From The New Yorker Now, imagine an animal that emerges every twelve years, like a cicada. According to the paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, in his essay “Of Bamboo, Cicadas, and the Economy of...
Have you seen Dragon Box? Once you do, you will be a believer in the power of technology for learning. I wasn’t before, I am now. My son is 6 and after about 4 hours of fun he can solve sim...
https://cheaptalk.org/2013/01/20/how-to-teach-a-six-year-old-algebra/
The last of Strogatz’ series blog entries on mathematics and it may be the best one: For the Hilbert Hotel doesn’t merely have hundreds of rooms — it has an infinite number of them. Whe...
https://cheaptalk.org/2012/11/08/this-is-how-to-explain-one-kind-of-infinity-to-your-kids/
My daughter was learning about prime numbers and she had an exercise to identify all the prime numbers less than 100. I made a little game out of it with her by offering her 10 cents for each n...
Its the same reason the lane going in the opposite direction is always flowing faster. This is a lovely article that works through the logic of conditional proportions. I really admire this kind ...
https://cheaptalk.org/2012/10/04/why-your-friends-have-more-friends-than-you/
Act as if you have log utility and with probability 1 your wealth will converge to infinity. Sergiu Hart presented this paper at Northwestern last week. Suppose you are going to be presented an...
https://cheaptalk.org/2012/05/01/how-to-run-your-hedge-fund/
Email is the superior form of communication as I have argued a few times before, but it can sure aggravate your self-control problems. I am here to help you with that. As you sit in your office w...
https://cheaptalk.org/2012/03/06/obsessively-checking-email-feel-free-to-profit-from-this-idea/
He was clearly going nowhere: (Mathematics) Not very good. He spends a good deal of time apparently in investigations in advanced mathematics to the neglect of his elementary work. A sound g...
Almost every kind of race works like this: we agree on a distance and we see who can complete that distance in the shortest time. But that is not the only way to test who is the fastest. Th...
From Presh Talwalker: In poker tournaments, everyone gets a fair shot at holding the dealer position as seats are assigned randomly. In home games, an attempt is also made to assign the dealer sp...