Formal Proof Jackassery

Out on the 'net, A Formal Proof that Neil deGrasse Tyson is a Jackass

Would you believe that I came across this on a random page with the link running, in effect, as a classified ad? The Internet is a wondrous thing.

Ethereum - Bitcoin on steroids

Bitcoin was only the beginning

Ethereum is bitcoin style disruption (blockchain technology) that is generic across anything writable in software. That's huge.

Etherum is not ripe. It's not something you want to devote a lot of resources to but it is something you want to keep your eyes on to monitor because any successful etherum software can disrupt any field of endeavor as bitcoin is disrupting banking. Look to hear about ethereum in a mainstream news outlet near you in mid 2015.

Social Security Solvency

The spin of dishonest social security defenders like +Michael Hiltzik really gets me upset. Every year we pay for a report from the Social Security trustees. Every year they say that under current law, the program is going to go broke. Because the economy changes, the year goes up or down but it is never actuarially solvent. The young people in this country only get what Social Security promises if the system is actuarially solvent.

The most recent report is for 2013. The bust year in that report is 2033. If you're going to be below retirement age in that year, the experts we're all paying for to estimate the health of Social Security say, you're not getting what was promised.

If you plan to be alive in 2033, the best guess of the government is that you're going to get a radical Social Security benefit cut. Everything else is snake oil and spin.

Something New

Platonic solids, Archimedean solids, Kepler solids, we haven't found a new class of solids for 400 years, until now with the naming of Goldberg polyhedra. Conceptually, you take a regular solid and blow it up like a bouncy castle ride, bowing out the planes. Fill in those bulged out planes with polyhedrons and you get what has been called Goldberg polyhedra since about 1937. But apparently while that satisfied graph theorist Goldberg back in the day, the polyhedrons themselves weren't flat and thus weren't satisfying to Stan Schein who figured out how to make the polyhedrons flat. The only unoriginal thing about it is that he wants to give them the same name as the 1930s discovered shapes, Goldberg polyhedra. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

Nobody knows for sure how this will all play out but it's nice to see in a very geeky way.

HT: Instapundit