Dec 12th, 2008 | counterintuitive | No Comments
Humanity has never been smarter and wealthier. The good ol’ times were not as good as now. We live at (the beginning of) The Age of Mass Intelligence
Third, what does all this say about the widespread view that societies are dumbing down, educational standards are crumbling and people’s ability to concentrate is collapsing? The reply must be that it cannot be true across the board and that for a significant number, the opposite is the case: people want more intellectually demanding things to see and hear, not fewer. Surely both things are happening at once: part of the population is dumbing down, part is wising up. But something has changed. H.L. Mencken, the so-called sage of Baltimore, said: “No one in this world…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” A growing number of people are proving him wrong.
I have had plenty of arguments about this issue. Let’s hope the next one will be soon while the data from the article is still fresh in my mind. I pity the fool who will dare question the statement.
Sep 28th, 2008 | counterintuitive, sofia | No Comments
You know the saying, when in a traffic jam ask a mathematician for help. Well, in a few hours I will be heading to the ghastly Bulgarian capital and I already dread the time it will take me to get in and out. As faith would have it, there is a perfect solution which requires the usual large scale mismanagement of the city and some luck. Here is the wikipedia article for the Braess’s paradox.
Braess’s paradox, credited to the mathematician Dietrich Braess, states that adding extra capacity to a network, when the moving entities selfishly choose their route, can in some cases reduce overall performance. This is because the equilibrium of such a system is not necessarily optimal.
The paradox is stated as follows: “For each point of a road network, let there be given the number of cars starting from it, and the destination of the cars. Under these conditions one wishes to estimate the distribution of traffic flow. Whether one street is preferable to another depends not only on the quality of the road, but also on the density of the flow. If every driver takes the path that looks most favorable to him, the resultant running times need not be minimal. Furthermore, it is indicated by an example that an extension of the road network may cause a redistribution of the traffic that results in longer individual running times.”
This runs the other way as well - unwitting removals of extra routes sometimes lead to overall decrease in travel time. So Sofia, feel lucky the next time your mayor shuts down several major boulevards. In any case, the road renovation works in the capital from last summer make me appreciate Blagoevgrad all the more.
