All posts in Entertainment

  • January 8, 2010

    Crossword Puzzle Copies?

    (Image by chipgriffin)

    Matt Gaffney, a 15 year veteran of professional crossword puzzle writing, wrote an article in late November for Slate about the likeliness of two crossword puzzle creators replicating the same, or approximately the same, puzzle. Crosswords exhibit 180-degree rotational symmetry, meaning that “if you turn the grid upside down, the pattern of black squares will look the same as it does right-side up.” Couple that with a specifically themed puzzle (e.g. Halloween and Edgar Allen Poe), a certain number of long word entries, and general crossword rules (e.g. no two letter words are allowed), the probability may be higher than you think.

    In a nutshell, Gaffney found that he had inadvertently used many similar aspects of a puzzle that had been released earlier in the year, and thus traces several reasons why this may have been the case. One interesting twist to the story is what happens when Gaffney asks a third crossword creator to write a similarly themed puzzle. Do you think that this third puzzle turned out to have similar entries to the first two? Read to find out!

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  • October 6, 2009

    Edgar Allan Poe and Cryptography

    (Image by orayzio)

    I’m trying to fill this autumn with plenty of seasonal activities, and so I’ve decided to try to read the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe during the month of October. I’ve also been reading some biographical information about the writer, and must admit that I had never heard about the cryptographic challenge that Poe issued to readers in the Alexander’s Weekly Messenger in December 1839. R. Morelli has a fantastic overview of this cipher challenge here. In sum, Poe proposed that “he could solve any simple substitution cipher that readers of the magazine cared to submit. A simple substitution cipher is one in which the same symbol stands for the same letter of the alphabet in the concealed message.”

    It appears that Poe did very well with the challenge.

    Also, fans of Poe’s writing will know about the short story The Gold Bug, and how this story of a treasure hunt relies on the solving of a cryptogram. Poe’s works are in the public domain, so it’s possible to read this story online through Google Books here, or to download the story (amongst others) from Project Gutenberg here.

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  • May 28, 2009

    Craig Damrauer’s New Math

    (Image by Lost Archetype)

    I’ve seen Craig Damrauer’s New Math pictures across a bunch of different places on the web, and they always make me take pause. A lot of them are downright hilarious, while others are more thoughtful. Check this one out:

    newmath

    I actually laughed out loud the first time I saw this. And then I thought about pirates in recent news history. And then I thought about Pirates of the Caribbean. And then I realized that in my brain there was a giant chasm between these two impressions.

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  • February 22, 2009

    LibriVox Public Domain Audio Recordings

    (Image by SusanAstray)

    My post from a few days ago that mentioned the public domain status of Bertrand Russell’s “The Problems of Philosophy” reminded me to check whether LibriVox had any audio recordings of Russell’s works that are now in the public domain. If you’ve never heard of LibriVox, the site explains that:

    LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

    The site has some amazing content, including a complete audio copy of “The Problems of Philosophy” (as well as a few other Russell titles). So for those of you who prefer to listen to audio books, there are some great philosophy, logic, and mathematics related books are available. Here are links for a few:

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  • February 19, 2009

    BBC Dangerous Knowledge Documentary

    (Image by BBC)

    In 2007 BBC Four released a documentary named Dangerous Knowledge, which is summarized on the official page as follows:

    In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

    Sounds uplifting, huh? Well, David Malone, the British filmmaker, does a really great job tracing how mathematical ideas tie together the four individuals through history. While some of the films claims are a bit…over the top and dramatic, overall the content is solid and quite informative. There’s a lot of information given not only about mathematics, but about how these four individuals dealt with various difficult aspects of their personal lives. These videos may still be up on YouTube, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for them being there for long given the copy protection issues involved. Having said that, I won’t even attempt to embed one of the videos here. But you CAN watch a clip directly from the BBC 4 official page by clicking here. If provided with the opportunity, you should take advantage of checking it out the program in its entirety.

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  • January 15, 2009

    Carl Friedrich Gauss Facts

    (Image by threedots)

    I’ve come across a few sites that list facetious facts about Gauss, similar to the wonderful Chuck Norris Facts that we’ve all come to love. Gauss, if you don’t know it, was one of those hyper-intelligent individuals who may have in fact been a space alien. It’s the only natural explanation, right? It’s hard to tell who originated the facts, but the two people who have listed the most are Matt Heath and Andrew Dolphin. My favorite two facts from these links are:

    • Gauss never needs the axiom of choice, and
    • Gauss didn’t discover the normal distribution, nature conformed to his will.

    I thought I would give it a go as well. So here are 20 original Gauss facts coined by me this evening in a state of tiredness. Please keep in mind that if you understand at least 3 of these, you’re every bit as much of a geek as I am. Fair warning.

    • Gauss can trisect an angle with a straightedge and compass.
    • Gauss can get to the other side of a Möbius strip.
    • “Uncountably Infinite” was a phrase coined to explain the intelligence of Gauss.
    • There are no Fermat Primes greater than 65,537 because Gauss saw that Fermat was on to something, and well…he put an end to that.
    • For Gauss, arithmetic is consistent AND complete.
    • It only takes Gauss 4 minutes to sing “Aleph-Null Bottles of Beer on the Wall”.
    • When Gauss tells you that he’s lying, he’s telling the truth.
    • Gauss once played himself in a zero-sum game and won $50.
    • For Gauss, point nine repeating equals whatever he wants it to equal.
    • Gauss did not prove theorems, he simply stared at them until they yielded their solutions.
    • Occam’s Razor – The principle stating that the explanation of any phenomenon is equal to the explanation that came out of Gauss’ mouth.
    • Gauss drinks his beer from a Klein bottle.
    • For Gauss, there are no indefinite integrals.
    • Gauss once started falling asleep in his complex analysis class. The result…singularities.
    • Imaginary numbers are simply those that Gauss has not deemed worthy of existence.
    • The shortest distance between two points is Gauss.
    • Once, while playing chess, Gauss solved the Knights Problem in six moves.
    • Gauss is neither a Frequentist nor a Bayesian. For Gauss, the probability is always 1.
    • Fermat once made Gauss angry. The result…Fermat’s Last Theorem.
    • In Gauss’ mind, there is no such branch of mathematics as “Number Theory”. This is because he knows it as “Number Facts”.

    Have any more? Leave one in the comments!

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