Where are all the millionaires? Are we all so dumb? If our great-great-grandfathers had put $1000 away for a long while, then we (or our children) would be sitting pretty either now or in the future some time. But that clearly isn’t how things work. Well why not? What are the forces that have prevented [...]
Archives for October 2005
gerrymandering
This article on gerrymandersing got me thinking – what is a good way of saying “make your lines not too tortured, okay?”. I think that the ideal rule should be: all congressional districts must pass the rubber band test. You remember the rubber band test, right? It makes sure that a shape is convex – [...]
fuzzy computing
One of the reasons computer programs are so brittle is that everything is digital, so a single bit flip could massively change a value. Operating purely on intuition, then, perhaps we could help make our systems less brittle if we gave more redundancy to higher order bits. We’d waste space, sure, but space is cheap. [...]
