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A short while ago I posted a quickthought that described a fantastic little article about the hidden architectural secrets that an architect put into his client’s house. The article contained the following ceaser shift cipher:

FDYDQ,WKHDUFKHU’VFKLOG;FXULRXP,EULJKW–BRXUTXLFHJLOGSLYRWVDQGOHDSVOLNHDGDOFHU.
WKHNHBWRSUHVHUYLQJFXULRXPLWB’VOLJKWLVWRORYHWKHTXHVWLRQDVPZFKDVWKHDQVZHU

I promptly started writing an excel program to help me solve it. Jesse then stepped in to help out a bit with some macro work. the end result is decidedly awesome.

Click below to download the excel sheet:

caesarcodebreak.xls

Try it out! You’ll have to use Microsoft excel and you’ll have to enable macros. But the result is a pretty sweet little program. Note: There are two sheets. the first is for all generic codes, the second sheet is specifically for shifted codes.

Surprisingly, Shamus was working on a program to solve ciphers at the same time. He did his in Labview. Check out a screenshot here.

Codes are sweet.

When you refer to a group of animals, whether it’s a herd, flock, or swarm, you’re using what are called collective nouns. At the pig roast on Saturday these collective nouns came up in conversation. Mika sent out a whole bunch via e-mail to share the excitement. Here are a few of my favorites. Enjoy!

a paddle of ducks
an implausibility of gnus
an ostentation of peacocks
a tower of giraffes
a dazzle of zebra
a murder of crows
a crash of rhinos
a troop of monkeys
a charm of finches
an ambush of tigers
a mischief of mice

fun! for a more complete list, click here.

I took the government census data and downloaded it to excel. I was interested in the number of 25-35 year old people in each state of these United States as a percentage of the population of that state. Specifically, I wanted to see how Connecticut ranked. The results? Not very good for us Nutmeggers.

Take a look!

Here’s some info.

Minimum: MAINE 11.46%
Maximum: UTAH* 16.03%
Average: 13.22%
Standard Deviation: 1.03%

An interesting sampling:
Connecticut? 11.65%
Mass? 12.89%
Rhode Island? 12.39%
Oregon: 14.06%
Arizona: 14.58%
Texas: 14.78%
Washington: 14.00%
North Carolina: 13.78%
New York: 13.10%

*oh those mormans. They’re so crazy.

Professor Sisson: “Have we figured out how to raise the melting point of Aluminum yet?”
Professor Apelian: “Yes we have. You just use a different Thermocouple. It works every time.”

HA!

At this point, I pledge to you internets, that I will teach my children to completely own unit conversions. Not metric to english junk, I’m talking unit analysis to bring your inch^3/second into Tons/Hr.

I think it is the single most important skill for engineers. I think it even beats out basic differentiation by 5×10^-14 Parsecs.

fun fact: what is a parsec? it stands for parallax of one second of an arc. Parallax is the act of seeing something in two different spots because you’re moving: perspective shift. So if you’re driving in your car, and you took two rapid photographs of a tree… once you’d downloaded your photographs you’d see that the tree was in two different spots. Parallax is an astronomical method of using this basic theory to try and figure out how far away we are from celestial objects. So, we could look at some distant star from Earth now… and then again in 6 months. Since the Earth has moved around the sun we can figure out how far away that object is - presuming we know how far we’ve gone and where the relative change in position is of the star. The actual parallax is half of the distance that the star has appeared to move.

So that explains the first half. The “one second of one arc” (or arcsecond) is just 1/60th of an arc minute. An arcminute is 1/60th of a degree. There are 360 degrees in a circle. That means that one arcsecond is 1/1,296,000 of a circle. So, a parsec is the distance that a star would be away from the earth for its parallax to equal 1/1,296,000 of a circle.

This comes out to be about 3.26 light years. Neat eh?

Jesse did some analysis to see the likelihood of anyone getting hit by that falling satellite.

check it out:

WORST CASE SCENARIO:

Assumptions:

No one is stacked, everyone is spread out (no two-story bldgs)
Everyone is adult (worst case, takes more area)
Avg adult human height: 166.5 cm (i took wiki’s stats by M/F and race, and average everything)
Avg adult human width: 46 cm (total guess)
People are rectangles lying down
The satellite is < or = size of a person (not true, but whatever)
World Pop: 6.5 billion
Earth Surface Area: 510,065,600 km^2

From that, I get a 1 in 100,000 chance that a person will be struck by the satellite
Also, the chances that a PARTICULAR person will get hit (i.e. YOU) is 1.5*10-15, or 1.5 in a quadrillion
NOT LIKELY BUD, and that's worst case. Well, the satellite probably has a bigger hit radius, let's say 10-12 ft, (twice the size of a person lying down), so then it would be 1 in 50K for any person, and 3 in a quadrillion for you, worst worst case.

A commenter on this page pegs it at around 1 in 82,000 by a different method (so we’re pretty close).

Check it out. Lichen versus Jellies.

Whoa!

This one turned out as expected I think.

The epic fight begins…

The response from my professor was hilarious:

“Hot Stuff Mike.”

(more…)

Tonight, as I drove along the long stretch of road from Longview to Dallas, Texas, I couldn’t help but wonder how far away the horizon is.

Now, I’m not completely math illiterate, so I decided to figure it out. The problem is… My answer doesn’t seem right. Perhaps I have done something wrong. See if any of you find a mistake in my method:

Assumptions:
The Earth is perfectly round
Our test subject is 5.8 feet tall.
Because the Earth is so big, the distance ‘x’ (shown below) is a close enough approximation of the arc length and actual driving distance to the horizon.

