Edouard Chazal

Math as Myth

A great song, Golden Ratio, and artwork from Benn Watt’s album.

But simple, beautiful mathematical explanations can make us greedy. While we wish for all explanations of the world around us to be elegant, science often involves “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact,” in the words of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. Before positing elliptical orbits, Kepler himself succumbed to the desire for beauty when he suggested that the planets’ orbits could be modeled as the Platonic solids nested inside each other. His theory was beautiful, but it was soundly disproved by later observations of the outer planets. In a way, it was almost too beautiful to be right.

→ Nautilus

Apple I To Be Recycled Fetches $200,000

A South Bay recycling firm is looking for a woman who, in early April, dropped off boxes of electronics that she had cleaned out from her house after her husband died. About two weeks later, the firm, Clean Bay Area, discovered inside one of the boxes a rare find: a vintage Apple I, one of only about 200 first-generation desktop computers put together by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne in 1976.

The recycling firm sold the Apple I this month for $200,000 to a private collection, Vice President Victor Gichun said. And now, because company policy is to split proceeds 50-50 with the donor, he’s looking for the mystery woman who refused to get a receipt or leave her name.

“We are looking for her to give her $100,000,” Gichun said.

→ San Jose Mercury News

Inspiring Economic Growth

Robert J. Shiller :

Fear causes individuals to restrain their spending and firms to withhold investments; as a result, the economy weakens, confirming their fear and leading them to restrain spending further. The downturn deepens, and a vicious circle of despair takes hold. Though the 2008 financial crisis has passed, we remain stuck in the emotional cycle that it set in motion.

It is a bit like stage fright. Dwelling on performance anxiety may cause hesitation or a loss of inspiration. As fear turns into fact, the anxiety worsens – and so does the performance. Once such a cycle starts, it can be very difficult to stop.

→ Project Syndicate

Beau Biden, Dies at 46

Many in Delaware expected Mr. Biden to run for his father’s Senate seat after the 2008 election, but the younger Biden, who was elected attorney general in 2006, declined, saying he was still needed in his state as he pressed ahead on a major child molestation case his agency was pursuing against a pediatrician.

“I have a duty to fulfill as attorney general, and the immediate need to focus on a case of great consequence. And that is what I must do.”

→ The New York Times

How the Cayman Islands Became a FIFA Power

It might seem unlikely that FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, has spent $2.2 million since 2002 to build a new headquarters for the soccer association and to fund two planned fields, given that the land is swampy and a grass field struggled to exist in brackish conditions.

FIFA’s generosity might seem even more improbable, considering that the Cayman Islands, a Caribbean tax and tourist haven, is ranked 191st among the world’s 209 national soccer teams. The team has never played in a World Cup. And the entire population of the islands, about 58,000, would not come close to filling the world’s biggest soccer stadiums.

While $2.2 million seems peanut for the FIFA, there’s a twist to it :

Seven years later, though, the first field remains weeks away from completion. Plans for a dormitory and a gym have not materialized. A final grant, for $500,000 in March 2014, was for the installation of artificial turf, FIFA noted on its website, because “the current grass field cannot survive in the low-level saltwater environment.”

→ The New York Times