What is the difference between a religious denomination and a political party?

Both start from a certain ideology (political or religious) - a world view which defines "Right" and "Wrong", and then proceed to delineate an appropriate behavior.

One might think that religions are grandfathered - they existed before the democratic process while ( Read more... )

Multi-person game theory introduces a concept of Shapley value which quantifies that contribution of each person having several votes to the outcome of an election.
It is equal to the probability that the election will be decided by this person.
Examples:

1. everyone of the n voters has the same number of votes. then everyone has the same Shapley ( Read more... )

Intellectual growth occurs when a paradigm shift is forced by a cognitive dissonance ( Read more... )

The Gresham's law has two non-monetary examples:

1. Anti-Jewish bias at the best Soviet universities admissions led to filtering out the best non-Jewish students too (according to Gelfand)
2. Soviet purges hit the better people more (e.g., Shtern vs. Zhukov and Korolev vs. Kostikov)

Ах, какую страну мы потеряли! Вы хоть раз предъявляли дневник комсомольскому патрулю у входа в кинотеатр...? Вспомним, как это было ( Read more... )

Good morning children!
My name is Bill Gates, and I am your new math teacher.
Today we are counting to 10:
1, 2, 3, 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10.

A human cell contains ~10^14 atoms; a human body contains ~ 10^14 (human) cells (plus ~10^15 symbiotic bacteria in the intestines ( Read more... )

Диалог с преподавателем истории КПСС:
- Иван Иванович, а почему Маркса конспектировать проще, чем Ленина?
- Голубчик, но ведь Маркса переводили...

То ли в гебне идиоты, то ли время уже было вегетарианское...

30+k people die on the American roads every year.
Most accidents happen when one of more cars change lanes.
Why do they change lanes? To pass each other!
10 years ago I was in Italy (famous for its crazy drivers but having 30% smaller traffic deaths than the US) and I was stunned by the stress-free "autostrada" driving. There are just two lanes, ( Read more... )

Moderate Drinking and Partying increases the number of possible outcomes (e.g., the set of places where you will find yourself in the morning) and evens out their probabilities, thus increasing the entropy ( Read more... )