The USA is rare among democracies in electing a President by a formula different from one-person-one-vote.

One well-known inequity is that small states get more electoral votes per inhabitant. I think of this as a linear effect, which, all else equal, gives a Wyoming resident a 3.5 times better chance of determining the President than a Californian.

The other best-known inequity is the winner-takes-all system in most states, which means that a few swing states end up determining the winner. This is a vastly greater injustice, for it is exponential. Thanks to the laws of statistics, the chance that a Californian might determine the President is in a precise sense exponentially small because of the exp(-x^2) shape of the normal distribution. Likewise for a Wyomingite. This biggest problem of American democracy is thus a corollary of the Central Limit Theorem.

[22 September 2024]

Harvard University Health Services has sent us all a memo about “best practices for protecting yourself and the community”. Six of the ten bullet-point recommendations concern ticks and mosquitoes, including this one:

• Avoid outdoor activities from dusk to dawn.

So I’ve looked around on the web. It seems that mosquitoes kill 1 or 2 people per year on average in Massachusetts through Eastern Equine Encephalitis or West Nile Virus, and ticks perhaps a similar number through Powassan virus or Lyme disease. Meanwhile my rough estimates are that Massachusetts can expect around the following numbers of deaths this year from various other causes:

150 homicides
400 car accidents
400 Covid
600 suicides
700 flu
1000 falls
1000 other non-auto injuries
2000 opioid overdoses

Do I conclude that Harvard is foolish to tell us to stay indoors after dusk? To tell the truth I’m not sure what I conclude; but the numbers are striking.

[12 September 2024]

The last two notes commented on the flourishing of bureaucracy at the NSF and in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, so it seems only fair now to mention the latest from Harvard University. All of us faculty just received an email about the university’s policies and procedures (related to doxing, as it happens). It was signed by the President, the Provost, a Vice President, and fifteen Deans.

P.S. 10 Sept. Here’s another email. Another deanship has been created.

[5 September 2024]

The cashier at the Broadway Marketplace just now asked me for two forms of ID before he could sell me a bottle of wine. He needed proof I was over 21. We joked about this, and he explained that policing has become very strict lately and the store can get into trouble if they cut corners.

Having rigorously established my age, he gave me the 10% senior citizens discount.

[5 September 2024]

My father was one of the first four employees of the National Science Foundation when it was founded in 1950: Personal Assistant to the Director and Executive Secretary of the National Science Board. He remembered those happy days as a bunch of first-rate guys in an office in Washington trying to do the right thing for science and their country. I estimate he took home as his salary about 3% of NSF’s budget of $225,000.

75 years later, having moved to Harvard after decades in England, I have just registered with NSF as a potential investigator so that I can apply for grants. NSF’s budget last year was $9,877,000,000, and my proposal will ask for about 1/20,000 of that. My ID is 0000A0PB5, and Harvard’s is LN53LCFJFL45.

Among the many documents I must upload is my Mentoring Plan. I wish I could show my father NSF’s instructions for this, to be found in Chapter II, section D.2.i(i) of the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) (NSF 24-1), which begin as follows: “Pursuant to Section 7008(a) of the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (42 U.S.C. § 1862o(a)) Act,…”.

[14 August 2008]

I love random twists of history like the following. Is there a name for them?

Switzerland leads in luxury watches because in 1541, Calvin banned jewelry. The lawyers managed to argue that watches were about function, not decoration, and that’s how we got Rolex and Patek Philippe.

The British drink sherry and port because during the Napoleonic wars, their access to French claret was cut off. They turned to peripheral countries, whose grapes weren’t as good.

The USA relies on employer-funded health care because in 1942, Roosevelt imposed a wage freeze. Employers had to find a different way to compete for workers, and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since.

Sport utility vehicles dominate the world because in the late 1970s, the USA passed a law mandating miles-per-gallon averages for cars. Automakers figured out that by building bigger vehicles classed as trucks, they could get around the rules.

[28 May 2024]

Most talks I attend have too many slides. Typically the speaker ends up skipping the last ten pages, expressing surprise that their time has run out so quickly. Even senior professors are surprised, though they’ve been giving talks for decades. Today we had 67 pages of mathematics for a 35-minute talk. One wants to laugh, and scream.

What’s going on here? One factor must be that mathematicians, who are geeky people, aren’t good at putting themselves in the heads of the audience. In preparing for the event, they don’t focus much on communication. They focus on their wonderful mathematics, whose details are so captivating!

A more unholy factor is that optimizing communication is never the whole purpose of a presentation. Audiences must be impressed as well as enlightened. If the talk is an incomprehensible torrent, alas, that may impress.

Like talks, papers are also too long. The reasons are the same, minus the comedy. I still want to scream.

[15 May 2024]

Like phones with their autocorrect, we all make mistakes when typing. Not for the first time, I just typed “as American as applied pie”.

[13 April 2024]

I think it’s not too great an exaggeration to say that for centuries mathematicians and scientists conceived the world like this,

whereas now many mathematicians have moved to a view more like this,

What an own goal! Some separation is to be expected as disciplines have grown bigger and more specialized. But it has been a vicious circle. As mathematics and science have diverged, mathematicians have come to know less of science, further encouraging them to focus on (1) rigor and (2) generality at the expense of (3) solving problems. Yet solving problems is what inspired Archimedes, Newton, Euler, Laplace, Gauss,….

[2 April 2024]

Everybody in this coffee shop has a computer, but they don’t know what a rarity I am. I’m actually computing!

[17 March 2024]