{"id":5486,"date":"2021-05-10T00:47:52","date_gmt":"2021-05-10T05:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=5486"},"modified":"2021-05-10T00:47:52","modified_gmt":"2021-05-10T05:47:52","slug":"three-updates-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=5486","title":{"rendered":"Three updates"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
  1. For those who read my reply to Richard Borcherds on “teapot supremacy”<\/a>: seeking better data, I ordered a dozen terra cotta flowerpots, and smashed eight of them on my driveway with my 4-year-old son, dropping each one from approximately 2 meters. For each flowerpot, we counted how many pieces it broke into, seeking insight about the distribution over that number. Unfortunately, it still<\/em> proved nearly impossible to get good data, for a reason commenters had already warned me about: namely, there were typically 5-10 largeish shards, followed by “long tail” of smaller and smaller shards (eventually, just terra cotta specks), with no obvious place to draw the line and stop counting. Nevertheless, when I attempted to count only the shards that were “fingernail-length or larger,” here’s what I got: 1 pot with 9 shards, 1 with 11 shards, 2 with 13 shards, 2 with 15 shards, 1 with 17 shards, 1 with 19 shards. This is a beautiful (too beautiful?) symmetric distribution centered around a mean of 14 shards, although it’s anyone’s guess whether it approximates a Gaussian or something else. I have no idea<\/em> why every pot broke into an odd number of shards, unless of course it was a 1-in-256-level fluke, or some cognitive bias that made me preferentially stop counting the shards at odd numbers.
    <\/li>
  2. Thanks so much to everyone who congratulated me for the ACM Prize<\/a>, and especially those who (per my request) suggested charities to which to give bits of the proceeds! Tonight, after going through the complete list of suggestions, I made my first, but far from last, round of donations: $1000 each to the Deworm the World Initiative<\/a>, GiveDirectly<\/a>, the World Wildlife Fund<\/a>, the Nature Conservancy<\/a>, and Canada\/USA Mathcamp<\/a> (which had a huge impact on me when I attended it as a 15-year-old). One constraint, which might never arise in a decade of moral philosophy seminars, ended up being especially important in practice: if the donation form was confusing or buggy, or if it wouldn’t accept my donation without some onerous confirmation step involving a no-longer-in-use cellphone, then I simply moved on to the next charity.
    <\/li>
  3. Bobby Kleinberg asked me to advertise the call for nominations<\/a> for the brand-new STOC Test of Time Award. The nomination deadline is coming up soon: May 24. <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    For those who read my reply to Richard Borcherds on “teapot supremacy”: seeking better data, I ordered a dozen terra cotta flowerpots, and smashed eight of them on my driveway with my 4-year-old son, dropping each one from approximately 2 meters. For each flowerpot, we counted how many pieces it broke into, seeking insight about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5487,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5486\/revisions\/5487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}