It has been three years since some major gun massacre or another (unfortunately they all run together these days) prompted me to write about the real math behind the “Great Replacement” hypothesis that again has Tucker Carlson, plus a teen killer in Buffalo, New York, and other Fox News hosts in a tizzy. It is time to revisit. In short,… Read more »
My pre-retirement career went back and forth about three times between teaching and educational publishing, the latter as an editor, a managing editor, and a technology director for a publisher with imprints both in the U.S. and Great Britain. After over 30 years combined in those related fields and I am still no expert on this professional concept called pedagogy,… Read more »
The recent controversy over a leaked Supreme Court opinion perhaps overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision highlights how even Supreme Court justices, when blinded by sectarian religious fervor, can get Ethics 101 wrong. In a pluralistic society, issues of public morality may overlap with issues of legal practice, but only in places like Taliban-controlled Afghanistan do judges make… Read more »
Many of the most fascinating advances in DNA research have been in the extraction of readable genetic material from ever older biological sources. When those sources are ancient humans, the analysis of DNA fragments takes us back to our very origins as a species, analogous to the Hubble Telescope peering back through time to the beginnings of the universe. But… Read more »
I have intentionally been listening to, and reading comments from, ordinary Russians regarding their view of the “special operation” being conducted by their military into Ukraine. The similarities of their arguments to positions being amplified daily in right-wing American media are troubling. The similar threads I pull out are: Paranoia Conspiracy-thinking, and Reinforcement by religious leaders Of these, #1 may… Read more »
The confirmation hearings for the elevation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court highlighted for me the fight-to-the-death of two types of political power currently jousting both in Washington and Ukraine. In math terms, I describe democracy as a linear function, but autocracy is an exponential “power law.” In democracy, you need to add up millions of equal “integer”… Read more »
Will Russian President Vladimir Putin use a first-strike tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine if he cannot succeed there by conventional means? What are the odds? So, it turns out that “the odds” are likely irrelevant in this type of conjecture. The Pentagon instead is more likely at this moment exploring many variations of a mathematical model with the ironic name… Read more »
In a prior post I noted one major obstacle to cryptocurrencies being widely accepted as a “medium of exchange,” which is a key characteristic of “money.” The “price” of most cryptocurrencies relative to the U.S. dollar continues to fluctuate more widely on a daily and weekly basis that most traditional “risky” investments. This is a problem handled for millennia by… Read more »
I do not like bullies. Not one bit. The outside owners of a book and software publisher that employed me for many years would send in a new president every three years or so as part of an executive development strategy for their publishing empire. First year to get settled, second year for changes, third year either up or out…. Read more »
Take it from a retired accounting professor that utility pricing is ALWAYS much more about politics than it is about accounting. It has long been that way for home versus business customers, and the addition of rooftop solar, which Florida legislators are literally trying to kneecap right now, adds a messy third axis to the politics. Let’s try to explain… Read more »