apparently a lottery *is* a tax on people bad at math

"So what I get from the Netflix prize is that there are probably significant limits to recommender systems. Even the smartest don't do a whole lot better than the simple approaches, and a lot of work is required to eke out even a little more actual information from the morass of data.”

"When I finally contacted Andrew, I said to him one word: 'Polynomials.'"

...or just programming laymen

re non-10 denominations of money