In the aftermath of each new tragedy of mass gun violence, people always look for a cause. There are likely many “causes” of mass gun violence, but the math points to a clear, correlated “temperature” that summarizes all of the causes and spits out violent acts that are at the same time random, yet probabilistically predictable. In the prior post in this… Read more »
I have written in the past comparing the math behind American gun violence as unnervingly similar to the random-but-probabilistic math of lotteries. Another descriptor for this phenomenon pops up from time to time, and it has again after the mail bombs and the tragic Pittsburgh synagogue killings of this past week, and that is the term stochastic terrorism. What is… Read more »
If you have ever engaged in conversation with a Second Amendment radical and even mentioned the words “assault weapon” or “semi-automatic,” you have likely descended quickly into “pedantry hell.” You will receive a lecture about why these terms are meaningless in their side of the discussion about any reasonable gun regulation. And they have intentionally made this “word corruption” a… Read more »
This is the second post in a series featuring music that remains in my iTunes playlist and in the complete original running order after a lot of years have passed. This one features the later singer-songwriter Kate Wolf. After a lot of years of playing the singer-songwriter circuit in northern California, Kate Wolf scored her first major television appearance in… Read more »
Even if you remember a few things from that college statistics class (and confess, you probably don’t) the barrage of election statistics around this time of year can get overwhelming and confusing. I will admit that I have fivethirtyeight.com and other election statistics sites in my news feed, but I have learned a few limitations to human knowledge about this… Read more »
In the wake of the devastating Hurricane Michael, news reports from Tyndall Air Force Base, located just outside of Panama City, Florida, detailed extensive damage to somewhere between $5.8 billion and $7.5 billion worth of F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets left on the ground as the base was abandoned. [1] [2] This story reminded me of a 50-year-old book that was… Read more »
This is the first post of a recurring series that I plan to run on Saturdays, looking at albums that remain on my iTunes playlist in original running order after a lot of years. For this first one, a look back at John Stewart, not the comedian and Daily Show host, but rather the less-well-known songwriter of one of the… Read more »
I wrote a post back in February that looked how an accounting problem called the fixed-cost dilemma skews many medical costs like drugs and ambulances. The same problem occurs in spades in higher education, and that is the focus of this post. If you are going to advocate for “free college education,” I suggest that it is very helpful to… Read more »
In a prior post, I noted that much of the pure “education” delivered by a college or university is alternatively available from other sources for little or no cost. What then are all of the tuition dollars, state funding dollars and student loan dollars paying for? If we are looking to fund “free college for everyone” then where is that… Read more »
I was representing my publisher employer at a technology meeting at the dawn of the commercial internet in the mid-1990s when I heard the popular technology guru Esther Dyson presciently say that “the price of information always trends toward zero.” That prediction was not good news for many book publishers like mine, but it has certainly come true in the… Read more »