Exciting New Blogs and New Posts

There are new exciting blogs and all sort of nice things on old blogs. In Avzel’s journal you can find a post with the words and a link to the performence of a beautiful Leonard Cohen’s song “everybody knows”;  and you can find there as well as on Computational Complexity links to some great songs of Tom Lehrer. Noam Nisan (who encouraged me to start this blog) has now a blog of his own called “Algorithmic game theory” of with interesting posts on the econ-CS interface. One post is about Fourier theoretic proof of Arrow’s theorem and the recent paper by Noam, Ehud Friedgut and me on Quantitative Gibbard Satterthwhaite theorem.  (BTW, are you aware of blogs devoted to learning?, or to mathematical programming/optimization?) Dick Lipton has a new blog  called “Godel’s lost letter and P=NP,” where he covers in a very very nice style, the major developements that occured in theoretical computer science, (and from time to time outside it,) and the people that were involved in these developements. There is a spirit of light skepticism regarding the common wisdom about some of the central problems in some of the posts. This reminds me that scientific skepticism and how it should be practiced (if at all) is a great topic for discussion. Economist Al Roth has an extremely prolofic blog called “Market design.” Roth have created (with the help of Aaron his son,) very eraly on (in 1995,) a scientifically useful home page. And finally Terry Tao had a beautiful post on sailing into the wind in higher speed than the wind. And post-finally Scott Aaronson, breaks yet again new grounds, and asks four questions for Passover about corn, rice, and wheat.

And Frank Morgan (whom both me and Noga TA’d in Calculus 18.001  18.011 in 1983) has a lovely post on optimal paths in Baseball based on work with  Davide Carozza and  Stewart Johnson, and Jeff Elly has an econ blog with the good name “cheap talk”. And here is an excellent post on the 15 greatest statisticians by Yosi Levy (in Hebrew).

And Terry Tao illuminatingly rescaled the US budget to match incomes and expenses of a single family.