Mathematical Formulae Sometimes in Mathematics exams, we were allowed to carry formula sheets. The idea was that being able to apply the right formulae and solving the problems was the important part, not the rote memorization. The problem, of course, was that unless you memorized the formulae, you would not be able to find the right one during the test. You couldn’t just brute force your way down the formula sheet; time, after all, was limited. ...
A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable. Otherwise, it becomes a claim of faith, and ceases to be scientific. When Einstein proposed the General Relativity in 1915, it made certain testable predictions. A 1919 solar eclipse presented a scenario in which the predictions could be tested. Observations were made, and the hypothesis passed the test. One should naturally be skeptical of hypotheses that are untestable, and thus unfalsifiable. However, unfalsifiability has certain flavors that are hard to dismiss. ...
The university serves, in no small part, as a mating market, amidst a sea of bullshit subjects and bullshit research preparing students for bullshit careers. The forming of couples who go on to create families might be one of the few real offerings of academia. This was a job done by churches in the past, and done by them today in conservative circles. For liberal and non-religious types, the university serves this role. ...
ॐ अग्नये स्वाहा । इदं अग्नये । इदं न मम ॥ अग्निमीळे पुरोहितं यज्ञस्य देवमृत्विजम् । होतारं रत्नधातमम् ॥ अग्निः पूर्वेभिरृषिभिरीड्यो नूतनैरुत । स देवाँ एह वक्षति ॥ अग्निना रयिमश्नवत्पोषमेव दिवेदिवे । यशसं वीरवत्तमम् ॥ अग्ने यं यज्ञमध्वरं विश्वतः परिभूरसि । स इद्देवेषु गच्छति ॥ अग्निर्होता कविक्रतुः सत्यश्चित्रश्रवस्तमः । देवो देवेभिरा गमत् ॥ यदङ्ग दाशुषे त्वमग्ने भद्रं करिष्यसि । तवेत् तत् सत्यमङ्गिरः ॥ उप त्वाग्ने दिवेदिवे दोषावस्तर्धिया वयम् । नमो भरन्त एमसि ॥ राजन्तमध्वराणां गोपामृतस्य दीदिविम् । वर्धमानं स्वे दमे ॥ स नः पितेव सूनवेऽग्ने सूपायनो भव । सचस्वा नः स्वस्तये ॥ ॐ महाज्वालाय विद्महे अग्निमध्याय धीमहि । तन्नो अग्निः प्रचोदयात् ॥ x 11 ॐ अग्नये नमः ॥
Richard Cantillon (1680-1734), an Irish-French banker/merchant predating Adam Smith, is arguably the founder of modern economics. The book he wrote shortly before his demise, Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, officially published in 1755, was an influential and highly citied document, before it was overshadowed by the retardation of economics that would follow in the form of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Cantillon rescued economic analysis from its traditional conflation with politics and ethics. In the words of Friedrich Hayek, “this gifted independent observer, enjoying an unsurpassed vantage point in the midst of the action, coordinated what he saw with the eyes of the born theoretician and was the first person who succeeded in enterating and presenting to us almost the entire field which we now call economics.” ...
This tutorial focuses on SQL usage for data analysis (rather than transaction processing). DuckDB is the engine primarily used, so some commands might not work with SQLite and vice versa. Commands largely drawn from https://www.dbvis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/SQL-Cheat-Sheet.pdf Datasets Palmer Penguins, Chinook, Elevation of Indian Cities. The raw datasets are located in ~/Datasets/Raw. Set 1: Loading and Exporting Loading Data cd to the Raw datasets folder. run duckdb chinook.sqlite. this opens a duckdb command line with chinook loaded. run describe; or show; to see the tables and data types. Alternatively, ...
Passages From The Wealth of Nations The following passages from Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations have received enormous attention over the centuries following their publication in 1776. “[A man] will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them … It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” “As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of. . .industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . .(B)y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” “Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.” These passages are seen as evidence of Adam Smith promoting laissez-faire capitalism. Note the introduction of the “invisible hand” meme in the second passage, one that has been propagated around without much regard for context. These famous quotes convey the idea that it is through the selfish pursuit of our own goals that the good of the economy results, and this is more desirable than a direct, motivated pursuit of social good. The anti-free market positions advocated by Adam Smith, therefore, come as a shock to those who imagine him as the paragon of the laissez-faire paradigm. ...
There are two opposing thoughts regarding money I am considering at the moment. On the one hand, we have the idea that to the extent it serves a nonmonetary purpose, it is an inferior form of money. For example, gold, which is a form of money, also has various other use cases as jewelry, industrial raw material, etc. These use cases compete against the monetary use case. Until Bitcoin, there was no contender for pure money. That Bitcoin lacked any other utility was hurled as a criticism. The idea was something like this: gold has various other utilities (and corresponding demand), so its price is unlikely to fall below a certain level; Bitcoin, on the other hand, due to absence of such alternate uses, would see its price collapse to zero some day. ...
Pretty much everything I have to say on the topic is encapsulated in the title. Whether it be through Quarto + .qmd or Emacs + org-mode, the overhead is significant. Many of your experiments do not need to persist. Also, when programming, the ratio of code to the “literate components” is high enough to justify the exclusive use of comments for such components. Learn using scripts, running those through your preferred IDE. Only at the point of publishing (and possibly subsequent teaching through live demonstrations) should you consider using computational notebooks. By the time you use such a notebook, you must already have a good idea of the outcome.
The Cost of Decentralization I have been a happy Artix Linux user for several months. I had got the setup to be exactly as I liked. The choice of the distribution was prompted by a desire to contribute to the cause of keeping Linux decentralized. (See videos form Youtux.) Artix helped me retain the use of the package ecosystem of Arch while using an init system that isn’t systemd (something monolythic and centralizing) (I was using OpenRC), and without being tied to the wayland display server (which, again, seems to be pushed upon us by corporate forces in Linux (I was using XLibre, although, sadly, Artix just reverted to X.org). It needed more configuration than some of the other distros I have used. But for a one-time setup, I did not mind that. ...