The Wall Street Journal has a story about a coded message that was sent to Thomas Jefferson by his friend Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania which apparently remained unsolved until 2007 when Dr. Lawren Smithline a professional cryptologist turned his attention (and the power of a computer) to the problem.
It’s been one of the wettest springs and early summers I can remember and the variability in weather from hour to hour has been very unusual as well. Day after day for nigh on two months we’ve seen rain showers, thunderstorms, and clouds punctuated infrequently by short periods of beautifully cool and sunny weather. Summer seems to have been put on hold in favor of a perpetual April. All in all it’s been more like England and Ireland around here than New York of late. But why is this happening? Here’s what I found:
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Just thought some of you might be interested in this photo gallery I found on the LI Press website. Apparently one of their reporters was allowed to tour the facility and take a bunch of photos. I had never seen the inside of the place and it’s been fully decommissioned since 1994. There are several pages of pics, so don’t miss the little links to the other pages at the bottom of the page. The Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant was finished in 1985, it was forced to close without ever generating any electricity when safety concerns were raised by anti-nuclear groups over the proposed evacuation plan after the Three Mile Island incident in Harrisburg, PA. In 2005, LIPA dedicated two 200,000 kWh wind turbines on the grounds of the facility and connected them to the grid. The nuclear reactor would have generated 820 MW.
Ahmadinejad and his fundamentalist cronies are doing their darnedest to blame the west for the unrest in their nation right now but thankfully, the current administration has so far avoided the saber rattling that defined the last 8 years of foreign policy. Obama has instead calmly expressed his faith in democratic ideals and the right of Iranians to work out their own problems. A less interventionist US policy effectively weakens the Iranian government’s arguments. Threats of American military action would almost certainly lead to a weakening of the opposition as parties unite patriotically to fight the common enemy.
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With just a personal computer and the recurring price of a broadband internet connection you can sit in on a vast number of lectures by scholars from MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, or Yale (though you won’t get course credit for doing so). With the videos and course materials made available by these schools FOR FREE over the internet, given enough time and motivation anyone can attend an Ivy League school – virtually. Even if sitting through 14 hours of Calculus lectures isn’t your idea of a good time, there are a vast number of excellent one-off lectures available on a whole range of topics, most by noted scientists in their fields. I watched a great talk about the current status of solar energy technologies the other night, and another one recently on the science of aging. College lectures and talks are not the kind of thing you will find anywhere among the 140 or so typical channels of garbage on television – but they are out there on the internet, for instant on-demand viewing for inquisitive folks.
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I watched a great ireport wherein the question is posed why it is that the guy who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum and the the guy who shot the abortion doctor recently weren’t on a terrorist watch list since they had both committed similar acts in the past. It seems like we’ll send in the marines if the terrorists are muslim, but when they’re old white guys we don’t care?
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A friend recently took a ‘quiz’ on Facebook called ‘How common is your birthday?’ It turns out this is a classic math problem. This particular friend’s result to the quiz was 6% (though the sample size was not listed). From wikipedia (see Same birthday as you): “The probability q(n) that someone in a room of n other people has the same birthday as a particular person (for example, you), is given by q(n)=1-((365-1)/365)^n. Substituting n = 23 gives about 6.1%, which is less than 1 chance in 16.” Which might mean that 23 other people have used that app in some given pool of people (his friends? his friends using the app? everybody using the app?) that the programmer chose. “For a greater than 50% chance that one person in a roomful of n people has the same birthday as you, n would need to be at least 253.” Teachers love this one in college in big lecture halls that might hold as many as 300 kids when they’re doing probability theory because folks intuitively think that in a group of 300 the chance of someone else having their same birthday is going to be near 1, but as it turns out it’s higher than 50%! The teacher can pick anyone and there’s a better than half a chance somebody else has that birthday too.
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