Three updates
- For those who read my reply to Richard Borcherds on “teapot supremacy”: seeking better data, I ordered a dozen terra cotta flowerpots, and smashed eight of them on my driveway with my 4-year-old son, dropping each one from approximately 2 meters. For each flowerpot, we counted how many pieces it broke into, seeking insight about the distribution over that number. Unfortunately, it still proved nearly impossible to get good data, for a reason commenters had already warned me about: namely, there were typically 5-10 largeish shards, followed by “long tail” of smaller and smaller shards (eventually, just terra cotta specks), with no obvious place to draw the line and stop counting. Nevertheless, when I attempted to count only the shards that were “fingernail-length or larger,” here’s what I got: 1 pot with 9 shards, 1 with 11 shards, 2 with 13 shards, 2 with 15 shards, 1 with 17 shards, 1 with 19 shards. This is a beautiful (too beautiful?) symmetric distribution centered around a mean of 14 shards, although it’s anyone’s guess whether it approximates a Gaussian or something else. I have no idea why every pot broke into an odd number of shards, unless of course it was a 1-in-256-level fluke, or some cognitive bias that made me preferentially stop counting the shards at odd numbers.
- Thanks so much to everyone who congratulated me for the ACM Prize, and especially those who (per my request) suggested charities to which to give bits of the proceeds! Tonight, after going through the complete list of suggestions, I made my first, but far from last, round of donations: $1000 each to the Deworm the World Initiative, GiveDirectly, the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and Canada/USA Mathcamp (which had a huge impact on me when I attended it as a 15-year-old). One constraint, which might never arise in a decade of moral philosophy seminars, ended up being especially important in practice: if the donation form was confusing or buggy, or if it wouldn’t accept my donation without some onerous confirmation step involving a no-longer-in-use cellphone, then I simply moved on to the next charity.
- Bobby Kleinberg asked me to advertise the call for nominations for the brand-new STOC Test of Time Award. The nomination deadline is coming up soon: May 24.
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