Very interesting, thanks for the info.

I think that "confining" was also intended to be "confiding".

"My wife and I are even considering allowing our older child to take the Metro (public transit) to ballet by herself next year when she's in middle school."

That's totally the culture here in NYC... around 3pm when the schools get out the sidewalks, buses, and subways are mobbed with kids traveling from school to wherever on their own. I'm guessing, like, on the order of a million every day. It's so strange to read about such a different culture just a couple states down.

What state/city was that?

Wow, what a fantastic response! Thanks for that.

I must admit, I was unfamiliar with the concept of little corner stores lining all the streets around the corner from where I lived until I moved from a rural area to New York City. I found it to be crazy wonderful and convenient.

For what it's worth, here in New York City (I live in Brooklyn) there are kids all over the place commuting between home & school by themselves all the time. Around 3pm when the schools get out the sidewalks and city buses are literally swarming with the little folks, definitely all ages from elementary through junior high school. They all seem pretty confident, content, and safe about it (if rambunctious). The idea that half the city would have to mobilized to follow around this million-magnitude number kids one-at-a-time would immediately gridlock the entire metropolitan area!

Something less than 52%.

About 48%? Currently about 52% of Americans own stocks (including mutual funds and retirement accounts), and that number has been trending lower each year since 2007.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/162353/stock-ownership-stays-record-low.aspx

Please. We have all of those things in our household, and every time we ever interview a CPA they only thing they can do is (a) remind us to put receipts in a folder, (b) type the info into probably the same software, and (c) boil us with a multi-hundred dollar charge. I let that happen to me once at H&R Block and vowed never again.

My partner has interviewed other CPAs, and when we ask how they can improve our process and they say, "remember to put your receipts all in a folder", we roll our eyes and thank them for their time.

Fascinating, thanks for posting that.

There was a head of IT at one place I worked who, when asked where the weight goes when a person diets, answered that it's due to the nuclear fusion inside a person's cells. So hey, apparently that already happens, np.

False, the effect is not very great. Plus, do you not know what an index fund is (per GP)? The fund management takes care of that for you.

For example, the Vanguard 500 Index fund is indeed up 48% in that time period. If you'd invested $10,000 in the fund on 12/1/2012, then the value in your account would today be $14,843.15, with zero additional work on your part.

http://quotes.morningstar.com/fund/VFINX/f?t=VFINX

A lot of that's true, but I'm not sure how you think public money passes through universities to textbook companies? (In reality, it's students paying textbook companies directly.)

The thing about the Pythagorean Theorem is completely true and well-documented (by maybe one or two hundred years). Pretty sure it's in a sidebar to the college algebra text I teach out of.

Wikipedia: "In India, the Baudhayana Sulba Sutra, the dates of which are given variously as between the 8th century BC and the 2nd century BC, contains a list of Pythagorean triples discovered algebraically, a statement of the Pythagorean theorem, and a geometrical proof of the Pythagorean theorem for an isosceles right triangle. The Apastamba Sulba Sutra (ca. 600 BC) contains a numerical proof of the general Pythagorean theorem, using an area computation. Van der Waerden believed that "it was certainly based on earlier traditions". Boyer (1991) thinks the elements found in the ulba-stram may be of Mesopotamian derivation.[67]... Pythagoras, whose dates are commonly given as 569–475 BC, used algebraic methods to construct Pythagorean triples..."

[67] Carl Benjamin Boyer (1968). "China and India". A history of mathematics. Wiley. p. 229.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#History

There's all kinds of examples, maybe more often the case than not, that mathematical principles get named after someone other than the original discoverer. It doesn't even require "forgotten knowledge" or anything like that, just some kind of power relationship at play. In fact, Stigler's Law of Eponomy (named after Stephen Stigler, Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of Statistics of the University of Chicago) states, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." See also: Matthew Effect and Boyer's Law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

Here's professor Richard Lipton writing on that particular subject:

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/why-is-everything-named-after-gauss/ ... but obviously the other stuff mentioned at the conference is total looney-tunes.