I like the organic mix of university and city development that University of Michigan has in Ann Arbor. It feels like the two grew together and coexist. I do get that feeling you describe when in Wayne State downtown though

Your footnote, wut?

It's a thing in maths that stuff gets named after whoever people decide at the time deserves it, not necessarily the person who discovered it.

General Taylor series were discovered by James Gregory (long after the first Taylor series for sine and cosine etc were written down by Madhava of Sangamagrama) who taught them to Maclaurin who taught them to Taylor.

Lambert's W function (also known as the product log function) was the function that Euler discovered that solved a problem that Lambert couldn't solve.

Gauss' law in physics was discovered by Lagrange. In turn, Lagrange's notation for derivatives was used by Lagrange, but was invented far earlier by Euler.

"Feynman's Trick" in calculus of parameterizing and then differentiating under the integral was also discovered by Euler. Like yeah. 250 years isn't enough to stop someone stealing the name of something you discovered. I think Euler discovered so many things people just decided at some point they couldn't name everything after Euler so started giving other people a chance.

The Gaussian distribution was discovered by de Moivre. Gaussian elimination was in textbooks in the time of Gauss so in his work he calls it "common elimination".

Arabic numerals were invented by Indian mathematicians.

Practically the only thing we know for absolute certain about Pythagoras is that he didn't discover Pythagoras' theorem (that had been known to the Babylonians centuries earlier).

Bayes never published his paper during his lifetime but it involves a very important thought experiment in probability and not the equation that everyone knows as Bayes' theorem, which was actually written by Laplace after reading Bayes paper.

Cantor didn't discover the Cantor set.

etc etc. There are hundreds or possibly thousands of examples. This is known as Stigler's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy

There are two more fun examples then I’ll stop. Kuiper published a paper stating that a ring of asteroids didn’t exist in the solar system. So when such a ring was discovered naturally it was named the Kuiper belt after him. Not maths, but in the same vein, in chess an early theorist called Damiano published an analysis showing that 1 e4 e5 Nf3 f5 was losing for black, so now that’s called “Damiano’s defence “

Funniest but is that Stigler was not the first to discover Stigler's law.

Fibonacci series goes far far back in time than Leonardo of Pisa.

That was great reading, thank you! TIL

Most of these fall under the math version of Darwin's Law?

>In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

  -- in Eugenics Review April 1914 ‘Francis Galton’

I witnessed the Better Off Ted water fountain skit play out in real life once, it was incredible awkward. I was helping my buddy and his black friend and his wife set up accounts on online casinos in Michigan for the promos/refer-a-friend rewards. Some of the sites require the live video facial verification and we were doing it in a darkly lit space at night. It worked instantly and without issue for my friend and me but oh man, many many attempts later and many additional lights needed to get it to work for his friends.

How do you prove the person typing in the credit card details is the same person who owns the card?

I know I've read stories of kids taking cards to purchase games or other things online numerous times over the last 20+ years.

> I'd wager >99% of "surround sound" deployments would take more than a year to notice if they were transparently "downgraded" to stereo

I can immediately tell if anyone has messed with any knobs or buttons on my receiver or if any of the speakers seem off / wrong sounding. Maybe I'm that 1% but I can remember many multiple times people have been over for movies / TV and someone asks out loud "does the sound seem off?" and sure enough a kid or a clueless friend was messing with the knobs.

I'm not talking about EQ settings or dynamic range or anything. I'm talking about 'surround' specifically. I've also had a track record of noticing messed up audio settings quickly. But I probably wouldn't notice if my 5.1 started getting down mixed to stereo. At least for music.

The number was given just so we have a sense of scale of the project being talked about. Its not a competition nor are measures being made.

If you wrote a program that is 1,000,000 lines of code you could also write a blog post about your thoughts on "writing 1,000,000 lines of code".

You could also write a program that is 200 lines long and write a blog post about "writing 200 lines of code".

One is not better than the others, you are just informing your audience of the topic under discussion.

Yearly maintenance costs and some states require you to also file as a foreign corporation doing business in the state.

> People are default overconfident with their estimated error bars.

You say this but yet roughly in a top level comment mentions people keep their error bars too close.

Sorry, my comment was phrased confusingly.

Being overconfident with error bars means placing them too close to the point estimation, i.e. the error bars are too narrow.

Ah right thanks, I read that backwards.

They are meaning the same thing. The original comment pointed out that people’s qualitative description and mental model of the 95% interval means they are overconfident… they think 95 means ‘pretty sure I’m right’ rather than ‘it would be surprising to be wrong’

I think they are confusing "conflict of interest" and just "in their interest".

If you asked me if my friend Bob should get a free $100 or if I should get a free $100; of course I'm going to choose myself, as that's in my best interest. There is no conflict though.

I believe the core point being "of course particle physicists want more funding of particle physics"

I sometimes watch a concrete YouTuber. He recently did a manure pump pit. I honestly didn't realize the scale of manure management. A massive holding tank for all the produced waste. All the areas with cows will have ways of pushing and moving that manure out into trenches and eventually into a massive pit. The pump pit was so they could get to the lowest point and pump the product into its next stage of processing / use. Its a valuable byproduct so worth dealing with but just never thought about what goes in must come out, and cows eat a lot.