The Dream of Total Information Became a Nightmare in Postwar China | Aeon Essays
“From the vantage point of today, the travails of China’s statisticians during the 1950s might appear quaint, their obsession with definitional issues and their rejection of probabilistic methods an artifact of a more ideologically driven time. That would be a mistake. The concerns that drove them are with us today, as alive and as urgent as they were 70 years ago. At their heart is a set of basic and timeless questions: what do we need to know and how should we know it?”
When Math Gets Impossibly Hard | Quanta Magazine
“Mathematical impossibility is different. We begin with unambiguous assumptions and use mathematical reasoning and logic to conclude that some outcome is impossible. No amount of luck, persistence, time or skill will make the task possible. The history of mathematics is rich in proofs of impossibility. Many are among the most celebrated results in mathematics. But it was not always so.”
Put A Propeller On It: the Golden Age of Tinkering | The Appendix
“Alberto Santos-Dumont is beloved in Brazil as the inventor of the airplane (his heart is even preserved in formaldehyde at Rio de Janeiro’s Air and Space Museum). But it was in Paris, the global capital of ballooning, that the debonair Brazilian made his name. In 1898 he decided that he was not satisfied with the haphazard nature of navigation in his balloon. So he put an engine and a propeller on it. Soon, he was the only man in the world flying a dirigible—even winning a prize for maneuvering around the Eiffel Tower.”