area is y. We know the area of the lower right rectangle is 45, and the area of the upper left rectangle is 32, so using the formula for the area of a rectangle we get the following two equations:

(14 – y)x = 14x – xy = 32
y(11 – x) = 11y – xy = 45

You can then solve one equation for one variable in terms of the other, substitute that back into the second equation, and solve for one of the two variables. I chose to solve the first equation for x, yielding:

x(14 – y) = 32
x = 32/(14 – y)

11y – y(32/(14 – y)) = 45

11y – 32y/(14 – y) = 45
11y(14 – y) – 32y = 45(14 – y)
154y – 11y² – 32y = 630 – 45y
–11y² + 167y – 630 = 0

That, my friends, is a quadratic equation, and if you remember your quadratic formula – where you take the two coefficients and the constant and plug them into the formula to get the two possible solutions – you can solve it from here, or you can just plug them into this site and get your two answers for y, which in this case are 7 or 90/11.

It turns out that both answers produce whole-number, positive results for the area of the lower left rectangle. If y is 7, x is 32/7, and the area is 45. If y is 90/11, x is 11/2 (5.5) and the area is 32. A reader pointed out that the first answer is impossible, however, because of the one number I haven’t mentioned yet: the truncated, upper-right rectangle’s area, which is 34. Because the area of the whole shebang has to be less than 154 (11 * 14), since there’s a piece missing at the extreme upper right, then the lower left area has to be less than (154 – 32 – 34 – 45), which is 43. That leaves 32 as the only possible answer. (EDIT: Fixed the second sentence, where I transposed the two answers.)

I think.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: math, puzzles

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