Couldn't agree more. Your comment about the weirdness of high-dimensional spaces is funny. I think this sort of stuff gets deployed for its high "Gee whiz!" fac

Couldn't agree more. Your comment about the weirdness of high-dimensional spaces is funny. I think this sort of stuff gets deployed for its high "Gee whiz!" factor. Not that it isn't interesting in its own right, but I fail to see what kind of a purchase it's going to give you on "data science"... The one example I know of re: insight is L1 regularization. The "spikiness" of the L1 unit ball in R^n for large n can be thought of as encouraging sparsity when using the L1 norm to regularize optimization problems.