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Math problem of the week.
By cookla, March 5, 2010 3:00 pm
A faulty car odometer proceeds from digit 3 to digit 5, always skipping the digit 4, regardless of position. For example, after traveling one mile the odometer changed from 000039 to 000050. If the odometer now reads 002010, how many miles has the car actually traveled?
Problem courtesy of John Boyer.
My solution is in the comments.
Another two feet
By cookla, March 2, 2010 9:57 am
Got hit with another two feet of snow over the weekend. This picture was snapped on Friday 2/26 around 9:30PM with my Nikon.
Why The Internet Will Fail (1995)
By cookla, March 1, 2010 8:53 pm
In 1995, Clifford Stoll, PhD wrote an article for Newsweek about the rise of the internet. According to Stoll, this technology was a bunch of crazy hype and would never catch on. It seems like he was 100% wrong about every point he made. It’s fun to read through and see how the scenarios he thinks will never exist are now apart of everyday life.
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Read the full article here: link
Google’s Search Algorithm
By cookla, February 24, 2010 9:36 am
Chances are that you, and everyone you know, uses Google at least once a day. Everyone in my life, from my 9-year old niece to the 81-year old grandmother, uses Google. However, it’s no surprise that most user’s think of the worlds most famous search engine as magic. The simple text bar and “Google Search” button are a lot smarter then most people think. Stephen Levy got an inside look at Google’s search algorithm and wrote up his experience in a fascinating Wired feature.
There are some beautifully complex subtleties that you never think about. Take the synonym system, for example:
Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”
The full article covers everything from the start, through the present, and how they’re using an internal demo fair called CSI (Crazy Search Ideas) to step into the future. Find out just how smart Google is and how is it constantly becoming smarter.
More info: link
Solar Eclipse Photography
By cookla, February 16, 2010 2:08 pm
Photographer/scientist Miloslav Druckmüller and his team specialize in capturing images of solar eclipses. Pictured above is one photograph that compiles nine images, taken on July 22, 2009 from the Marshall Islands. Druckmüller writes:
Solar eclipse photography if one of the most difficult tasks of astronomical photography. There are at least three reasons for that. The first and main one is the extreme contrast which makes impossible to record the phenomenon on a single image. Neither classical nor digital photography have the ability to master the brightness ratio which is necessary for successful eclipse photography. The second reason is little chance for making experiments. If anything gets wrong it may take years to get an opportunity for a new experiment. The last but not the least reason is the fact that processing of images taken during total eclipse is very complicated and time consuming work with needs of one purpose software being developed specially for this aim.
more info: link
Math problem of the week.
By cookla, February 12, 2010 2:52 pm
The fifth and eighth terms of a geometric sequence of real numbers are 7! and 8! respectively. What is the first term?
Problem courtesy of John Boyer.
My solution is in the comments.
Grizzly Bear: Two Weeks
By cookla, February 10, 2010 8:31 pm
Artist: Grizzly Bear
Song: Two Weeks
Album: Veckatimest
Year: 2009
Director: Patrick Daughters
Just watch every second of this video and let it creep you out..
Themocracy