Not my usual fare for this venue, but it made me laugh.

Coolest thing ever!

From our legislature…

WHEREAS, Recent astronomical discoveries, including Pluto’s oblong orbit and the sighting of a slightly larger Kuiper Belt object, have led astronomers to question the planetary status of Pluto; and

WHEREAS, The mean-spirited International Astronomical Union decided on August 24, 2006, to disrespect Pluto by stripping Pluto of its planetary status and reclassifying it as a lowly dwarf planet; and

WHEREAS, Pluto was discovered in 1930 by an American, Clyde Tombaugh, at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, and this discovery resulted in millions of Californians being taught that Pluto was the ninth planet in the solar system; and

WHEREAS, Pluto, named after the Roman God of the underworld and affectionately sharing the name of California’s most famous animated dog, has a special connection to California history and culture; and

WHEREAS, Downgrading Pluto’s status will cause psychological harm to some Californians who question their place in the universe and worry about the instability of universal constants; and

WHEREAS, The deletion of Pluto as a planet renders millions of text books, museum displays, and children’s refrigerator art projects obsolete, and represents a substantial unfunded mandate that must be paid by dwindling Proposition 98 education funds, thereby harming California’s children and widening its budget deficits; and

WHEREAS, The deletion of Pluto as a planet is a hasty, ill-considered scientific heresy similar to questioning the Copernican theory, drawing maps of a round world, and proving the existence of the time and space continuum; and

WHEREAS, The downgrading of Pluto reduces the number of planets available for legislative leaders to hide redistricting legislation and other inconvenient political reform measures; and

WHEREAS, The California Legislature, in the closing days of the 2005-06 session, has been considering few matters important to the future of California, and the status of Pluto takes precedence and is worthy of this body’s immediate attention; now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Assembly of the State of California, That the Assembly hereby condemns the International Astronomical Union’s decision to strip Pluto of its planetary status for its tremendous impact on the people of California and the state’s long term fiscal health; and be it further Resolved, That the Assembly Clerk shall send a copy of the resolution to the International Astronomical Union and to any Californian who, believing that his or her legislator is addressing the problems that threaten the future of the Golden State, requests a copy of the resolution.

Good to see our legislators are on the case.

Link courtesy of Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog.

[tags]Astronomy,Humor[/tags]

Courtesy of Flutterby, it appears that the cryptography museum at Bletchley Park has actually completed construction of their Bombe, the machine designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman for the cracking of the German Enigma code during World War II. Cool.

I’ll have to put Bletchley on my list of sites to see.

[tags]Cryptography,Bletchley Park,Enigma[/tags]

While reading Beiler’s Recreations in the Theory of Numbers, I ran across this rather odd conjecture attributed to Goldbach: that all odd numbers are either prime, or can be expressed as the sum of a prime and twice a square. That seemed rather interesting. There were two known exceptions, in particular 5777 and 5993, which could not be so expressed. It turns out that even among primes, most primes can be written as a similar sum. Those that cannot are apparently called “Stern Primes”. I thought that I’d write a little Python gizmo to check that out.

Sure enough, one small Python script later, and 3m49s of runtime, we get….

3 is not the sum of a prime and twice a square
17 is not the sum of a prime and twice a square
137 is not the sum of a prime and twice a square
227 is not the sum of a prime and twice a square
977 is not the sum of a prime and twice a square
1187 is not the sum of a prime and twice a square
1493 is not the sum of a prime and twice a square
5777 is not the sum of a prime and twice a square
5993 is not the sum of a prime and twice a square

The first eight are all prime (in fact, the only known Stern primes). The last two are composite.
There are no other such numbers smaller than ten million (yes, the script tried them all).

You can read more about this conjecture here and the WIkipedia entry on Stern primes here.

[tags]Mathematics[/tags]

Addendum: I rewrote the program in C, and ran it up until max value = 1,073,741,824. The C version took only 1m41s on my faster workstation, and verified that there were no additional odd numbers that could not be so expressed that were smaller than 2^30th.

Some of the people at works are real choco-holics. Hence: Grilled chocolate sandwich. Their suggestion? Use pound cake instead of bread.

Damn, I’m off to lunch now.

A couple of days ago, I got bitten by the bug again to think about trying to actually commit some of my braincells to the learning of some Mayan hieroglyphs, and maybe make a program which actually could draw dates written in the Mayan long count calendar. To do that, I needed some bitmaps of the glyphs. Luckily, if you dig around, you can find a zip file with all sorts of Maya glyphs in it. An example glyph looks like:

Not bad, but not exactly pretty either. The resolution is pretty low, and it isn’t even antialiased. I had some idea that I could load this into a program for vector based image editing like inkscape and then trace the outlines, and indeed, if you import the bitmap, you can then use the “Trace Bitmap” function, and turn it into a nice .SVG format vector file. But there are over 1000 glyphs in that catalog, and doing each one separately seemed like it would be a real drag.

A tiny bit more research revealed that inkscape uses the “potrace” library, which you can also install as a standalone command-line program. Woohoo! It accepts simple black and white PBM files (use the netpbm utilities or ImageMagick to convert your gifs to PBM files) and can output in a variety of formats, including Postscript, SVG, or even antialiased PGM files. When I ran potrace on the bitmap above, and wrote out an antialiased pgm file, I got:

Much nicer. If you have a browser which supports SVG files, you can view it in its native format.

The conversion isn’t always perfect, but it seems to be a darned good start, and you can actually edit the SVG files to fix what minor problems remain.

[tags]Inkscape,Maya,Hieroglyps,Raster to Vector,potrace[/tags]

I’ve begun exploring Google Books a bit, since they promise to make many books which are out of copyright available for free download as PDF files. In that vein, I give you Lick’s Recreations in Mathematics, which isn’t nececessarily the best book on recreational math that I’ve seen, but it’s easy availability makes it worth a glance. Check it out.

I was trying to dust off some of my books (mostly unread and completely unabsorbed) about the Maya Calendar, and ran across Mesoweb Resources, which includes a nice introduction to Mayan hieroglyphics in PDF form that you can download and study. Nifty.

[tags]Mayan,Hieroglyphics[/tags]

Dummies Book Cover Generator/Maker 2006

Earlier I mentioned that I had come across a fix for the annoying Java permissions problem of my LG CU500. Yesterday, I finally got my USB cable, traipsed upstairs to my wife’s PC (the only one still running Windows) and performed the vital steps on my phone, with the net result that now my phone no longer nags me about allowing network connections every time. This makes using Opera Mini much more palateable, and makes Google Maps Mobile possible.

Of course, your mileage may vary, and if you screw up your phone while doing it, it’s not my fault.

[tags]LG CU500,Java,Opera Mini[/tags]