I'm going to read Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small, by Barry J. Nalebuff, Ian Ayres.
This article made me curious, it sounds like an interesting book.
Recently in books Category
"Of twelve coins, one is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than all the others. The others weigh the same. With a balance scale, on which one side may be weighed against the other, you are to use only three weighings to determine the counterfeit."
About a year ago I found this cool puzzle in the collection of short stories
"The Palace Thief Stories" by Ethan Canin.
It's in the story "Batorsag and Szerelem" about a math prodigy. I had a fun time solving it (took me a while) and now I have the solution on loose papers lying around on a shelf. So I thought it would be good to transfer it over to a LaTex document. Stay tuned...
I just finished reading a very interesting and entertaining book:
"A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" by John Allen Paulos.
Each chapter dissects one news story (or a couple of news stories falling in the same category) and it exposes faulty reasoning in it, from wrong interpretation of statistical data to circular logical reasoning to optimistic curve fitting to inappropiate probalistic assumptions etc. Seeing the news stories through the author's eye often leads to conclusions that are very different from the headlines that go with those stories. What surprised me most is how ingrained journalistic conventions with faulty reasoning are and how hard it is to shake yourself free and see through them. This book goes a long way in making you a more skeptical and educated newspaper reader.
In the same vein is this webpage in which philosopher Julian Baggini is collecting faulty reasoning in argumentations.
One other instance of faulty reasoning is worth mentioning here, something Malcolm Gladwell calls "creeping determinism" in an article he wrote for The New Yorker magazine. It describes the faulty reasoning in which events in hindsight seem to have been destined to occur the way they did which invariably raises the question of why haven't the signals that pointed in that way been picked up. Examples in the article are among others the Sep 11 tragedy and the 1973 attack on Israel from the neighboring Arab countries. Why haven't the intelligence agencies "connected the dots" ? The problem is that only in hindsight can the signals that pointed that way be distinguished from the general noise that confronts inteligence agencies nowadays (for example the F.B.I.'s counter terrorism division has sixty-eight thousand outstanding and unassigned leads dating back to 1995).
My favorite book is
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and the Meaning of It All
by Richard P. Feynman
His clarity, honesty, brilliance and humor shine through in all the pieces in the book and it is just a joy to read him.
To tickle your curiosity here's some ideas out of his essay about the relationship between science and religion.
Religion provides a moral and ethical framework to society and that is great. Religion also has an inspirational role in people's lives and that is great also. But religion as a way to explain the world surrounding us is too simplistic and inflexible. Everything is set in stone and is based on belief. There's not much room for doubt. If new facts or observations turn up that would make other explanations more plausible they' re ignored or suppressed.
Science on the other hand is the total opposite: in constant change. Observing the world around us suddenly is much more fun. New observations and experiments can lead to new explanations that completely overhaul what was thought before. We are slowly moving forward that way, searching for truth, understanding our world better. Will we ever know everything ? Probably not, but that shouldn't stop us from continuing. The good news is that we will never run out of things to explore.
Note though for science to function and to stay healthy it needs honest scientists and there's an essay about that in the book too.
