Weekly links for September 16

Is an auction the best way to solve the roommate/rent dilemma? At Freakonomics, referring to The rent is too damn fair! by Michael Jancsy et al. The title is a reference to “The Rent Is Too Damn High!”, political party and e-book by Matt Yglesias. (Conflict-of-interest disclosure: I know Jancsy, and I went to college with Yglesias’ wife.)

Larry Wasserman writes on Hunting for Manifolds. Given data that are close to some manifold, how do we estimate the underlying manifold?

RAND’s presidential election poll features some unorthodox methodology, including asking the same people repeatedly and asking them explicitly for the percentage chance that they’ll vote.

Brian Hayes explains the abc conjecture. (He’s done this before.)

Steven Strogatz has a new series of math blog posts at the New York Times.

John Allen Paulos on Letterman. (Presumably from 1988.)

Life expectancy doesn’t measure how long you’re expected to live.

Howard Wainer writes of the most dangerous equation: (ignorance of) what I call the “square root law”. (From Wainer’s website for his intro stat course which contains some other interesting links.)

Austin Mohr has created Spacebook, a searchable database of topological spaces inspired by Counterexamples in Topology.

Handouts from Geometry and the Imagination, a summer workshop by John Conway, Peter Doyle, Jane Gilman and Bill Thurston in 1991.

Animation of Bruce Springsteen’s diffusion. (For The Girlfriend and my father. The Girlfriend is from Arkansas, so this is a good excuse to point to the Walmart diffusion animation as well.)

An interesting visualization of prime factorization.

The best video I’ve ever seen on combinatorial explosion.