Thane Plambeck

Phoenix Mars Lander 2007

link

Klarner, Polya, de Bruijn

Kara Lynn Klarner sent me a scan of a photo of the mathematicians David Klarner, George Polya, and NG de Bruijn. It was taken on the campus of Stanford University in May 1973.

Post-Modern Algebra

link

The standard twentieth-century approach to algebra followed the pattern set by van der Waerden's extremely influential 1931 German Springer text Modern Algebra...

arXiv paper

Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google

Abstract:

We have found a method to automatically extract the meaning of words and phrases from the world-wide-web using Google page counts. The approach is novel in its unrestricted problem domain, simplicity of implementation, and manifestly ontological underpinnings. The world-wide-web is the largest database on earth, and the latent semantic context information entered by millions of independent users averages out to provide automatic meaning of useful quality. We demonstrate positive correlations, evidencing an underlying semantic structure, in both numerical symbol notations and number-name words in a variety of natural languages and contexts. Next, we demonstrate the ability to distinguish between colors and numbers, and to distinguish between 17th century Dutch painters; the ability to understand electrical terms, religious terms, emergency incidents, and we conduct a massive experiment in understanding WordNet categories; the ability to do a simple automatic English-Spanish translation.

Domain name of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, United States Department of the Treasury

moneyfactory.com.

[Complete with convenient, downloadable images of the new $50 bill. PDF]

Also: Wikipedia article on the "EURion constellation," or special images on US and Euro notes meant to be detectable by software inside scanners:

Users of recent versions of image editors, such as Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, discovered that these also refuse to process banknotes. According to an article in Wired magazine, the banknote detection code in these applications, called the Counterfeit Deterrence System (CDS), was designed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group and supplied to companies such as Adobe as a binary module. However, experiments by Steven J. Murdoch and others showed that this banknote detection code does not rely on the EURion pattern. It detects other features of banknote designs that have yet to be described in public.

[Also: counterfeit detection pen]

Uday Hussein and the Wood Chipper

In the latest issue of Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn writes:

Discussing an Iraqi fakir touted by the Bush administration, I recently wrote that "In atrocity stories there are some things that don't ring true, even when dealing with such well-credentialed butchers as Saddam and his sons. Take the story, subsequently identified as one concocted by a Western intelligence agency, that Uday had put some of his victims through a wood chipper. Anyone using these chippers knows the damn things jam if inconvenienced by anything with a diameter larger than a stick of asparagus...

....Uday's chipper, whose origin can probably be traced to a scene in the movie Fargo, just didn't passed muster..."

I was being slightly frivolous about the woodchipper, but the letters poured in.

Then one of the letters:

Dear Mr Cockburn, Your fine web piece of Jan 8-9 contains a factual error that you might wish to be aware of. Although the residential, light-commercial, tree-service-type wood chipper might jam if fed a human body (they are designed to chew up brush and limbs), the type used in land clearing (the source of woodchips we use for playground surfacing) and pulp-chip operations would not stutter if fed a regiment—one at a time, of course.

And then a pointer to a company called Morbark, which offers this customer testimonial:

One long-time Morbark customer put it this way: "If you're serious about chipping wood or grinding wood, Morbark is the only way to go."

added later (and not for the squeamish): A Darwin Award

innw

Mysterious billboard in San Jose:

Click the photo.

"I see. ICs? What, Chips? What kind of chips?"

I don't think I want to hear more

From today's Palo Alto Daily News:

Basic Cryptanalysis

*FM 34-40-2

FIELD MANUAL
NO 34-40-2 HEADQUARTERS
DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
Washington, DC, 13 September 1990

more

quoting shakespeare

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I were dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! what the dickens! but me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

(Bernard Levin. From The Story of English. Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil. Viking: 1986).

via joshua

this tls article (PDF) by Ronald Wright: "Fools' Paradise: Easter Island's unlearned lesson."

two responses to the misspelling "becuase"

(1) Dvorak-analytic [blame the mechanism]:

The right hand's trigger-finger loses patience at "U", and enters the stage before the quartet of left-hand letters "B", "E", "C", and "A" can complete their lines. [naturally, I prefer this explanation]

(2) Poetic-emotional [curse the wor(l)d]

link [not too bad, either]

What's wrong with this web page?

link

[Give up? Read the answer]

A question posed about online course management systems

Course Management Systems: Trapped Content Silos or Sharing Platforms? (PDF)

An excerpt

However, while more and more faculty and programs have come to rely upon course management systems over the past few years, rapid technology and business changes (mergers, elimination of products, etc.) have brought about a sense of discomfort in the community.

Questions arise: 1) How invested is my institution in one platform? 2) If I put my material in a CMS, can I get it out? 3) What happens if my institution switches systems? 4) How do I share materials between systems? 5) If I have just arrived from an institution that uses a different CMS, how do I use what I have already created? 6) How can my content development work be "future proofed" against CMS changes?

The answer to these questions is as follows

1) overinvested.
2) probably not.
3) you lose everything.
4) you don't, easily.
5) you can't.
6) don't use a "course management system" for pedagogic material:

WRITE HTML INSTEAD

We've arrived at the answer to the question posed by this paper: Trapped Content Silos.

Strawberry Tsunami vs Strawberry Nirvana

Gloria noticed that they're not selling the "Strawberry Tsunami" flavor any more at the Jamba Juice in the Tresidder student union on the Stanford campus. It might have been replaced by something called "Strawberry Nirvana." You can still buy a Strawberry Tsunami in Hawaii. But on another web page for a Concord, CA shopping mall, it looks like "Strawberry Tsunami" and "Strawberry Nirvana" are different drinks.

Second Isomorphism Theorem

Note to self:

click me and don't forget me! otherwise you'll write more useless Mathematica

[Yellow Peril credit: Stanley Burris and H. P. Sankappanavar, A Course in Universal Algebra, Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics 78, 1981]

Cheney at Auschwitz

"The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower..."

cnn

mathematical headache du jour

might not something in this possibly help me extend this to a theory of the misere mex rule?

greg writes

You'd expect this from google, not amazon. They have a yellow pages service with pictures of the storefronts and some ability to "walk" up and down the street:

link

Fifty Years of Hacks

I'm sorry I missed this talk by Edward Fredkin this afternoon at the Stanford CS dept.

By "Hack" we mean a modest effort that yields a surprisingly big result, the "hacker" is known to very few and the result is hopefully amusing. In this case the hacker always meant well, but...