two-cents

Posts with the tag two-cents:

Livable Cities vs. Cars

2023-05-07 123 words economics politics two-cents

Cars take tons of space While bike paths and especially public transport have significantly more throughput, more space is allocated to cars. This is fundamentally unfair. And this does not even account for the stupendous amount of space cars occupy while parked. Why do people move to the suburbs? They want to escape cars. Well, they are going to say they want to escape the noise and have easy access to nature. But cities are not loud, cars are. Here is a video of someone taking noise measurements and if we removed two car lanes and all parking, we could add tons of greenery to every street.

Pragmatic Positive Image of People

2022-12-09 718 words two-cents philosophy

Cynical people like to call me naive, whenever I suggest how good or neutral intentions could have lead to a situation where they suspect malice. But naivety implies there would be no thought behind assuming best intentions, just lack of experience. And this is not the case.

Proof Assistants for Typesetting Maths

2022-04-04 1076 words two-cents maths

I am currently trying make our exercise sheets HTML based to allow for things like drop down solutions, which start in a collapsed state. I ended up asking myself whether it might be possible yet to verify proofs submitted by students automatically. So I looked for Proof Assistants and ended up with lean. In particular I tried out the Natural Numbers Game and started reading Theorem Proving in Lean for a more comprehensive introduction. Landmark based Maths vs Steps in Proof Assistants The first contrast I noticed was the following. When you write down Maths for another human, you tend to write something like:

Smart Quotas

2021-05-22 580 words politics two-cents

While equal rights could be viewed as an issue of the past (at least in most developed countries), equal opportunity is still an open issue. In a free market wages and hiring decisions are not up to the law and thus equal rights are not enough to guarantee equal opportunity. While wages for equal work can be achieved with transparency and public pressure, it is much more difficult to quantify hiring discrimination. For this reason many people argue for a quota to actually affect these decisions with written law, so that injustices could be tried in court.

A Recipe for Endless War

2020-12-12 784 words two-cents politics

On sunday the game of the “Hooligan Eagles” against the “LesserEvil Hawks” is taking place. The city decided, in order to protect the police, it will not send in police to enforce a peaceful game. Instead, it intends to supply the fans of the “LesserEvil Hawks” with handguns so they can protect themselves against the often violent fans of the “Hooligan Eagles”.

When the referee takes one of the Hooligan Eagles players off the field for a foul, the camera pans to an increasingly rowdy crowd of Eagle fans close to the Hawks fan section.

A Better Education System

2020-10-11 1897 words politics two-cents

Education is one of those topics, which everyone has an opinion on, and reforms are proposed every other day. In Germany it is even worse, as education is state’s jurisdiction, so multiply the mess by 16. So, is this just another proposal which claims to be much better than any others proposed before?

There are only two colors

2020-10-07 1242 words two-cents politics

a lot of people would protest. There are of course more than two colors. For example “red, green, blue” are already three. Okay so maybe the statement was an exaggeration. How about “only 5 colors” (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet)? Some people might start to agree with that statement. Other people might list a few more. At some point words for more colors will run out. Yet some people would still disagree with the statement: “there are only x colors”. Even though we only have a finite number of words for them.

My Philosophical Foundation

2020-10-03 2248 words two-cents philosophy

It seems fitting that the first article of a blog should layout the foundation of my beliefs. So…