strangestchild

You're simulating a full game of poker. Once a player has been given card 'i', you have to ensure that card 'i' isn't drawn again during the game. You could maintain a set containing all cards that have already been drawn, and re-select your random number if you draw a duplicate, but that's going to get awfully laggy once large numbers of cards have been drawn.

Homeopathic obesity – what an intriguing idea...

There are recruitment agencies which only take individuals with autism on their books, and try to find them roles which suit their particular skills profile. A quick Google should turn up some useful results, but be careful to not be taken for a ride.

Tech is a good industry for those on the autistic spectrum, as it values protracted periods of focus and analysis; but as with any job, communication is really important – perhaps especially so in tech. It will be important to find an employer who is prepared to take him on as an individual and work with him to minimise his difficulties and build on his strengths.

Horses for courses. Whilst I'm skeptical that we're at the stage where mechanical proof-checking is viable, such a technique would be immensely valuable.

On the other hand, it is of course true that if the proof itself is mechanistic, most mathematicians would feel that a lot of the important essence of the result had been lost.

Voevodsky's work is apparently in the former, and the blog author conflates this with the latter in order to (wrongly) criticise it.

What a ridiculous article.

The statement "70% [are] on prescription drugs" is devoid of moral content. If the title had been "70% are on prescription drugs unnecessarily" or indeed "70% misuse prescription drugs", we would have had a story. As it is, the implicit title "70% are currently being treated for medical conditions, using drugs that have passed several rounds of peer-reviewed trial" is a testament to our healthcare system.

I'm not at all surprised by the statement that prescription opioid usage 'outstrips' heroin usage by a factor of 14. I'm glad these people are getting pain relief. Indeed, if the number of heroin users was anywhere near the number of people with badly broken bones or chronic pain, I would be alarmed.

This article very much prompts the question "What alternative would you suggest?"

Scientists definitely do have a test for the so-called IQ, and it's called the IQ test – but 'Intelligence Quotient' and intelligence are not synonymous. One need only read Mensa magazine to realise that IQ does not constitute intelligence in a meaningful sense.

It's clear that brains vary, of course, but 'intelligence' is too broad a term to say, quantitatively, to what degree a person possesses it. The term encompasses:

- The ability to acquire new knowledge quickly, or to learn difficult things at all.

- The ability to, given time, make nontrivial deductions from given data.

- The ability to make rapid deductions in short periods of time about given data.

- The ability to generate multiple unrelated solutions to a problem.

- A high level of verbal proficiency.

We mean all these things to different degrees at different times when we use the term; and although these are not orthogonal concepts, they clearly do not exist in a one-dimensional space.

Certainly if IQ is taken to mean 'the raw, unchanging potential of a mind', the Flynn effect is inexplicable given that the timescales involved are far too small for our neurobiology to have adapted evolutionarily. Given that it means very little other than 'the ability to pass IQ tests', the Flynn effect is perhaps not surprising at all.

What I mean is that since Goodstein's theorem is provably true for the naturals, but is not a consequence of the Peano axioms, then the definition of the naturals used to demonstrate Goodstein's must be strictly stronger than the Peano axioms themselves. I was wondering what this definition might be.

I'm familiar with the distinction between formalism and Platonism, although I still haven't made my mind up yet :)

How then are the naturals defined? By the Von Neumann construction? (0, {0}, {0, {0}}, ...)

Agree - especially given that this was funded by the Campaign for Real Beauty, and it wouldn't exactly have supported Dove's ad campaign if the pictures looked the same or the sketch was reversed.

I know, I was being facetious. I just like the thought of the campaign finishing and runn1ng posting each of his sponsors a $0.99 protractor.

I use a similar workflow with SVN to great effect. I have never had a sync issue - whether this is luck or that the repository structure is more robust in this setting than Git's, I don't know. I would strongly recommend against using this as a collaboration tool, though!

Looks good - I've signed up :)

I would say though that I think your articles and lectures could do with a bit more organisation. In both cases, the user would benefit from posts having tags denoting subject content, and from a search facility so that I can find things that specifically interest me. If you have five hundred videos about mathematics, finding one on Analytic Topology, say, by scrolling through them would be a bit painful. I also think it would be good if the lectures had some way of tying subsequent videos together - it seems a tiny bit messy to have 'Cosmology - Lecture 1', and 'Cosmology - Lecture 2' as separate entries. I'm also not certain that you want to limit lectures to being videos. A well-written explanation of a broad subject is sometimes better than a video that I can't search or skim through - and I think it serves a different purpose from the articles. It's also easier for your community to add written content than videos.

Hope that was useful to you - but obviously take it all with a pinch of salt. You know your strategy better than some guy off the internet who's only spent ten minutes on your site :)

Perhaps your experience has been different from mine, maybe because I'm based in the UK - I know that US education tends to be more generalised. Among my friends with or pursuing postgraduate degrees in pure mathematical disciplines, none have any particular knowledge of stats above the undergraduate level. As a master's student, I wouldn't imagine I count for much - but what I know about statistics could be written on the back of an envelope. It's something I've been meaning to remedy for a while now. It's possible that tenured professors have a wider breadth of knowledge than the average PhD - and I admit that I wouldn't know if that were the case.

As for the depth of statistics as a field, and its reliance on other disciplines - I agree entirely. I think pure mathematicians are far more likely to be ignorant of statistics than statistical mathematicians are of, for example, analysis.

That seems a pretty strong generalisation. A doctorate in Model Theory doesn't give you the authority to talk stats.