May 2013
33 posts
1 tag
2 tags
He Conceived the Mathematics of Roughness →
By JIM HOLT | The New York Review of Books May 23, 2013
Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The...
1 tag
3 tags
1 tag
In sheer numbers, these microbes and their genes dwarf us. It turns out that we...
– Some of my best friends are germs
2 tags
1 tag
2 tags
Yahoo's Board Approves $1.1 Billion Purchase Of... →
Yahoo’s board approved the plan to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash, All Things D reports.
Previous reports said that Tumblr’s board had okayed Yahoo buying Tumblr, so it looks like it’s a done deal.
Marissa Mayer has made her first big move as CEO of Yahoo. She’s buying a social networking site with a younger audience, and a ton of pageviews. Now it’s time to...
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
Legends Never Die: A look back at "Kids" two... →
By CAROLINE ROTHSTEIN l Narratively May 2, 2013
August 1990, St. Marks Place. Priscilla Forsyth, one month shy of her fourteenth birthday and just home from summer camp, straddles one of the two lion statues guarding the downward staircase to the apartment building her family has owned since 1975. Naturally blonde Liza and dyed blonde Margaret idle with her. It’s hot out, and Priscilla is...
2 tags
2 tags
A Most Profound Math Problem →
By ALEXANDER NAZARYAN l The New Yorker May 2, 2013
On August 6, 2010, a computer scientist named Vinay Deolalikar published a paper with a name as concise as it was audacious: “P ≠ NP.” If Deolalikar was right, he had cut one of mathematics’ most tightly tied Gordian knots. In 2000, the P = NP problem was designated by the Clay Mathematics Institute as one of seven Millennium Problems—“important...
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke →
By PABLO S. TORRE l Sports Illustrated March 32, 2009
What the hell happened here? Seven floors above the iced-over Dallas North Tollway, Raghib (Rocket) Ismail is revisiting the question. It’s December, and Ismail is sitting in the boardroom of Chapwood Investments, a wealth management firm, his white Notre Dame snow hat pulled down to his furrowed brow.
In 1991 Ismail, a junior wide...
2 tags
April 2013
44 posts
1 tag
The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed...
– Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface | MIT Technology Review (via zachrose)
1 tag
The Mind of a Con Man →
By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE l New York Times Magazine April 23, 2013
One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an...
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
3 tags
1 tag
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag