Friday, August 26, 2005

Your Organs Are Backwards

You have situs inversus.

Or maybe you don't.
Your real problem is that your perception of left and right are backwards. Your internal model of the world is a mirror image of what the world actually is. What you call left to right, the rest of the world calls right to left.
Early in life you learned that sounds in this ear and touches on this side correlate to things you see on this side. Likewise things on the other side go together, but you got it ever so slightly wrong, right from the beginning. How could you be corrected?

Fortunately, it is not a problem that your mind is backwards.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

A Math Problem

Imagine you had an infinitely long, infinitely thin string with two ends, you take the tangle of string and put it inside a box, while leaving the two ends on the outside.

The Problem:
Define an infinitely long path between two points that stays within a finite volume. The path canot intersect itself. The location of each point on the path must be a function of the distance along it from either of the two points.

Friday, August 12, 2005

This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself.

By David Moser

This is the first sentence of this story. This is the second sentence. This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself. This sentence is questioning the intrinsic value of the first two sentences. This sentence is to inform you, in case you haven't already realized it, that this is a self-referential story, that is, a story containing sentences that refer to their own structure and function. This is a sentence that provides an ending to the first paragraph.

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Friday, August 05, 2005

In Dog we Trust

There was a story in the paper about a woman who left 200 million dollars to her dog. What a waste.

Or is it?

presumably, the money is at least in a savings account somewhere. This means that it is gaining interest by being loaned out to other people. Those people are putting it to good use, enough to justify paying interest back to the Dog.
Given the size of the fortune, it's possible that it's in a professionally managed trust, which yields an even higher return. This means that the money is going to places that a trained analyst thinks will use the money best. If the Dog has a good tax attorney, there may even be an element of charitable giving.
Would her human trust-fund grandchildren have used the money so responsibly?

Perhaps the best use of any given dollar is to put it into an account that invests with an eye towards both finacial gain and the social good, a kind of venture philanthropy for the small time investor. What if you could send a dollar to a charity knowing that it would not merely be spent, but responsibly loaned out, to maximum benefit? What if you could go to your favorite charity for a loan, thereby both getting your funding, and knowing that your interest payments would be positively re-used?

If you want to let the market sort out the good, and just send money to an account that invests for financial gain, I volunteer mine.