A revised edition of the classic Ernest Nagel and James Newman explanation of Gödel’s insights, and the book that inspired Douglas Hofstadter’s immensely popular Gödel Escher Bach. From Hofstader’s Forward: We now understand that the human mind is fundamentally not…
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Marvel-ous stories
Intellectual property is at the root of many of today’s stories. Maybe this explains why the second season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is looking so mutant-like. But killing off Wolverine?! Brinksmanship, perhaps. Interesting comparisons to EMI and the Beatles (and…
NECCO stands for …
New England Confectionary Co. Here are two stories about the storied little valentine candy. The first is audio, from Marketplace. On Valentine’s, saying “#LOVE” with candy hearts The second is a nice little stop-action video, from OZY. Don’t mess with…
YouTube gems
From last week’s NYTimes WordPlay blog, two fascinating performances. One live. One semi-live, semi-manufactured. The Beatles in-studio, All You Need Is Love James Brown, It’s a Man’s World
Transmission of financial information across the centuries
Our study serves as the modern counterpart to Koudijs’s (2014a) study on insider trading on eighteenth-century stock exchanges — except, in our case, week-long sailing voyages have been replaced by modern electronic transmission as the conduit for information flows. “How…
A code situation
The two articles aren’t hugely related, except that they share the idea of folks finding problems in the code. Either disabling or vulnabilerizing. Johnny Mnemonic’s Secret Door (Planet Money) Those Who Say Code Doesn’t Matter (blog@ACM) The latter link is…
Enter efficiency wages
The first paragraph says it all: AETNA wants to attract and retain workers. That’s what efficiency wages are all about. Aetna to Boost Incomes of Lowest-Paid Workers (WSJ) There is also more to say about efficiency wages. The theory of efficiency…
MLK pairing
After listening to this story Students Describe What King’s Legacy Means To Them (NPR), go ahead and have fun spending some time with this “playable post” The Parable of the Polygons (Nicky Case). It’s Schelling’s model, redone in a very attractive…
Corporate strategies that don’t fit the times
“Appeasing, fleeing, and fleecing are precisely the wrong strategies” 3 Terrible Strategies for Companies Seeking Growth (HBR BLOG) Strategy is about building an institution that can compete. Competitiveness isn’t merely short-term profitability. It is about all the things that underlie…
Maps, rivers, and humans
Louisiana Loses Its Boot tells so much about the evolution of bodies of water, maps, and the human remaking of our planet. Edited with BlogPad Pro