Forest Hill resident and apparently amateur shutterbug Brenda Rusnak captured the magnificent and unusual scene on the Serengeti: a leopard bounding atop a tree, with the lightness of a character from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as it escapes from the roaring lion a branch below that has laid claim to the leopard’s quarry – a freshly killed gazelle.
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Most people don’t understand how mirrors work. For example, when presented with the following scenario, most people get it wrong.
Imagine you’re at the entrance to a narrow corridor and further down, several feet away, hanging on the right-hand wall, there are three rectangular mirrors (30cm x 45cm) at head height. At what point, as you proceed down the corridor, do you think you’ll be able to see your face in the mirrors?
In another demonstration of the fallibility of our intuitions when it comes to mirrors:
If I asked you to draw a full-size outline of your head on a flip chart, and then to draw the outline of your head as it appears in the mirror, would you draw the two outlines the same size? You shouldn’t do because the mirror image of your head (as it appears to you) is exactly half its true size, irrespective of how far you are from the mirror, a fact that few people realise.
Benford’s Law is one of those things that has always made me scratch my head. Â It just doesn’t make sense! Â Here’s what the law boils down to:
A second earth-shattering fact is that there are more numbers in the universe that begin with the digit 1 than 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, or 7, or 8, or 9.  And more numbers that begin with 2 than 3, or 4, and so on.  This relationship holds for the lengths of rivers, the populations of cities, molecular weights of chemicals, and any number of other categories.  What a blow to any of us who purport to have mastered the basic facts of the world around us!
One of the cool things this law allows us to do is to detect inaccurate corporate accounting!
In fact, Benford’s law has been used in legal cases to detect corporate fraud, because deviations from the law can indicate that a company’s books have been manipulated.
Jialan Wang wanted to find out if corporate accounting deviated from Benford’s law and how that changed over time.
So according to Benford’s law, accounting statements are getting less and less representative of what’s really going on inside of companies.  The major reform that was passed after Enron and other major accounting standards barely made a dent.Next, I looked at Benford’s law for three industries: finance, information technology, and manufacturing.  The finance industry showed a huge surge in the deviation from Benford’s from 1981-82, coincident with two major deregulatory acts that sparked the beginnings of that other big mortgage debacle, the Savings and Loan Crisis.  The deviation from Benford’s in the finance industry reached a peak in 1988 and then decreased starting in 1993 at the tail end of the S&L fraud wave, not matching its 1988 level until … 2008.
I think elementary math education in the USA is, on average, quite bad. The worst part about it is that the mental habits acquired during these formative years are nearly impossible to break. I’m fairly competent at math now (though, I don’t know as much as I’d like), but I still struggle against the attitudes and habits from school. How much more understanding would I have if my early education had been more appropriate?
Numerical arithmetic should look to children like a simpler and faster way of doing things that they know how to do already, not a set of mysterious recipes for getting right answers to meaningless questions.
– John Holt, How Children Fail
This reminds me of the essay Guessing the Teacher’s Password by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Suppose the teacher presents you with a confusing problem involving a metal plate next to a radiator; the far side feels warmer than the side next to the radiator. The teacher asks “Why?” If you say “I don’t know”, you have no chance of getting a gold star – it won’t even count as class participation. But, during the current semester, this teacher has used the phrases “because of heat convection”, “because of heat conduction”, and “because of radiant heat”. One of these is probably what the teacher wants. You say, “Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?”
This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher’s password.
I worry about my 2-year-old daughter’s future. Especially given the fact that I don’t know how to find good teachers. There is no thriving industry of teacher and school reviews like there is for some of the other products we use (see gadgets and cars, for example).
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I’m a big fan of all sorts of books.
I read lots of science fiction. Â It’s my go-to genre when I’m bored and want to read something. Â You would assume my favorite book would fall within the genre, I know I made that assumption.
Today I realized that wasn’t the case. Â Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov holds this distinction. Â I read this first probably in junior high and it just blew me away. Â I was always an underachiever in school. Â A lot of that had to do with the fact that, while I knew I was smart, I didn’t feel like I was smart enough to understand complicated things. Â This book changed all of that.
Asimov’s writing style is just fantastic when it comes to explaining topics. Â In this book he does a great job of not only explaining how things work, but how we figured them out and how scientists depend on the work of their predecessors.
I would put this book somewhere between pop science books without a bit of math and a full-on textbook. Â However, even though it has math in it, it is completely attainable to someone who normally only reads the pop science books.
I rarely re-read books, but I find myself reading this one every couple of years. Â You will too.
My most recent project is an app called woofi. Â Let me quote the apps description from its market page:
Simply put, with woofi you define locations like “home”, “work”, or “Joe’s house”, and woofi turns your WiFi radio on when near those points and off when not.
More detailed explanation:
Say, for example, that the only place you connect your phone to WiFi is at home. This means you don’t need for the WiFi radio in your phone to be on when you’re not at home. The rest of the day it’s just sitting there trying to connect to access points and wasting battery.
With this app you would save your “home” location (and wherever else you connect to WiFi regularly…like at the office), and the app would keep track of your location throughout the day and when you weren’t near these saved locations turn your WiFi radio off, and then when you were near them it would turn your WiFi radio back on.
You can, of course, simply turn the WiFi radio on and off manually when you are at-home/not-at-home, the only purpose of this app is to automate doing this for you. I always forget to do this manually…thus the idea for this app.
Most people seem to leave their WiFi on all the time and not realize that it’s on because it just connects to networks that they’ve connected to before automatically.
Here’s what normally happens without this app: Once you’ve connected to your home (or office, or wherever) WiFi, Android will just connect to your home WiFi every time you’re in range. The only way it knows to do this is because the WiFi radio in your phone is on all the time looking for WiFi networks to connect to.
This app replaces that procedure by checking your phones location and leaving the WiFi radio off unless it is needed. Doing this saves battery life.
Coming soon expect some posts about the logic and trade offs made in the development of this app.
I recently played all the way through the following games on the hardest difficulty.
[table id=1 /]
I have played through all the games before, but it’s been years. Â I didn’t rush through any of the games. Â I didn’t look in every nook and cranny of each level, but things that were interesting, I investigated.
I must say, the whole Half-Life series is a blast to play. Â I am, however, disappointed at how much shorter Half-Life 2 was then Half-Life 1.
This isn’t directly connected what I normally post about, but I’ve got a home I’m trying to sell!
![104957-F[1]](https://i0.wp.com/blog.contriving.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/104957-F1.jpg?resize=504%2C504 "104957-F[1]")
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