On Giving Too Much Legitimacy to the Inferior Position




The Appeal to Image



To quote Carl Sagan:









The Freedom of Speech






Quote Mismatched

Can you correctly match the following quotes with their authors?

  1. Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
  2. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
  3. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
  4. All art is quite useless.
  10. Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

The choices, each used exactly once, are:

  • Albert Einstein
  • Napoleon Bonaparte
  • Isaac Asimov
  • Bill Gates
  • Barack Obama
  • Oscar Wilde
  • Ayn Rand
  • Voltaire
  • Audrey Hepburn
  • Winston Churchill

The answer key is found here, but try it yourself first! If you really are bold, I dare you to write down your guesses in the comments and then check the solution.


In an extreme case, consider the following electoral map:







Bonus Round #1:


Bonus Round #2:

Let’s go back to 2 parties. Someone on Facebook asked:





The Perfect Prediction

Many have heard of Nate Silver’s prediction of the 2012 presidential election. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here was his prediction for last Tuesday, which may seem uncannily familiar:

It seems familiar because it bears a striking resemblance the actual results:

In fact, that’s all 50 states correctly predicted.

Given two equally likely options for each states, the chance to predict all 50 states correctly is one in 2^{50}, or one in 1.126 quadrillion. Granted, we already knew which direction states like Texas or Vermont would vote for, so for the sake of simplicity let’s consider only the 9 “swing” states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. That’s still a one in 512 chance to guess all 9 states correctly from sheer luck.

How did he do it? The answer is high-caliber aggregate statistics. When you conduct a poll, you are going to have very high uncertainty if you poll only a few people. But if you poll a lot of people, your prediction gets more accurate. And one way to poll many people at once is to aggregate the data from many, many polls.

In 2008, Silver’s prediction was accurate in 49 of the 50 states, missing only Indiana.

Does Your Individual Vote Really Matter?

Everyone on Facebook seems to be talking about how they voted today, and why you should as well. To be a good citizen, they say, you must vote. “Go vote!” says every other status on my Facebook feed.

Yet there are plenty of reasons not to vote, and in fact, not voting has been historically a very powerful form of protest against a government. This article debunks many of the voting myths that attempt to place voting on the moral high-ground. I found the most significant part of the article to be number 5, which responds to the claim that your vote is your voice in the government:


Indeed, the United States is not a true democracy (though the term “democracy” gets thrown around enough that it seems to be synonymous with anything moral).

There are two more main reasons why, for the majority of voters, your vote will be futile. Firstly, the electoral college system places all importance on the swing states such as Ohio. Unless you live in one of these states, your individual vote will have nearly zero chance of affecting the outcome of the election, as the vote of your state is already determined. Even if you do live in one of these states, one vote will not statistically make a difference. There has not ever been a case where a president has been decided by one vote, and basic probability tells you it will remain that way.

But what if everyone thinks like that, you might say. If everyone does this, then no one will vote, and the election will fail. The bad guy will be elected with just a handful of votes.

This is hardly a valid concern. We all agree that being a medical doctor is a good and respectable profession. However, if everyone thinks like that, then everyone will be doctors, and nobody will be there to grow crops, educate children, provide entertainment, forecast weather, write books, or produce art. This argument fails because even though one might respect doctors, one must not necessarily become one.

Secondly, if you really want to change the world, you’re not going to do it by casting a single ballot once and then posting once on Facebook that you voted and then never mention politics again. Suppose I had a button in front of me such that every time I pressed the button, it would add one vote randomly for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in a random polling booth in the United States. Even if I pressed the button a thousand times it would have no statistical effect on the outcome.

If you want to change something, start a movement. Your government won’t listen to an insignificant statistic in a polling booth, but it sure as hell will listen to a provocative demonstration. The beauty of the United States is that you have the right to challenge the government, a right that is too often taken for granted, for in many countries, speaking out against the slightest flaw in your country could be a death sentence. So exercise this right! We the people control the government, yet we have allowed the government to control us.

So if you think that by voting, you have fulfilled your civic duty for the next four years, think again. If you really care about your country that much, you would do a lot more than broadcasting your vote on Facebook to a bunch of people you already know anyways.

All that said, in an age of technology and reason, I would be very unhappy if Romney were elected. It is important that the United States lead the world in advancing forward, not regressing back into an anti-intellectual dark age. If I were to choose between Romney and Obama, I would without the slightest hesitation pick President Obama. However, given that Ithaca, NY is guaranteed to vote Democrat (and the state of New York as a whole), and given that both major party candidates have been quiet about the environment in the weeks leading up to the election, my vote today went to Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Blogging Year 3

Today is the 3rd birthday of my blog! It was a fairly light year, with only 42 posts published, but it received 52k views, thereby averaging 1238 views per new post (many of these views were on older posts, so it is not an accurate representation of views for a given post). In comparison, Year 1 averaged 1042 views per post and Year 2 averaged 1053 [data].

The most visited posts in the third year were:

  1. The Persistence of Memory – 18,465 views
  2. (Home page) – 4,030 views
  3. 10 Mind Blowing Mathematical Equations – 2,506 views
  4. Tumblr vs WordPress: Simplicity vs Power – 2,360 views
  5. The End of an Experiment – 2,206 views
  6. US Census 2010 Win – 1,699 views

The vast majority of the hits for #1 and #5 resulted from Google image searches, whereas the majority for #3 and #4 came from normal Google searches. Interesting.

Haven’t tracked followers in previous years, but as it stands, 62 of you are following this blog. Nice!

One final note: unlike in the past two years, I am not participating in Nanowrimo this year due to some very busy math classes, though I would gladly cheer on anyone who is. Good luck getting to 50,000. May the Force be with you.