Dwolla, Tesla, Math Education and Earthquake Prediction

Everyone now and then I post a few recent interesting tech links with some comments. Most of the links usually come from Hacker News. Today, I was able to paste in the 4 links quickly due to Email All Tabs, a life-saving (or second-saving) extension. I may be a bit biased about this extension, since I recently made it and submitted it to the Chrome store. Future version of the extension may include more features (such as the ability to include many long links). Anyways here are the links of the day:

blog.dwolla.com/masspay-launces-with-10-new-partners
Dwolla, the practically free payment provider, announces a new product for mass-payments. I always thought the fees Paypal and the credit companies charge seem somewhat high. They often take around 3% + transaction fees just for handling the money. I wonder if money changers in medieval times charged that much for providing a similar service that also included currency conversion:

In the market, most large transactions were done not by cash/coins, but by transfer order of funds on the books kept at the local money changer(s). After a market/fair ended, merchants gathered at the local money changers and withdrew their deposit in their own different currencies. The rate of exchange between different foreign currencies and the local one were fixed between the opening and the closing days of the market.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_changer

teslamotors.com/blog/tesla-approach-distributing-and-servicing-cars
Tesla Motors does not feel its sufficient to invent a new class of electric cars, they also want to create a new model for selling them. They have managed to completely skip the standard car-dealer controlled sales process. Car dealers have too much legal protection from competition, so it's nice to see someone challenging them. In this post, Tesla's CEO diplomatically explains that he understands the protectionist car-dealer laws, but they do not apply to Tesla, which does not deal with car-dealers. 

refsmmat.com/articles/unreasonable-math.html
Obligatory link about math education.~ This somewhat long post says math is about rules that can be used as Lego blocks to build things, while schools just get people to memorize things that have been built. Its true that math education often just consists of memorization, though its often the rules that are memorized. It may be difficult for many people to learn how to wield math, so the educations system just settles on getting them to act like machines (see my early post on this). I think math education needs to be taught in different ways to different people, depending on their aptitude and inclination. 

bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20025626
Italian scientists convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to prison for incorrectly predicting that an earthquake wouldn't be so bad. Seems pretty crazy, but I didn't look into the details.