A lady doesn’t discuss her age or her budget

Paula Wagner (1946– ), producer
on finance in the entertainment industry
in Paula Wagner Turns to Producing on Broadway in The New York Times on 11/4/12

 

David Quammen on Books

David Quammen (1948 ― ), science, nature, and travel writer
in The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

 

Physicists Hunt For The Big Bang’s Triangles | Quanta Magazine

Bookmarked Physicists Hunt for the Big Bang'€™s Triangles (Quanta Magazine )

“The notion that counting more shapes in the sky will reveal more details of the Big Bang is implied in a central principle of quantum physics known as “unitarity.” Unitarity dictates that the probabilities of all possible quantum states of the universe must add up to one, now and forever; thus, information, which is stored in quantum states, can never be lost — only scrambled. This means that all information about the birth of the cosmos remains encoded in its present state, and the more precisely cosmologists know the latter, the more they can learn about the former.”

Two Types of Hipsters

César A. Hidalgo (1979- ), Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and the director of the Macro Connections group at The MIT Media Lab
in Cesar Hidalgo on economic complexity: Why information grows | Economist.com on June 15, 2015

 

How to Steal a Million

Msr. Charles Bonnet, painter, art forger, conman
counter-scolding his daughter who has called him a fraud
in How to Steal a Million (1966)

 

Then, just a bit later in the film:

Msr. Charles Bonnet, painter, art forger, conman
ironically speaking to his daughter after forging and selling several major artworks
in How to Steal a Million (1966)

 

On Being a Secretary

Daniel N. Robinson, (March 9, 1937-  ), philosopher
in Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition, Lecture 28 “Hobbes and the Social Machine”

 

Great Ideas of Philosophy

Sir Francis Bacon smacks down Republican party front-runners

A

s I watch the unfolding of the 2016 presidential election, I find myself wondering more and more where I can register to vote for the “scientific party?”

The electorate seems to want to focus primarily (only?) on the Judeo-Christian principles upon which our country was founded. Though I have no qualm with these principles, they seem to miss the firmer and primary base upon which the country was built at the dawn of the Age of Reason.

Sir Francis Bacon, (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist and author
in the preface to Novum Organum (1620)

 

Pourbus' Francis Bacon

Read the original 1620 edition in Latin

Can computers help us read the mind of nature? by Paul Davies | The Guardian

For too long, scientists focused on what we can see. Now they are at last starting to decode life’s software.

“A soup of chemicals may spontaneously form a reaction network, but what does it take for such a molecular muddle to begin coherently organising information flow and storage? Rather than looking to biology or chemistry, we can perhaps dream that advances in the mathematics of information theory hold the key.”

Paul Davies, physicist, writer, and broadcaster
in Can computers help us read the mind of nature? in The Guardian

 

 ‘When we look at a plant or an animal we see the physical forms, not the swirling patterns of instructions inside them.’ Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA
‘When we look at a plant or an animal we see the physical forms, not the swirling patterns of instructions inside them.’ Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

I’m a sucker for references to math and pastry

W

hat can I say? I’m a sucker for references to math and pastry.

 

“One of the wonderful features of math is that, like with pastry, it can use quite simple ingredients to make very complicated situations. This can also make it rather offputting, like making puff pastry. Actually, I don’t think puff pastry is that difficult if you follow the instructions carefully. But even if you don’t want to try doing it yourself, perhaps you can still enjoy the fact that such simple ingredients can turn into delicious puff pastry. Math is about understanding processes and not just eating end results.”

Eugenia Cheng, mathematician, amateur chef
in How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics (Basic Books, 2015)
 

How to Bake Pi
How to Bake Pi

Game Theory’s Tit-for-Tat is Just a Mathematically Complete Version of Religion’s Golden Rule

Francis Fukuyama (1952- ), American political scientist, political economist, author
in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

 

Don’t get the impression that I actually read more than a few pages

Michael Harris, number theorist,
on why his book Mathematics Without Apologies has so many footnotes.

 

Mathematics Without Apologies by Michael Harris
Mathematics Without Apologies by Michael Harris

 

An Asterisk Does Not Denote a Hard Problem†

Richard Millman & George Parker in Elements of Differential Geometry

 

Dagger Graveyard by Natalie Slack
Dagger Graveyard by Natalie Slack

 

Nothing Would be More Devastating than Reduced Access to a Technical Library

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, flâneur
in the Financial Times in response to the question:
“If you lost everything tomorrow, what would you do?”

 


 

Algebra is Like Pastry: Wonderful!

Pierre Anton Grillet (1941 – ), algebraist
in preface to Abstract Algebra, Second Edition (Springer, 2007)

 

Annotated The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas TalebNassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House)
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.