Until further notice, this blog is going into hibernation mode, as I have started blogging over at Wired Science! The new blog is called Social Dimension and is about how to quantify the anthropic part of our world. And lest you be concerned about the frequency of the posts, Social Dimension will have more frequent [...]
Author Archives: Samuel Arbesman
The Greatest Intersection
In Ithaca there exists the best intersection ever — where Penny Lane meets Lois Lane: It turns out that this is not the only Lois Lane. There are others, such as this one, in the suburbs of Detroit. My wife noted that we now need a Peter Parkway. Anyone aware of that street?
Posted in Maps 3 Comments
Bill Miller’s Mutual Fund Streak
With the recent announcement that Bill Miller will be stepping down from running Legg Mason Value Trust fund, a number of people have used this as an opportunity to re-examine his incredible fifteen year streak of beating the S&P 500. Running from 1991 to 2006, this record has never been matched. However, in recent years, [...]
Posted in Math 2 Comments
Mechanical Turk, Dynamic Networks, and Cooperation
In a fun paper recently published in PNAS, Dynamic social networks promote cooperation in experiments with humans, Dave Rand, Nicholas Christakis, and I explored how a dynamic social network affects cooperation. Scientists have been using the public goods game for a long time to understand people’s tendency to cooperate with others. Recently, research has explored [...]
Posted in Amazon, Science Leave a comment
America’s Age, Empires, and Mathematics
I had a piece in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe this weekend about understanding the nature of empires and civilizations, seen through the lens of mathematics, entitled How Long Will America Last? An impossible question, answered with math: With all the chatter about the rise of China, our possible economic collapse, and climate [...]
Mesofact: World Population will hit 7 Billion this Month
As many of you are probably aware, the estimated world population is set to hit 7 billion at the end of this month, according to the United Nations Population Fund. And of course, this milestone came relatively rapidly: According to demographers, the world’s population didn’t reach 1 billion until 1804, and it took 123 years [...]
Posted in Mesofact 3 Comments
The Nanny and Aural Sexual Selection
Sexual selection, like many evolutionary concepts, was first anticipated by Charles Darwin and has since been elaborated in great detail. It is a powerful concept, explaining everything from the unwieldy nature of the peacock to the changing curves of Playboy centerfolds over the years. But this is all selection at the visual level. Just as [...]
Posted in Evolution Leave a comment
A Drunken Moose and the Problem with Homonyms
An article on msnbc.com details how rescuers worked to free a drunken moose that was trapped in a tree in Sweden. Weird and slightly disturbing, but not as much as one of the sentences in the article: Johansson called the police, he told The Local, but while waiting for a response, he and neighbors began [...]
Posted in language Leave a comment
Norman Mailer’s Lego City of the Future
So, this is sort of crazy. Apparently, Norman Mailer built a giant city out of Legos, and it remained in his living room for decades: If you had to name one American, for instance, who clubbed together with a couple of friends in 1965 and spent more than three weeks building a futuristic seven-foot vertical [...]
Posted in City, Lego 2 Comments
Personalized Subways
In the September issue of Scientific American, the editors asked a number of people about an innovation that would make cities more livable. My answer? Personalized subways: Transportation innovation is one of the keys to creating a more livable city. And one innovation that has the potential to greatly impact life through transportation is personal [...]
Posted in City, Science Leave a comment