Poker
fromwww.scientificamerican.com
1 day agoHow a Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory
The problem of points illustrates how to fairly divide stakes based on current scores in a game of chance.
The street plan of the Valley is 'the street plan of America.' By this, he means that streets in cities across the U.S. offer rectilinear uniformity: 'broad, arrow-straight avenues, regularly spaced and perfectly parallel to one another, are met at fixed intervals by equally straight and parallel streets that intersect them at precise right angles.'
Spinoza was an heir to both Jewish and Christian culture-in Amsterdam he grew up in a Jewish community within a Protestant society-yet he distanced himself from both these religions. He did not want to be a member of a religious institution with strict, prescriptive codes of belonging and belief. He feared-quite rightly-that a [institutional religion would constrain philosophical freedom].
In antiquity, many opined about "the elements" in combination. Around 2500 years ago, Leucippus and Democritus founded the idea of atoms. Perhaps everything, they opined, was composed of indivisible building blocks. In the late 1700s, hydrogen and oxygen were discovered. Circa 1804, John Dalton revived atomism to explain chemical behavior. Then in 1869, Mendeleev developed the periodic table: organizing the atoms.
A mentor once told me that, when writing a research statement for a professorship, I had to start with the most ambitious pitch I could imagine - and then go ten times bigger. It's tricky enough to do this as a cosmologist, given that the topic of study is the entire Universe. But there is a quest that is more ambitious still: to find out 'what are we doing here?'
A drawn circle is at least something physical. You can see it, touch it, erase it. The skeptic can still say, "Circles are grounded in physical reality. Justice is different; it's just an idea in your head." So let's talk about the number two. Point to it. Not two apples, not two fingers, not a numeral on a page-that's just a symbol.
They escaped persecution in the form of violent antisemitism and came to Canada with next to nothing. They built their lives from the ground up and understood, through lived experience, what the normalization of cruelty did to the human spirit, how quickly people can be swayed by the opinions of the day, and how easily one could forfeit the human capacity to stop and truly think about what one is doing.
Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983-they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don't know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining. I think it's not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field's youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable.