Joseph Hertzlinger @jhertzli@mathstodon.xyz

I just realized Trump's closest fictional analogue is Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas."

#PoliticalBulshytt

It's Earth Day.

When will we see Mars Day?

Google Shopping is blocking searches for "epistolary novels."

Is Mathstodon cut off from the Federation?

After reading entirely too many characterizations of a controversial business or political strategy as multi-dimensional chess, I started wondering what Hilbert-space chess might be like.

It's probably easier to play than the Banach--Mazur game.

It's 2018 ... Aren't anti-agathics supposed to be invented this year?

The repeal of net neutrality has just returned us to the dark days of 2014.

Shorter version: "If the Right People do it, it's okay."
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-easiest-way-to-dismiss-good-science-demand-sound-science/

If the people of the "alt-right" have any sense of consistency, they will now claim that San Franciscans are genetically superior.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/opinion/lost-einsteins-innovation-inequality.html

The "efficiency gap" makes sense only if you think 3--1 majorities are ideal.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-supreme-court-is-allergic-to-math/

4/4) Hmmmm.... This might explains why academic types take overpopulation so seriously. They're in one of the few professions where it actually holds.

3/4) This might apply in the other direction. A large population might need a far smaller proportion of scholars. Present day scholar recruitment (including the idea that the most prestigious job is that of training more scholars) might have been more appropriate to smaller populations.

In other words, PhDs will have to get "real" jobs.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/apr/21/phd-cant-find-academic-job-university

2/4) This is needed in order to pass on an intellectual tradition. Without the tradition, any books that they have will not be understood. (ObSF: "Earth Abides" by George Stewart, in which in the aftermath of a population-annihilating disease, there is only one youngster in the San Francisco area with academic inclinations and abilities and when he dies, the plan to revive civilization has to be cancelled. I'd like to know what's going on in New York, where there might be a half dozen scholars.)

1/4) Are population size and the higher education bubble related?

In "Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience," Kenneth Wachter wrote:

"Small interstellar bands, below 500 persons, would certainly need to cultivate values that would recruit larger proportions of the young into learned studies than any past societies that come readily to mind."