5 August 2008, 12:12 UTCBicycle Helmets & Pedestrian Casualties
9 July 2008, 14:58 UTCReston to GMU Bike Route
Bike routes from Reston to GMU. About 22km (14mi). Embedded maps from MapMyRide and Bikely.
1 July 2008, 21:45 UTCCorrelation & Causation
Brilliant parody by Gregory Hill. From Monash!!
18 June 2008, 20:38 UTCThe Crowd Within
According to Vul & Pashler, the "Wisdom of Crowds" happens within a single person. (Updated June 30, 2007 -- my guess wasn't as good as it first appeared.)
16 June 2008, 19:40 UTCAudiophiles, Significance Tests, Greenspun's Tenth Rule
A great little post on Decision Science News.
10 June 2008, 13:27 UTCDemocracy
Every vote is nothing but a piece of nonviolence.
Taylor Branch, NYT 6 April 2008
13 March 2008, 0:24 UTCKrugman on Interstellar Trade
Krugman 1978. The Theory of Interstellar Trade
This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned wtih the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.
6 March 2008, 1:33 UTCScience & Magic
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man:
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike, the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique;
29 November 2007, 1:58 UTCFixed Links
Thanks to a MenTaLguY for pointing out that links to my papers were broken. Fixed.
10 October 2007, 16:41 UTCAviation collision experiments
I bet this experiment had an interesting ethics board review.
A research project conducted by John W. Andrews of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory involved 24 general aviation pilots flying a Beech Bonanza on a VFR cross country. The pilots were not aware that their aircraft would be intercepted several times by a Cessna 421 flying a near-collision course.
As the full article notes, the physiology of see-and-avoid at jet speeds is sobering.
22 September 2007, 14:52 UTCPay for free software