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"Paulos, John Allen, author"
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Mathematics and humor
John Allen Paulos cleverly scrutinizes the mathematical structures of jokes, puns, paradoxes, spoonerisms, riddles, and other forms of humor, drawing examples from such sources as Rabelais, Shakespeare, James Beattie, René Thom, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Koestler, W. C. Fields, and Woody Allen.
eBook
The S & L Bailout in Perspective
Or given that gold sells for roughly $350 dollars an ounce, and that the distance from the east coast to the west coast of the U.S. is about 15 million feet, $500 billion could buy a transcontinental gold bar weighing about five and a half pounds a foot. (I'll ignore the price rise that would result from this goldbricking project.) If we were to stretch the gold bar into a rainbow extending from Capitol Hill to 1,500 miles above the Kansas prairies and ending over the Phoenix headquarters of Charles Keating's failed savings and loan empire this golden arch would weigh in at almost four pounds a foot. The tendency we have to be mesmerized by ''people'' stories and bored by ''number'' stories should be resisted. Ultimately, however, the distinction between the two is specious. We must find better ways to vivify complex issues. The cost of not doing so will be considerably more than $500 billion.
Newspaper Article
Paradoxical Advice for Politicos
1. Observing the primaries and presidential politics in general, one is struck by the fact that candidates seldom say anything remotely like \"I don't really know\" or \"I'm not at all certain.\" Surely, this sort of admission is the correct response to so many questions put to politicians that its non-utterance is something of an intellectual scandal. One reason for this pose of infallibility: Politicians fear that voters will confuse a slow, qualified response with ignorance or evasiveness (and hope they'll confuse a quick, glib response with knowledge or resolve). As a result, most feel they must sometimes square their jaws and forthrightly utter the political equivalent of astrological drivel.
Newspaper Article
ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS; What We Fear Least Kills Most
Mr. [H. W. Lewis] dismisses the romantic notion that these lives are priceless. They may be in moral theory, but we certainly don't (and can't) behave as if they are in practice. According to the author, the value of a human life can be inferred by the actions regulatory agencies take and the safety expenditures that legislatures authorize. These expenditures -- ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million dollars per life saved -- depend to a great degree on public perceptions: is the risk voluntary or not, familiar or unfamiliar, of immediate or distant concern? (This last has relevance for policy on AIDS, the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion.) Yet despite brief patches of statistics and Mr. Lewis's talk of \"discounting rates\" in assessing the future consequences of present actions, \"Technological Risk\" is decidedly nontechnical, and is written for the proverbial intelligent layman. Excluded from this characterization, it seems, are lawyers, who are the object of a mild disdain throughout the book. Mr. Lewis derides the Delaney clause of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which limits to zero the amount of any additive (such as saccharine) that has shown the slightest evidence of causing animal cancers at any dosage. Other health bills, as well as some court orders, disallow any reference to cost or feasibility in protecting against risks, leading to the squandering of scarce safety resources on trivial risks, and sometimes to agency subterfuge to accommodate impossible legislative and judicial requirements. The increasingly popular \"deep pockets\" approach to litigation -- in which attorneys go after parties who can afford to pay rather than those actually responsible for a hazard -- clearly has little relevance to truth or culpability although it has enriched lawyers. Mr. Lewis also gripes about lawyers' lack of scientific background, predilection for assigning blame and impatience with scientific uncertainty.
Book Review
UPWARD FROM PEBBLES
The Moroccan-born French mathematics professor [Georges Ifrah] relates this anecdote in ''From One to Zero: A Universal History of Numbers,'' which has been glowingly reviewed in France. The book is an exhaustive and at times exhausting history of numerals (number symbols) and numeration systems from prehistoric times to the Renaissance, when the Hindu-Arabic system we use today came to worldwide dominance. The heroes of his tale are the nameless scribes, accountants, priests and astronomers who discovered the principles of representing numbers systematically. There are also digressions on alphabets and hieroglyphs, history and archeology, and over 350 illustrations by the author himself. Many of the sidelights are fascinating: Pascal's triangle was known to the Arabs and Chinese more than three centuries before Pascal. Wooden sticks with matching notches (one for the creditor and one for the debtor) were long used as ''credit cards'' in many parts of the world. But too much of this long book reads like a collection of appendices, and I often found myself saying ''enough already'' as Mr. Ifrah piled up his historical documentation.
Book Review