London Tube Lines

This is the "Northern Line" of the London tube:

It should be clear that whoever designed the tube system in London had a pretty hazy notion of the geometric concept of "line".

Comments

  1. NielsSeptember 6, 2012 at 3:04 PM

    Great to see that you are back to blogging! Keep it up.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Economist Blogs

The Economist's blogs are now much better than the magazine articles. Take this gem on the TSA . It is a rare article indeed which reaches these levels of informative comedy.
Read more

Was any other car company gaming emission standards?

Image
As most of you already know, Volkswagen was recently caught cheating on emission tests. But were they really alone in doing so? The EPA data shows some suspicious patterns. Without getting too technical (in any case, the specifics are still unclear), there's a tradeoff between fuel efficiency, and NOx emissions. So for a given level of performance, the software that controls a modern diesel engine can be tuned so that it is more fuel efficient, but produces more NOx, or it can be tuned so that it is less fuel efficient, but produces less NOx. Since Volkswagen had problems meeting the NOx standards in the US, they decided to introduce software that detected when an emission test was being performed, and tuned the engine so as to decrease NOx production, in the process potentially worsening fuel economy relative to regular driving conditions. One possible outcome of this procedure is that the cars involved might actually have better fuel economy in real life conditions, tha
Read more

The real stakes of the Greek vote

The Greeks should stop being so selfish. Why are they voting on this referendum based on what they think will be best for their economy? Don't they understand how their vote will impact legions of armchair (or chaired) economists and political scientists? Let's say they vote yes, accept the northern european ultimatum, and Greek society proves resilient enough to muddle through the cuts and austerity. Great. They will have conceded to the neoconservative enemy the last bastion of left-wing orthodoxy left in the Northern/Western hemispheres. They will have on their hands the conversational blood of millions of wearers of Che Guevara t-shirts,  local organizers of italian Feste Dell'Unità, and pretty much the entirety of french society without a hungarian last name. If instead they vote no, and reject Das Deutsche Diktat, they could recklessly end up understanding the incredible luck they just had, clean up their act, and push through the much needed reforms. In one stroke,
Read more