On faith, unbelief, and doubt

I bought this book (1955) at a Church and it’s been a truly magnificent and refreshing read. There seems to be an English translation, but I am not sure how well it’s translated.

First of all, I should make a note: I am not a religious fanatic, but I consider myself religious. Even if your religion is different (or you are not religious at all), I think this book has a lot to offer.

I am aware that discussions about politics and religion can be touchy. Thus, the point of this post is not to persuade you, merely to list the ideas I found interesting in the book.

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Tenses

I’ve been following Zen Proverbs for some time now, and I’ve noticed a trend that most quotes are about living in the “Now” and not in the “Past”/”Future”. I believe that’s a bit too extreme.

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Superliminal game overview

I used to play a lot of video games, and nowadays not that many. But I have never written a game overview. I believe this game deserved one.

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Stay Home

I would like to mathematically demonstrate how important it is to stay home in times like these. My article will be a very short version of the cite below. Let’s start with a simple task:

Begin by asking how a rumor might spread among a population. Suppose on Day 1 a single person tells someone else a rumor, and suppose that on every subsequent day, each person who knows the rumor tells exactly one other person the rumor. Have students ponder, discuss and answer questions like: “How many days until 50 people have heard the rumor? 100 people? The whole school? The whole country?Exponential Outbreaks: The Mathematics of Epidemics

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Wisdom of the crowd exercise

According to Wikipedia, the wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.

We’ll take the results of a YouTube video as an example, to test the wisdom of the crowd. I used Majk’s Show as a dataset. It’s a young local guy that interviews random people on the streets, asking them random questions.

We will agree that any hits above 50% will validate the wisdom of the crowd. Follows a table with results:

Question	Answer	Correct answers (%)	Valid?
How do you pronounce “schedule”	sheh·jool or skeh·jool	13/34 = 38.23%	No
Who’s the man on the picture	Albert Einstein	14/32 = 43.75%	No
8/2(2+2)=?	16	11/25 = 44%	No
What’s closer, America or the Moon?	America	9/22 = 40.9%	No
Who was the first president of Macedonia?	Kiro Gligorov	22/50 = 44%	No
What is larger: -4 or -10?	-4	20/36 = 55.55%	Yes

We can further categorize the questions and see where the wisdom of the crowd fails specifically. For example, English seems to be below 40% while everything else is above 40%.

In any case, I think I might have set a bit high grading point for the citizens of my country 🙂 But at least they seem to know how to compare two numbers!