Which planet is closest to Earth, on average? I used to think it was Venus, followed by Mars. But this paper claims it is instead Mercury. At first this seemed to make no sense. Just picture the orbits of the planets: they're a bunch of concentric circles (approximately). Venus' orbit...
Judea Pearl's theory of causal models is a technical explanation of causality in terms of probability theory. Causality is a very fundamental part of our reasoning—if we want to understand something, the first question we ask is "why?". Then it is no surprise that this theory is very useful for...
This is a response to the post We Write Numbers Backward, in which lsusr argues that little-endian numerical notation is better than big-endian.[1] I believe this is wrong, and big-endian has a significant advantage not considered by lsusr. Lsusr describes reading the number "123" in little-endian, using the following algorithm:...