Salon.com > math

Reddit launches original Web series

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:23:00 +0000

When most people think of Reddit, they imagine a trove of user-generated content and mishmash of links, the birthplace of new Internet memes and the door to the seedy underbelly of the Internet. Reddit is and always will be all of these things, but now it is one more: the creator of an educational Web series.

The latest organization to join media companies like Amazon and Netflix in producing original video content, the site's first series takes discussions from its "Explain Like I'm Five" subreddit to explain in-depth concepts in an easily digestible format.

From THR:

The "Explain Like I'm Five" subreddit, which the company says gets an estimated 4 million page-views monthly, was chosen because its discussion concept seemed fit for a video series.

The series features actors Michael Kayne and Langan Kingsley explaining broad topics to children in a classroom. The series covers diverse subject matter: "The Crisis in Syria," "Existentialism and Friedrich Nietzsche" and "The Volatility of the Stock Market" are the titles of the three episodes.

The ELIF series is produced by Jared Neumark, the founder of Landline TV and former co-director of content at College Humor. Each clip ends with a message pointing viewers to DonorsChoose.org, a online charity that helps provide teachers with classroom resources.

Do Republicans comprehend what sequestration is?

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:22:00 +0000

We all know sequestration is super boring and no one is paying attention to it, but our brave newspaper columnists have to press on and write about it nonetheless, so maybe we should forgive Peggy Noonan for being a little confused about the package of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts that will go into effect at midnight tonight.

In her Wall Street Journal column today, which thankfully lacks any attempts to read John Boehner's “vibrations,” Noonan ruminates at length about whom the American people will blame for the pain the sequester will inflict:

Everyone has been wondering how the public will react when the sequester kicks in. The American people are in the position of hostages who'll have to decide who the hostage-taker is. People will get mad at either the president or the Republicans in Congress. That anger will force one side to rethink or back down. Or maybe the public will get mad at both. [...] If the sequester brings chaos and discomfort, it's certainly possible the Republicans will be blamed. But it's just as possible President Obama will be.

David Foster Wallace, mathematician

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 23:29:00 +0000

God has particular languages, and one of them is music and one of them is mathematics.

— David Foster Wallace, The Boston Globe, 2003

TO THE EXTENT THAT HE WAS AT HOME anywhere, David Foster Wallace was at home in the world of math. As an undergraduate, he studied modal logic; Everything and More, his book on infinity, explained Georg Cantor’s work on set theory to a general audience, and Infinite Jest includes a two-page footnote that uses the Mean Value Theorem to determine the distribution of megatonnage among players in a nuclear fallout game.

But Wallace didn’t just talk about math. He structured his work with it. In a 1996 Bookworm interview with Michael Silverblatt, Wallace explained that he modeled Infinite Jest after a Sierpinski Gasket, a type of fractal in which a triangle is infinitely subdivided into smaller triangles using the midpoint of its borders. Pressed by Silverblatt on why he chose such a formation, Wallace elaborated: “Its chaos is more on the surface; its bones are its beauty.”

Hey, hacks: Nate Silver’s not taking your job

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 16:00:00 +0000

In terms of issues dividing the nation as we approach the long-overdue end of this endless campaign season, the raging War on Nate Silver is not as big a deal as, say, the war on poor people and minorities having their votes counted, or the fact that thousands of people on the Eastern seaboard have no power or, in far too many places, food. But it is one of the more entertaining diversions of the feverish week before Election Day. In short: Conservatives are outraged at Silver for "predicting" an Obama victory, and nonpartisan (but fiercely ideological) political press elites are all chuckling at his curious notion that fancy math can be used to determine what is most likely to happen in an election.

Nate Silver does not actually need his army of defenders. He is a wildly successful author and New York Times contributor with a huge audience, and he is smart and witty enough to fight his own battles. I also realize that any defense of Silver plays into the savvy politico notion that liberals are irrationally "clinging" to his projections because they are terrified of uncertainty and Mitt Romney's ineffable momentum.

Dumb tweet: The equation for pi

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:54:00 +0000

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