To wrap up February, another end-of-month sundry compendium of some reads I thought interesting over the prior 4+ weeks:
1) The month started off with Eric Weinstein overviewing the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW):
2) new book out from physicist (and founder of quasi-crystals) Paul Steinhardt:
3) In the “What Could Go Wrong Dept.” there was the story of the Canadian crypto coin failure:
(there is likely much newer info by now; this story is from early in the month)
4) Another test of linguistic relativity (h/t Lera Boraditsky):
5) A somewhat interesting thread of math-related book recommendations in this tweet:
6) Just another rich post from Brian Hayes, this time on factorials:
…in turn, a comment to Brian’s essay leads to this interesting Reddit thread:
7) Frank Harrell’s updated “journey from frequentist to Bayesian statistics” page:
8) I’m not involved in MTBoS nor Twitter Math Camp (TMC), but have always admired the efforts of this fantastic group of dedicated teachers. Watching them work through their current growing pains (typical of expanding, successful organizations) is almost painful to watch, but for those interested, here are 3 perspectives/posts of what’s been happening (there are many more):
9) Timely (though too late for some!) Mark Chu-Carroll addressed vaccinations and herd immunity:
10) Profile of mathematician Zhiwei Yun:
11) Anonymity and sperm donors in the day of widespread genetic testing:
12) Two of the best math bits from the month come (as usual) via Evelyn Lamb:
13) Jo Boaler on math learning and neuroscience:
14) Long, but pretty interesting, detailed description of the personal infrastructure that Stephen Wolfram has built around his own life for efficiency/productivity (perhaps something in here everyone will find useful):
15) An old fantastic BBC Horizon show on Fermat’s Last Theorem and Andrew Wiles now freely available here (outside of UK):
16) 50+ mins. of pure, unadulterated Matt Parker on a Numberphile podcast:
17) Wason’s THOG problem at Futility Closet:
...that should keep you busy for awhile.
