Links for Jane and Others

• Philosophy 101 – Real Simple – HT Mental multivitamin. Short summaries of the ideas of six major philosophers.
• Mount Wilson Observatory – wildfire photos and info. (I flagged this when the Observatory was under threat from the wildfire but forgot to move the autopost out of drafts. The threat is past now—hurray!—but the Observatory site and webcam are worth a look in themselves.)
• The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics – Boing Boing
• Coin-tosses aren’t fair – Boing Boing – “Many statistics examples start with “assuming a fair coin-toss…” But it turns out that coin-tosses aren’t fair; depending on your toss, there’s a small-to-alarming bias in the result.
• “A peach tree grows near Brooklyn « Farm School — “40 years ago, Michael Goldstein, then a young dad, rented the top floor of a building on the corner of Broome and Mercer Streets, and plunked a sandbox and kiddie pool on the roof. Such was the humble beginning of what would eventually become an elaborate, fantasyland garden”