Archive for September, 2008
The RAND Corporation
September 15th, 2008
Depending on who you ask, the RAND Corporation is either a benevolent non-profit seeking to solve all of society’s ills or a shadowy military-industrial-funded think-tank. Either way, in its years of public policy research it’s produced some really fascinating reports, a lot of which can be downloaded for free on their site. This includes the game-theory classic The Compleat Strategyst, Habitable Planets for Man, and the charmingly dated Towards an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail (1985).
Some pretty darn interesting people have worked at RAND in the past, including the economist Ken Arrow, game theorist Lloyd Shapley, philosopher/historian/sometime-neocon Francis Fukuyama, and of course the mathematician John Nash.
My Antipodal Point
September 11th, 2008
When Harry Schwartz was a young lad, he used to wonder where you would go if you drilled a hole directly through the Earth and fell in. The answer is the Indian Ocean.*
In geography (and geometry) the antipodal point of a point on a sphere is the point opposite it, such that a line drawn through both points passes through the center of the sphere.
Assuming you live outside of Pennsylvania (in which case you, too, are opposite Perth), you can find your own antipodal point using this nifty tool.
*N.B.: The answer is actually damped oscillation, but that’s not nearly so whimsical.