chaircrusher: if you don't know what the fuck you're doing, don't bother voting.
optic: someone had a big rant yesterday about people who dont vote. i was tempted to point out what a waste of time voting is and suggest she give money instead, by why get into it
optic: giving money is the new voting imho
rich: voting matters in local politics
rich: imho
rich: and in tight races
optic: sure, the smaller the pool of voters the more likely your vote will count
optic: but even in a local race thats tight the probability that your 1 vote will make a difference is miniscule
optic: if you can magnify your vote by convincing others or getting them to turn out, a bit more. or magnify it by donating money for ads and gotv
optic: but 1 vote is pretty unlikely to matter
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so it turns out, after some googling, that I have an erdos number of 4 (erdos - hoffman - karp - etzioni - me). but having never been in a movie, I don't have a finite bacon number or, therefore, a finite erdos-bacon number. much to my admiration, however, both natalie portman and danica mckellar (along with a handful of nerdy scientists and bertrand russell) have finite erdos-bacon numbers. that's something you can admire.

Nerd dilemma: I'm proud of this chart and want to show it off, but I don't want to actually tell you what I'm charting and thus reveal exactly how much of a nerd I am. Anyway, I've been fiddling with it off and on for a while, trying to convey not only the relationship between X and Y, but how the ratio Y/X compares with certain reference points (the yellow ones, whose Y/X ratio is represented by the solid lines). A higher ratio (toward the upper left) is better. The upper and lower vertical bars on each point also represent two additional pieces of data about each point (the upper should be small, the lower large). whew. at least now I can see at a glance which points I should pay attention to and which I can safely ignore.


[click for larger]

and no, Excel's 3-d bubble chart thing didn't work very well.

As mentioned earlier, I'm currently reading David Foster Wallace's book about infinity. It's an interesting book -- fairly dense math and intellectual history, all in DFW's very distinct voice, what with the footnotes, idiosyncratic abbreviations, authorial asides, and constant flirting with the line between reader amusement and reader annoyance that is his stock in trade. Anyway, I'll probably have more to say about it later, but for the moment just wanted to share one inverted nugget. One of his footnotes reads, in classic Wallaceian style, "There's really nothing to be done about the preceding sentence except apologize." The sentence in question reads (including the ellipsisized lead-in): "But neither Fourier nor anyone else in the early 1820s can prove that Fourier Integrals works for all f(x)'s, in part because there's still deep confusion in math about how to define the integral ... but anyway, the reason we're even mentioning the F.I. problem is that A.-L. Cauchy's work on it leads him to most of the quote-unquote rigorizing of analysis that he gets credit for, some of which rigor involves defining the integral as 'the limit of a sum' but most (= most of the rigor) concerns the convergence problems mentioned in (b) and its little Q.F.I. in the --Differential Equations part of E.G.II, specifically as those problems pertain to Fourier Series." right. Dying to read it now?