Rainbow particles

My son enjoys creating Flash applications. Check this one out:

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Canadian election results

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So the election results are in. Of the 308 parliament seats at stake, the Conservatives won the largest number, 124, so they will form a minority government. How do the seat counts compare with the popular vote? Well the two leading parties won a somewhat larger share of the seats than their share of the vote. The Conservatives won 40.3% of the seats with 36.3% of the vote, while the Liberals won 33.4% of the seats with 30.2% of the vote. On the other hand, the NDP got just 9.4% of the seats even though they had 17.5% of the vote. The Bloc Québécois benefited the most from our first-past-the-post system, winning 16.6% of the seats with just 10.5% of the votes. And the Green Party won no seats at all, even though they got 4.5% of the vote! I haven't looked at the breakdown of popular vote here in the province of Ontario, but here's a barchart from today's issue of the newspaper Dose. Although the title suggests that it shows popular vote, it actually shows the number of ri...
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Is everything that can be imagined real?

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A couple of days ago, I went to see the Mythic Beasts special exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. It's a fascinating collection of artifacts and stories from around the world. Now, I have previously written about beasts like unicorns that (probably) don't exist . What about the unicorn's cousin, Pegasus? How can we talk about Pegasus? To what does the word 'Pegasus' refer? If our answer is, 'Something,' then we seem to believe in mystical entities; if our answer is, 'nothing', then we seem to talk about nothing and what sense can be made of this? Certainly when we said that Pegasus was a mythological winged horse we make sense, and moreover we speak the truth! If we speak the truth, this must be truth about something. So we cannot be speaking of nothing. The quote—or perhaps it's a paraphrase—is from the Wikipedia entry for philosopher W.V. Quine . In the philosophy of language, this is known as the problem of empty names , and I ...
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Corporate welfare for professional sports teams

I certainly don't agree with everything that the Cato Institute puts out, but I do read their Daily Commentary , which magically arrives on my antique Palm m105 every day (thanks to AvantGo ), and often find it thought-provoking. Today's piece is about how the city council of Washington, D.C. is giving Major League Baseball a sweet deal on a new stadium. It's written by Dennis Coates, a professor of economics at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who is co-author of a Cato Institute report on the subject. Apparently their research suggests that the economic benefits of this kind of corporate welfare are ... nonexistent! (The commentary includes a link to a 12-page report you can download in PDF, which in turn has references to two related journal publications.) Another recent Commentary I found useful was a review of books on Economics. Even if they don't get everything right (IMHO), there are some bright people at the Cato Institute.
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