great pictures

The nature of democracy

From Znet

The media therefore presents gossip not in spite of American democracy, but to enhance and preserve a certain conception of it: one that involves spectators, not participants; public ratification, not public decision making. It is antithetical to a participatory economy and the idea of self-governance, and displays a striking commitment to reactionary ideology, despite illusions of an independent press. The issue at hand is and will always be whether or not the media is free, but will remain unresolved as long as the media is responsible for the gossip that debases public life.

William E. Shaub is a violin performance major at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan and the editor of TheFBM.com.

 

How true. Yukie says that in Japan scandals are more about connections to unpopular groups or money scandals. At least that appears to have some political relevance...though it rarely does...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/sunday-review/hard-truths-about-disclosure.html?hp

To illustrate how few people actually read its terms and conditions disclosure, the online retailer Gamestation, on April Fools’ Day 2010, replaced the usual text with what it called an “immortal soul clause,” which read: “By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 anno Domini, you agree to grant us a non-transferable option to claim, for now and forever more, your immortal soul.” Eager to get on with their online purchase, 88 percent of customers clicked the box to sell their souls. (The 12 percent who opted out were rewarded with a cash credit for their diligence.)

factorial functionSSSSS

Abstract. The Gamma function of Euler often is thought as the only function which interpolates the factorial numbers n! = 1,2,6,24,.... This is far from being true. We will discuss four factorial functions
the Euler factorial function n!,
the Hadamard Gamma function H(n),
the logarithmic single inflected factorial function L(n),
the logarithmic single inflected hyper-factorial function L*(n).

We will show that these alternative factorial functions posses qualities which are missing from the the conventional factorial function but might be desirable in some context.

how big of a mammal are we operating at?

rest state 100 watts

as a social animal...15,000

more than biggest mammal blue whale

A castle without a dragon is worse than no castle at all.

legos and boys

The idea of creative play as conducive to learning, or even formal education, is an article of faith at Lego that goes back to its founder, who defended his decision to become a toymaker during the Great Depression by pointing out that all animals use play to develop their brains. In Japan, however, Lego found that study and play were more clearly delineated. Few Japanese parents bought Lego, as they do in Germany or the U.S., because they were “toys with vitamins in them,” as Lego senior director Søren Holm only half-jokingly puts it.

American boys, meanwhile, turned out to be the least free of any group Lego tracked. British and German boys are far more likely to play unsupervised in yards and wooded areas and even have greater latitude in decorating their bedroom walls. Among slightly older American boys, 9 to 12, building with Lego represented a rare chance to be left alone. (On one subject, boys of all ages and nationalities agreed: A castle without a dragon is worse than no castle at all.)

 

One can construct the polars of a polynomial by means of a differential operator. Suppose we have a homogeneous polynomial p(x1xn) To compute the polars ofp we act on it with the operator =y1x1++ynxn the k th polar of p equals kp(x1xn)