All you budding computer scientists our there are no doubt dying for me to resolve last months cliffhanger. As I stated last time, my goal with this series of posts is to describe the PCP Theorem in plain English. The PCP Theorem is a major result in the field of computational complexity, but to really […]
When you visit this blog, your computer sends a message to the computer that hosts this site. That computer, in turn, responds with the priceless content currently being displayed by your web browser. This simple exchange, in essence, is the purpose of the internet; it provides a way for computers talk.
With so very many computers […]
Even a non-fan like myself is aware that Roger Clemens is currently testifying before congress, responding to the Mitchell Report’s allegation of steroid use. His decision to testify is a bold move to be sure.
To aid in his defense, the Clemens team has assembled the The Clemens Report, which—surprise surprise— concludes that Clemens late-career performance […]
I was all set to write about this Science Times article (don’t worry, I’ll get around to that later), when this monstrosity was brought to my attention. This article is fairly incoherent, but the gist of it, as far as I can tell, is that astronomers don’t yet have a theory that explains why the […]
About a year after my French friend Luc arrived in the states, he told me that he had basically adjusted to nonmetric units, with one exception, miles per gallon. In Europe not only do they measure fuel in liters and distance in kilometers, but they also measure fuel efficiency in liters per kilometer (not kilometers […]
I haven’t posted for a while, but all that’s about to change. My longtime friend David Goodman recently managed to get an article in Sunday’s Times, so I should at least be able to churn out a few blog posts.
According to Dave (and his team of experts) the last 70 years may soon be viewed […]
Today on Freakonomics, Steven Levitt describes an alternative way to do multiplication. It’s also explained in this Wikipedia entry. Basically it’s a way of doing multiplication in binary (meaning base 2), even though you start with numbers written in base 10. In other words, you write one number as a sum of powers of 2 […]
Steven Dubner wrote a post today highlighting the bursty nature of the linescore for the Rangers recent 30 to 3 victory over the Orioles. Knowing that the Rangers scored 30 runs, Steven says he would have predicted an inning-by-inning score that looked something like 4 3 1 0 5 6 3 5 3, but the […]
Yesterday I rambled on about Facebook in lieu of discussing a New York Times article explaining why women and men must have the exact same average number of heterosexual partners, despite what survey’s reveal. Unfortunately the article fails to acknowledge the difference between a medians and averages, nor does it offer any real explanation for […]
Any one who knows me knows I’ve spent most of my life doing two things, watching television and doing math. As such, I was already well aware that actress Danica McKellar (i.e. Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years) was a published mathematician. Today I learned that she has also written a middle school math textbook […]