- Why we have to get rid of pi for the sake of good math
- [io9 - Alasdair Wilkins]
Pi is perhaps the most beloved number in the world. People devote an entire day to celebrating it; enthusiasts memorize it to hundreds of thousands of places; and it's even pretty useful for calculating the properties of circles and spheres. But pi hides some very important mathematical truths. Put another way, pi is just wrong. So wrong that physicist Michael Hartl says it's time to lose pi in favor of a new symbol: tau. We asked him to explain why pi has to go.
- Prices and Plutocrats – NYTimes.com
- [Paul Krugman, with charts]
What’s going on here? It means that we’re either overstating inflation (and hence understating income gains) or overstating economic growth. …Maybe the real point here is to remember, always, that economic statistics are a peculiarly boring sub-genre of science fiction; extremely useful, but not to be treated as absolute truth.
…why hasn’t family income tracked rising GDP? It’s partly about price indexes, partly about plutocrats (i.e., rapidly rising incomes at the top). It would be nice if the story were cleaner, but that’s life.
- The neoliberal failure: A world of Egypts, ready to explode
- [Open Left - Paul Rosenberg]
On Sunday, Juan Cole wrote a very concise backgrounder to peaceful revolution going on in Egypt, "Egypt's Class Conflict". It's not only about class conflict, of course, but also about the shifts in political ideology and foundations of legitimacy from Nasser's time to today. As such, one of the most valuable things it does is to highlight the role played by failed neo-liberal policies–which are hardly unique to Egypt, of course.
- Money from Nothing? The Illusion Behind the Magic by David Korten
- Much of what Wall Street celebrates as financial innovation involves borrowing to inflate the value of financial assets to create collateral to support more borrowing to further inflate the assets to create more collateral…
…an asset bubble–real estate or otherwise–does not create wealth. A rise in the market price of a house from $200,000 to $400,000 does not make it more functional or comfortable. The real consequence of a real estate bubble is to increase the financial power of those who own property relative to those who do not.
…If you have difficulty understanding "economist speak," it may be because you are in touch with reality.
- Whataburger Goes Cage-Free After Investigation of Egg Supplier
- [Change.org]
Texas-based fast food chain Whataburger has announced that it will begin a transition to using cage-free eggs in 2011. The burger chain has nearly 700 restaurants in Texas and ten others scattered around the South and Southwest.
…the cruelty uncovered at the Waelder, Texas farm isn't uncommon. In fact, it's standard operating procedure.
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- Corruption
- [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Seumas Miller]
The causes and effects of corruption, and how to combat corruption, are issues that are increasingly on the national and international agendas of politicians and other policymakers. For example, the World Bank has relatively recently come around to the view that economic development is closely linked to corruption reduction…
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- #DearJohn: Taking It Big
- [Tiger Beatdown - Sady]
…this movement is getting big. It is way bigger than Tiger Beatdown; it is way bigger than Twitter. You can find an amazing, frequently-updated list of resources, including which groups are starting petitions and what action steps or educational resources are being provided elsewhere, right here. [link: http://chunkymonkeymind.blogspot.com/2011/01/redefining-rape-list-of-resources.html ]
[TRIGGER WARNING]
- Girls on Film does Star Trek
- Girls on Film takes scenes between men in mainstream movies, and redoes them with female actors playing the parts.
Here they take on a scene from the recent Star Trek movie:…
Swapping the sex of the actors playing these roles is interesting because it highlights quite clearly the codes of masculinity and expected gender roles which go under the radar in the original.
- CultureLab: The real Leonardo was more impressive than the legend
- …the middle-aged Leonardo da Vinci struggled to learn Latin, aspiring to read classical treatises on optics and mechanics. At the time, he was also trying to master algebra, and to improve his employment prospects by studying a book of letter-writing tips.
- The Delicious Irony of Microsoft Aggregating Google’s Search Results
- There's nothing illegal about Microsoft copying Google's search results. After all, the Web is built on aggregation.
Microsoft's Bing search engine is apparently relying on data gathered from users of its Internet Explorer browser to copy some of the search results offered by Google and then offer them up on Bing. Google would officially like the practice to stop, and the fight between the two usually buttoned-down companies has already turned nasty on Twitter.
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[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
The Of interest (Wed, Feb 2nd, 12pm) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.