This edition goes out to the badass parrots. Links for you. Science:
Ordinal Regression: Data to Order
A virtuous intolerance
Budget 2012: NIH and CDC
Republicans are closing their eyes to climate science
Who dares enter the lair of the stingless bees?
The secrets of ant sleep revealed
Other:
Why We Should Raise Taxes on the Super-Rich and Lower Them on the Middle Class
Living history: Court ruling on whether some Hingham residents can use a beach hinges on colonial ordinance
'Bitten or crushed by other reptiles' (Bestest health statistics EVAH!)
New Research on Coerced Pregnancy Sheds Light on Recent Abortion Debates
Who is Influencing Obama's Budget Proposal? Follow the Funders.
Metro's future rides on Saturday night
More like this
I'll continue my explanation of the ordinal numbers, starting with a nifty trick. Yesterday, I said that the collection of all ordinals is *not* a set, but rather a proper class. There's another really neat way to show that.
I've talked about the idea of the size of a set; and I've talked about the well-ordering theorem, that there's a well-ordering (or total ordering) definable for any set, including infinite ones.
With ordinals, we use exponents to create really big numbers. The idea is that we can define ever-larger families of transfinite
ordinals using exponentiation. Exponentiation is defined in terms of
repeated multiplication, but it allows us to represent numbers that we
In addition to the classic {L|R} version of the surreal numbers, you can also describe surreals using something called a sign expansion, where they're written as a sequence of "+"s and "-"s - a sort of binary representation of surreal numbers.