IN WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo, a sometimes-poet and else­wise a recently-graduated student of Computer Science and Math, oc­cas­ion­al­ly writes on things of int­erest.

Reading Feed (last update: April 2)

A collection of things that I was happy I read. Views expressed by linked authors are chosen because I think they're interesting, not because I think they're correct, unless indicated otherwise.

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Blog: Don't Worry About the Vase | On Automoderation -- Zvi concretizes much the the vague disease I was feeling around Automoderation, despite it being an eminently plausible approach to its design specification.

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Blog: JeffTK | Slack tool: predict -- Note that Jeff's implementation is of a market mechanism that's not budget-balanced, and rewards marginal improvements of the "last price", rather than marginal improvements of the "current best price". I suspect that these design decisions have the net effect of denoising the signal of predicter quality.

Blog: Schneier on Security | New Gmail Phishing Scam -- "The article is right; this is frighteningly good."

A Meditation on π

note: This is not a volley in the $\pi-\tau$ debate, of which Vi Hart is undisputed monarch -- and right, as well -- as far as I'm concerned.

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A few number-theoretic $\pi$ facts:

• $\pi$ is provably transcendental, thus also irrational.
• $\pi$ is suspected, but not known, to be normal, a generalization of transcendence.
• $\pi$, provably, has Liouville-Roth constant (or irrationality coefficient) no greater than $7.6063$, and is suspected to have constant no greater than $2.5$. (As a consequence of its irrationality, its L-R constant is $\geq2$.)

Note, though, that each of these things is also true of literally 100% of numbers. And before you scoff at my use of the figurative 'literally', no no -- measure-theoretically, the non-(normal, transcendental, irrational, irrationality-coefficient-less-than-8) numbers make up exactly, mathematically 0% of the number line.

For the record: irrational algebraics like $\sqrt2$ are also nonterminating and nonrepeating, and it's