Dec 29, 2021
A lot of people think that Marx saw proletarian revolution as inevitable. In fact, it is not. But it is inevitable given certain assumptions that Marx probably believed (owing to arguments he made throughout …
Aug 28, 2021
Proponents of the use of NFTs for establishing ownership of creative works have a correct diagnosis but an incorrect prescription. They correctly observe that the status quo for creative production does not …
Sep 29, 2020
Recently there was a minor controversy over a blogpost from Coinbase’s CEO discouraging employees from thinking about politics, and encouraging them to focus on profit-making. I really appreciated this …
May 3, 2020
A platform for hamburgers. Think GrubHub. In this note, we’ll try to understand what is a platform, and whether they can be improved with a “coop” structure.
In particular, we’ll try to understand: …
May 25, 2016
There’s a famous dubious argument that “proves” the set of $\mathrm{Tree}$ of (planar, rooted) binary trees is in bijection with the set of $7$-tuples of trees $\mathrm{Tree}^6$.
The argument …
Jan 18, 2016
The ideas, knowledge, beliefs, laws and regulations, etc. contained in a culture would be the genetic instructions ordering the use of exosomatic energy. – p. 262
This is a good point and a nice way of …
Jan 18, 2016
I’ve often heard people say that the interesting part of number theory is the interaction between addition and multiplication, but I only yesterday realized one reason why that is, triggered by convincing …
Jul 9, 2014
The other day I was sitting in The Coop in Cambridge, reading a book on combinatorial games, and so naturally I started wondering about games played in groups, or on their Cayley graphs at least. After a short …
Jan 21, 2013
If I say the word “swimming” to you, you’ve got a fair bit of information about what word I’m going to say next. Most likely I’ll say “pool”, but I might say …