Posts tagged as:

logic

Fortune’s Formula

Monday, April 2, 2007

I am not even 100 pages into my latest William Poundstone book and I already know it’s going to be a favorite. Fortune’s Formula, The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street is the fourth Poundstone book I’ve read. The man is a genius of a writer. Labyrinths of Reason and Prisoner’s Dilemma have been in my personal top ten list for years and years and I urge people to read them every chance I get.

I have long been fascinated by the idea of “meaning” in communication. I’ve held the belief for as long as I can remember that the responsibility for communicating meaning is always placed on the person creating the message. If I am trying to tell you something, it is never your fault if you don’t understand. I just read a passage in Fortune’s Formula that really rocked me. It’s so good that I can’t help but quote it here:

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In Theory

Monday, August 13, 2001

You really should read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by the late, great Douglas Adams. There’s a bit in there about Schrödinger’s cat that started me tumbling down a long road (many, many years ago) of trying to learn everything I could about physics, metaphysics, philosophy, blah blah blah. (Try to find a copy of William Poundstone’s Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge, too. It will blow your mind.) The folks at Mad Science Laboratories have created a Schrödenger’s Cat Web Cam that is hysterical. I love the disclaimer:

DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS EXPERIMENT YOURSELF AT HOME. WE ARE TRAINED SCIENTISTS! YOUR CAT MAY THEORETICALLY DIE!

link via BrainLog

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Philosophy Exam

Monday, March 26, 2001

This is a take-home exam from a Philosophy class I took in my 2nd year of college…
October 26, 1992
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Game Theory

Tuesday, January 9, 2001

The bonus question @ sylloge.com is: “Does anyone know if there are an infinite number of chess games? If not, what the limit is?” The answers are “no” and “I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, but I suspect it’s a great big number”. This is a topic tackled in Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone, an excellent treatise on game theory and the research of John Von Neumann.

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