independence

Scott writes about the Continuum Hypothesis , a topic I find fascinating, although I never really understood it (I belong to his target audience of complete idiots).
But he has a talent to explain difficult proofs in a way that makes me believe I understand them and, as I get older, this is all I really need.
Of course, I had to ask a silly question, but he did not really bite ...

predictions ...

" I will predict, though, that before December 31, 2020, fleets of driverless taxis will be on the road in more than ten cities."
CIP

I was reminded of this prediction when Elon Musk announced recently for the n-th time that very soon his cars will be fully autonomous.

the fog and the princes

Recently, I watched two documentaries that I found quite interesting.

The Fog of War tells the story of Robert McNamara, in particular his experience of the 'cold war' and the Vietnam war; I think every politician should be required to watch it.
It provides several examples of smart men (and Robert McNamara was certainly very intelligent) doing really stupid things ...

Princes of the Yen documents the actions of the Bank of Japan after WW2, until and after the bubble burst in 1990.
I always feel that I don't know enough about Asia and Japan in particular, however, I disagree with the extrapolations at the end of the documentary; I do not understand central banks as omnipotent manipulators of the world economy.
Perhaps another documentary should be made about the Federal Reserve, from Alan Greenspan to Jay Powell.
I already have a title: "Clowns of the Dollar".

the one percent

We all know that the vast majority of the interweb is just garbage and the swamp continues to grow at an amazing speed.
In fact the swamp animals work hard to get rid of the valuable stuff ...
But there is still the one percent of high quality and recently I found another piece of it:
The lectures of Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky on the biology of human behavior.
I am surprised that we are still allowed to see it ...

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