By way of Slate, we can read John F. Kennedy’s Harvard application, sent in 1935. Things must have gotten (much) harder. Would this application get you in these days, even as a legacy candidate? I’d be surprised. Competition in admissions arises from scarcity of education opportunities. Is education necessarily a scarce resource? Perhaps not, but as an abstract enabling opportunity, that scarcity cannot be eliminated, I don’t think, even with the likes of OpenCourseWare, etc. This is by definition: the scarcity is what makes a thing (e.g. an elite education) an enabling opportunity.

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Stephen Boyd quips about a power allocation algorithm:

Oh by the way, this is used now, for example, in DSL and it’s used actually everywhere. Okay, and I’m not talking about used by …professors… I’m talking about, it’s used when you use DSL.

Sometimes engineers forget that to a mathematician, an “application” is another theoretical problem … only maybe in physics.

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Great stuff, this comet. I only recall seeing one comet in person, back in the 1990′s. Must have been Hale-Bopp. Now that was a rare one.

Comet Lulin is arriving from the far reaches of the solar system on a nearly parabolic orbit—”it’s almost as if it comes from infinity and goes back out to infinity,” he said.

This must have been one of these initially stationary objects then. Speaking of orbits, unrelated to comets, these so-called halo orbits are pretty amazing. They are orbits around stationary points in the gravitational field of three bodies called Lagrange points. L1, L2, and L3 are pretty obvious and therefore not that cool, but L4 and L5 surprised me and they are even stable… The application of going to an unstable Lagrange point and redirecting routing with low energy is even nicer.

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