Ebay is changing the Matrix again. The main thing is paying sellers directly to bank accounts and avoiding Paypal (and Paypal fees). But they are raising the 'Final Value Fee', i.e. their take of your sale price(*). And despite claims of lower fees for all, they don't provide a side by side comparison. Which seems suspicious, so allow me.

I googled ( Read more... )

 The Puzzle Universe purports to be a History of Mathematics in 315 puzzles. While that's not wholly inaccurate, it's more of an exercise in frustration. It is a beautiful book with bold, colorful illustrations. Alas, one or two of them are inaccurate and ruin the puzzles. A number of the puzzles suffer from setups that are not clear and ( Read more... )

A biography of Ada Lovelace, aka Countess Lovelace, aka the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, aka the eponym of the Ada programming language, aka the Bride of Science, aka the Enchantress of Numbers.

The book spends almost half of its length discussing Ada's parents, Lord Byron and Lady Byron (aka Annabella Milbankee, Baroness Wentworth). This is ( Read more... )

The House tax bill would lower the cutoff from $1 million to $500,000. That is, people with home loans bigger than $500K would not be able to deduct the interest from their income.

Doesn't really affect me. Or does it? Duh duh DAH.

The change doesn't affect current loans, so it doesn't affect me.

My loan isn't over $500,000, so it doesn't affect me.

( Read more... )

Tuesday

OldWiseGuy's link: whites are almost TWICE as likely to be killed by police officers.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, between 1999 and 2011, 2,151 whites died as a result of being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks.

essentialsaltes: The bolded text is a lie. An obvious lie. A childish lie. Only the innumerate would ( Read more... )

It came from the Christian Forums...

Moron: "a single volcanic eruption releases more polution than all of mankind has throughout our history combined"

me: False (provides evidence)

Moron: The problem is that a lot of the data surrounding human CO2 output has been based on lies and misinformation over the years, so there's really no way to affirm they ( Read more... )

Why Violence Has Declined takes a long, long, too-long look at rates of violence over the past umpty-thousand years from our hunter-gatherer forebears to today. Pinker has marshalled a shitload of facts and statistics, and though there may be some niggling details here and there, on the whole, he's pretty convincing that rates of murder, war, and ( Read more... )

Plywood sheets come in different thicknesses. Virtually all of them are fractions of the form (odd #)/32 inches. I saw a few 3/8 inch, but the rest were 7/32, 11/32, 15/32, 17/32, 19/32, 23/32... It was crazy.

Swann's auction catalog of Art, Press, & Illustrated books has some pretty unique things.

A curious edition of Flatland, published by the Arion Press, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury. It's printed on 56 accordion folded pages (so you can lay out the whole text... flat) and housed in an aluminum case.


( Read more... )

I always associated the New Math (not the new new Math of today) with oddball things like matrices, different bases, and an emphasis on abstract relations like commutativity. But apparently another new-ish thing of the New Math was 'borrowing' in subtraction. Although the idea of borrowing is centuries old, apparently many older Americans were ( Read more... )