Okay! Calculation time!
According to Wikipedia, the radius of the earth is an average of about 3956.545 miles * 5280 ft/mile=
20890557.6 ft

Add 5.8 feet to that and we get a hypotenuse of 20890563.4 ft

according to Pythagoras
20890557.6^2 + x^2 = 20890563.4^2

or

436415396838917.76
+
x^2
=
436415639169419.56

so x^2 = 24330501.8

x is about equal to 15566.96 ft

Divide by 5280 and we get… 2.948 miles. That’s so… short… did I do something wrong?

DINOSAURS!

This weekend was decidedly mixed.

Thanksgiving was, of course, splendid. Any holiday that pulls family together and offers two days off from work gets a recommendation from me. Friday after an exciting breakfast with Abby and Ted, I got a haircut and then tried to zip back to CT in time for Kung Fu. I didn’t make it in time, so instead I went to Tony and Paulette’s place for some pizza and some Guitar Hero III.

Most of Saturday was spent researching my paper.

Let’s talk paper for a second.

The class is international business. What I need to do is write a 10 page single spaced paper that talks about something relating to international business. I want to write about intellectual property. My original thesis was an attempt to try and show that the sharing of intellectual property with developing countries is better for mankind. But right now, after a few weeks of research I want to say that really… we need something totally different. Capitalism based intellectual property hoarding seems to work, but it’s not very efficient. Peer Production seems genius and super efficient, but there are some fundamental difficulties that relate to what sorts of markets can benefit from creative donated collaboration.

If we look through the Kaleidoscope of Geekery, we’ll notice that Star Trek operated off of a Peer Production basis where the characters were not rewarded with monetary funds but instead with notoriety. Of course they had replicators for food. Star Wars was a capitalistic society. Perhaps my thesis should talk about what changes would be necessary from our current international business system if we were to start engaging in intergalactic business.

Anyway, my changing my thesis to “we need something new” is weak. It’s not quite specific enough - nor does it have as much to do with international business. So with a monster paper due in four days… I don’t know what to do.

Continuing with the weekend, Saturday night I watched the new Die Hard movie with the Scott family. It was hilariously fun. Sunday was spent working on the paper, doing chores, and playing about two hours of Rockband.

Now, it’s totally cool if you want to criticize me for playing Rockband when I have a huge paper due because Rockband… is probably the most amazing game ever. With Shaun on the guitar and me on the drums… well… it was two hours of intensity like none other.

At lunch this week Jocelyn and I were talking about text fonts and cities. The question is: If you had to choose a font to describe a city in its entirety, what font would you choose? Let’s take a look at Hartford, first we’ll start simply by describing the city, then we’ll try to find a font that screams ‘Hartford’

Hartford has a lot of insurance companies. Not many people live in the city and it’s about as far as you can get from ‘college town.’ It’s reasonably clean and seems to be a growing city. It has a good museum scene. It’s somewhat modern but it’s kind of tough to drive around. The public transportation is poor at best, but there’s a decent amount of parking.

Now for fonts… start by checking out this monster image of fonts:

now… think Hartford.

Hartford is too modern for a Times New Roman and too formal to be anywhere near Wingdings. Courier New isn’t a bad choice, but I think Hartford has enough complexity to it to escape the burdensome scenario where each letter takes up the exact same number of longitudinal pixels.* And obviously, Hartford is not a script font.

Then there’s Ariel. Not a bad choice really, it doesn’t have any serifs (I don’t think Hartford is quite worthy of serifs). It might be just a tad bit too boring for Hartford. It shouldn’t be a bold or italicized font. Century is too classy. Helvetica… Helvetica could work. So could Raavi.

I think I prefer Raavi.

What font do you think best describes your city?

*there’s a word for this type of font. Anyone know it?

I just found out* I have a 10 page paper due in my international business class Friday. AND I had already agreed to go to Karaoke tonight. I hope ear bursting Journey tunes will provide enough energy for me to stay up for the next 60 hours to write this paper.

*we were actually told about this long ago**. I just forgot entirely until a classmate reminded me.
**long ago = about 4 weeks. But really. I just found out*(***)
***recursive footnotes!!!

Work and Academics have created a significant barrier to my levels of fitness.

Lunch: instead of going to the gym as I normally do… I’ve been working on work and working on homework

After work: instead of going to Kung Fu, I’ve been doing homework and going to class

It’s been really annoying. It’s like, I only have a certain number of skill points and I need to choose which abilities should be focused on. do I keep up with my academics and career? or do I get into super great shape. (pictorial representation of decision).

Writing this down has increased my determination to overcome this barrier. I will renew my efforts to maintain fitness, education, and career. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m having trouble with some annoying algebra.

Suggestions?

If you’re like me, you hate hate hate it when Windows automatically restarts your computer to install updates. Especially if you usually stay on top of updates and often have about 6 projects open on your computer that are ready and waiting to be destroyed by Windows XP.

Well, fear not good friends. I have researched the solution.

Step 1: go to Start -> Run
Step 2: type gpedit.msc

This will bring you to group policy editor.

Step 3: Go to: Administrative Template/Windows Component/Windows Update

See the “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates Installations“?

Step 4: Right click on that and go to properties.

Enable, and you’re done.

Badda-Bing. Take that Windows.

Anyone who loves music and would consider themselves a member of the “occasionally paranoid” club has likely wondered if their computer software is secretly plotting against them.

Old Man Schenk decided to prove it once and for all. He wrote a quick computer program (in Ruby!) and science ensued.

Enjoy!

Great job Ryan!

This link requires a look:

Quintessential Geekdom