Primer

Very complicated movie, and props to them for making it for $7K.

Drawing 3d and 4d graphs

Very nice.

5 min chocolate cake

Microwave? Check
Coffee cup? Check
Ok, Go.

Thanks, Martin Gardner

Thanks for 95 good years. RIP.

Magna Carta in NY

I didn't know it still existed.

Write the future -- Nike Ad

If you like soccer, this is a very happy three minutes.

Sand sculpture

This has made the rounds, but it is really good. Something about the fact that the pictures are made in real-time makes it part of a shared experience that is more powerful. Kseniya Simonova from Ukraine's Got Talent.

Jane Siberry Music

All available for download free.

http://www.janesiberry.com/janesiberry/music.html

What should I take and listen to first?

Peabody's Law

Small is still small when it is a little bigger.

-- p. 92 By Grit and Grace by Reverdy Whitlock c. 1988

This may be the disruptive force in Education

A guy, a whiteboard, a webcam; Panama!

This guy (Kahn. No, not that Kahn.) has stripped school down to the essentials.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

Fashion is made to become unfashionable

Excellent quote from Coco Chanel, from The Altantic. The reverse also holds true, as seen in the appearance of Dragonball Z t-shirts at a fancy downtown NYC boutique.

Kids need facts

Camille Paglia on education. Thanks to Mike Bates HH '81 for the pointer.

Also a good essay from Dorothy Sayers on a classical education (Thanks, Mike, for this, too).

Finding number of divisors of large numbers

Problem 12 was taking a long time to run (too long to fit within the 1 minute execution benchmark), because I was checking every integer value less than n to determine whether it was a factor. However, when I changed the program to check only up to the square root of n, then assuming that factors come in pairs (unless the square root itself is an integer), then it ran much faster. Probably five seconds for the whole thing, down from not finishing in over an hour. I guess that since the final value was over 76 million, it was taking a long time to do the calculation for every triangle number up to that and then checking all the values up to 76 million. Also got a chance to review casting and thinking about doing calculations outside loops whenever possible, so that they don't have to be done every time inside the loop.

The Savages

Better than I expected, not because I thought it would be bad, but because I wasn't in the mood for a serious movie and I really liked it anyway. Both Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are great.

Machine made out of pure awesome

It was great in its original form, but even better now that it's made out of legos.

In search of a better algorithm for finding factors

Problem 12 has me stuck. The obvious algorithm for finding factors of numbers is too slow to find the first triangle number (1, 1+2, 1+2+3, etc.) to have 500 factors. There should be a solution that takes less than a minute, but Brute Force is not the answer, since they are not distributed in any sort of pattern that I can see. I can't think about it any more today, but I'll be chewing it over in my subconscious (in theory). Or maybe I'll just be thinking about how to go 7-under-par in Wii Golf.

Nuke the slick

I love being an American. Are there any problems explosions can't solve?

Thank You, Rolling Stone

"We gave these people nearly a trillion bailout dollars, and no one knows what service they actually provide beyond fraud, gross self-indulgence and the occasional transparently insincere public apology."

Whether or not you agree with them, that's some good writing.

Actually, I like this quote almost as much:

These guys couldn't find the truth if it was sitting in their lap playing the ukulele . . . .

Problem 11

This one was harder than it needed to be. Take a 20x20 array of numbers between 0 and 99, and find the largest product of four numbers in a row -- horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. The program was actually fine, but I forgot to feed it the initial array. Not even smart enough to rise to the level of a rookie move. I was distracted, which (according to The Phantom Tollbooth) would have landed me in the Doldrums.

Benford's Law

The longer you stare at this, the cooler and stranger it gets.

"Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty. This distribution of first digits arises whenever a set of values has logarithms that are distributed uniformly, as is approximately the case with many measurements of real-world values."

We Are Happy To Serve You

The designer of the NYC coffee cup died (Leslie Buck).