Saturday, May 31, 2014

Child Geniuses and Other Articles

Stuck on a flight home, I passed time reading a hotel copy of the Wall Street Journal, to find more interesting things than I would have thought.

What first caught my eye is an interesting piece by Jordan Ellenberg, a math professor who also writes a lot about mathematics for more popular consumption, about The Wrong Way to Treat Child Geniuses.  Especially for any readers who did any of those science/math programs as a child (notably John Hopkins/SMPY) -- but not exclusively -- it's definitely worth a read.

Then there were also interesting articles about Ray Kurzweil and an amusing article about entitled Ticket to Dine: the Restaurant Reservation Revoultion.  The last article described a business model that is simultaneously disturbing and why-didn't-I-think-of-it -- using bots to snap up reservations on OpenTable to popular restaurants, and then selling/scalping the reservations.  Evil, or genius?  You decide....



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