Links for 2010-08-22

A bunch of professors in MBA programs have written a textbook in graphic novel form. I’d make a joke here about what this says about our future captains of industry, but, really, do I need to?

“The United States is flush with low-interest cash from the Giant Pool of Money. Yes, that cash will one day have to be repaid, but right now what it means is the government has the opportunity to invest it in ways that will help to generate future revenue, which is to say in ways that create jobs. And if it does so, if the government invests this money in job-creation, then the future revenue will exceed the low interest owed back to the Giant Pool. A government is not really like a business or a bank or a household, but to the extent that it can be compared to such things, what this all means is the government has the chance to turn a profit.

And if we’re really smart about this, we can put this money to work not just creating jobs, but building and rebuilding the infrastructure that makes long-term, sustainable economic growth possible. “

“A simple question from a six-year-old about hangman turned into another analysis obsession that made me play 15 million games of hangman recently.

Back in 2007, I wrote a game of hangman for a human guesser on the train journey from Oxford to London. I spent the time on the London Underground thinking about optimal strategies for playing it, and wrote the version for the computer doing the guessing on the return journey. It successfully guessed my test words and I was satisfied, so I submitted both to the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. Now, three years later, my daughter is old enough to play, but the Demonstration annoys her, as it can always guess her words. She asked the obvious question that never occurred to me at the time: “What are the hardest words I can choose, so that I can beat it?””