brainwagon

Project Gutenberg has released transcripts of every President’s State of the Union addresses, starting with a more important George W.

I call bullsh*. Shuttle astronaut John Young made the following claim: The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You’re 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event [...]

The GCHQ has a bit of a Christmas challenge: break the code they have on their website, and be entered in a drawing for winning a copy of Simon Singh’s latest book. Cool. Check it out! Jeff and I might have something to do over the new year.

Bristol Centre for Applied Nonlinear Mathematics | Publications | 2004 | Abstract of preprint 2004.3 This paper explains how one can crochet the Lorenz manifold, the two-dimensional stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system. My grandmother taught me to crochet when I was only five or six. I wonder how long it would [...]

Here is an interesting early paper on the justification, implementation, analysis and use of random number generators, written in 1959. The resulting machine generated about 5000 bits per second, not bad! Via Boing Boing. By the way, random numbers are still cool.

In trying to fix his previous noise problems, your host appears to have squelched that a bit, but ends up with clippy audio. Sigh. More stuff: My KVM switch died. Double sigh. I expand a bit more about my rant against Lisa Shapiro and her NY Times editorial. Chatted about TinyP2P and MoleSter. I thought [...]