Impromptus

The following results were achieved through a single blind study (Tracy was the blinder, however, so her results are not blinded at all): Bourbons ranked (with control scotch) Maker’s Mark Woodford Reserve Four Roses Dewar’s 12 year Tracy 3 2 4 1 Tom 2 1 4 3 Peter 1 3 2 4 Dan 2 1 [...]

I’m pretty sure I have never done a rational thing in my entire life. And probably neither has anyone else. “Rational”, as used by economists, seems to mean things which are optimal with respect to my current abilities. Consider the case of a 15th century person. It seems to me that the optimal thing to [...]

All variables should be private final by default. Making the defaults different from good design practices is a gateway to troubles. Coders (and especially students) have a job that is hard enough. Make the defaults support them doing their job right. final should be the default, and mutable should be a keyword for variables that [...]

Nuclear power is safe. Or it can be. If the organization running the plant has a sufficiently long planning horizon, they will make wise decisions and not have a CEO who hides in his office while the plants melt down. So, the proposed rule is: only groups whose planning horizon is 100 years or more [...]

Because people to regress to the mean, scolding always seems to work, and praise never seems to work. But this is a statistical illusion brought on by bosses with no knowledge of math and a surplus of hubris. I was reminded of this phenomenon when I read a blog post by FemaleScienceProfessor who wrote about [...]

I am 45 times faster at programming than my students. I just verified this again, in two different (Jr and Sr) classes with two different populations. 45 seems like a huge number in this context. It means that every 60 seconds of me programming corresponds to 45 minutes of their programming. How can I speed [...]

Ask an average undergraduate: Is matter composed of atoms? Yes. Why do you think so? I realized I have no idea why I am so sure that matter is composed of atoms. It seems a really useful explanatory model with lots of power, but nobody in any class I ever took argued for any evidence [...]

I was reading an article in New directions in the philosophy of mathematics[1] on the subway, and one of the authors talked about how Kolmogorov’s axiomatization of the foundations of mathematics was obviously incorrect because it couldn’t express the “intuitively obvious” notion of selecting an integer uniformly at random. Now wait a minute — perhaps [...]

A new math rule! Validated below, and brought to you by the subset of my students who are all too willing to make bad leaps of illogic when solving problems. Experimental hypothesis: for all , , and . Data: See above.* Data confirms the hypothesis! New rule now in effect. * Derived from here

I was reminded by a recent blog post* about a feature of science that we don’t like to talk about very much, which is its opposition to reason. In science, when mathematical proof (the highest standard and purest form of reasoning we have as humans) disagrees with the results of an experiment, then that reasoning [...]