Why? has bubbled incredibly beneath the surface for far too long. They now have 3 LPs and 2 EPs without ever garnering major attention even amongst the indie crowd. With almost no “mainstream” recognition “Elephant Eyelash” was one of the best albums of 2005 that no one heard. Perhaps this was due to the tepid 7.8 from “Pitchfork Media” for the wonderfully energetic, breakthrough LP or the refusal by front man Yoni Wolf (Why? himself) to conform to normal indie musicality. My guess is that despite the fact that Chris Dahlen at Pitchfork seems more concerned with understanding Why? (”…I finally understand how he feels.”) what really throws people is the genre bending, musical avalanche unleashed on Elephant Eyelash and, more importantly, this year’s “Alopecia.” Why? is tracing out a wonderful arc with every album rising higher than the last and Alopecia makes the trend solid. The quartet of Yoni Wolf (the original holder of the moniker “Why?”), his brother Josiah, Matt Meldon, and Doug McDiarmid are ready for some attention, which they seem to be getting. Or at least the indie critic establishment is taking them seriously or at least writing more seriously about them as can be seen here and better yet here.
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From Microsoft. Yes this box (pictures here and here, apologize for the crappy resolution iPhone takes terrible pictures in low light) was placed on my desk in my office at work last week. I still don’t know who it’s from, but it made me laugh. There’s also a web site associated with it: http://hey-genius.com/. It sort of reminds me of that Google billboard advertisements for people. You know, this one:
{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com
The solution is easy. A really cheap easy solution is here, though there are others. Please forgive the formatting of that post … it was a long time ago and vdov.net has changed substantially since those days.
Also, check this picture out. I took this at a gas station in West Lafayette, IN about a week ago. See if you can figure out why I think it’s funny.
Vdov seems slightly more alive as of late. Cheers.
I don’t normally just repost something that someone has already done. However, I thought that at least someone might like this little gem about the calculation for the date of Easter. The Wikipedia article also goes into a lot of depth. I had no idea this was such a complicated endeavor or that ancient people had spent so much time calculating the occurrence of this most glorious date. My absolute favorite part of the whole calculation is the beautiful condensation of all of this math into a nice easy to read, no math involved, histogram. The only anomaly seems to be Easter dates that fall on the 26th of April are moved to the 19th. The upshot of all of this is that this very Easter (today) happens to be the earliest Easter that any of us sad mortals will ever experience barring massive increases in human longevity since the next march 23rd Easter will be 2160. The earliest date possible for Easter is March 22nd which last happened in 1818 and won’t happen again until 2285. We can all rest easy though because barring rapture most of us will still be around in 2038 when we have the latest Easter of our lifetime (barring once again ludicrous increases in human longevity or singularity events). For those that don’t care a whit about Easter… well have fun roasting in the fires of hell for all eternity. I hope all your fancy math comforts you then.
There has been a lot of talk on the tubes lately about the traffic flow problem, specifically a part of this problem that we’re all familiar with: complete stoppages that seem to have no explanation. Some recent links on the popularized tubes (aka, not the science tubes), seem to indicate that there has been some incredible breakthrough in our understanding on this subject. For example:
Slashdot: Scientists solve the mystery of traffic jams
This is fine and well, but unfortunately these people fail to mention the most important work on the subject which initially came from the theory of nonlinear wave equations, and was more or less solved in 1974. It was summed up in a classic text on linear and nonlinear waves so titled and written G. B. Whitham. The book is out of print but it’s around on Amazon as well as other stores and any self-respecting science library should have this book sitting on the shelves. The main problem is one of wave propagation leading to “shock fronts” in traffic. If one person brakes for no reason, shock waves develop and travel backwards (for most flow problems) relative to the moving frame of the cars. Consider a velocity function for cars as a function of the density.
It’s quite simple to assume that 
must be a decreasing function of 
which starts from some maximum value at 
and decreases to zero as 
, and the maximum density flow 
occurs at some specific value of . Guess what? Actual observations peg the value of 
at about 255 vehicles per mile and the maximum flow density 
at about 80 (or 1500 vehicles per hour). Amazingly these values scale in a near linear fashion as lanes are added to the flow on a simple highway. It turns out the maximum flow rate is actually achieved at about 20 miles per hour. If we then develop a simple expression for the propagation velocity:
Since the derivative of the velocity function is less than 0, propagation of shock waves in a traffic flow travel backwards, and according to Whitham, “warn the drives of disturbances ahead”. Unfortunately this has some pretty negative consequences for you and I, the driver, who will inevitably be fed up with random stoppages in the road for no particular reason. Whitham continues to make some elementary arguments on the status of a wave near the stoppage density of traffic on a road. It turns out that the second derivative of the density flow function is less than zero, which means that a local increase of density propagates backwards, and shock forms somewhere behind the initial disturbance.
Now I’m sure that people have made some improvements in the mathematical description of this problem since the pioneering work of Whitham, but don’t be fooled: pretty much everything you read about “new developments” in this area in the popular media have been solved for more than 4 decades.
Cheers.
Living in Chicago I’ve had some interesting experiences. For instance, someone tried to mug me on the train. I survived unharmed and with the three dollars I had in my pocket. Luckily the mugger only wanted an iPod from me (the muggee) and I didn’t have one. I can only speculate that he had stolen someone else’s iTunes account information.
It took some not-so-gentlemanly banter to convince the mugger to move along. Had his assault on me escalated, he might have received a smack on the head with the maths text I was reading. I didn’t remember until later that you should never bring a maths book to a gun (or knife) fight. Imagine an analog of the game rock-paper-scissors called gun-knife-maths!
Last week I drove to Midway Airport. While stopped at a light I made a phone call and a man approached my car. He wanted money so I kindly signaled him to move along. He ignored my polite gesture, knocked on my window and yelled something unintelligible. I stared at him blankly. As he turned to go I noticed he was holding a cell phone to his ear. It all made sense. Apparently his cell phone company is over charging him too. He must have been yelling “Can your hear me now?”
There have also been a number of instances of indecent exposure (not by me) during my train rides to and from home; public urination seems to often happen around me or immediately preceding my arrival. So often, I’m beginning to believe that I am a superhero whose super power is inducing public urination. Admittedly, I need to work on better harnessing my power in case I have to battle a supervillain; it’s well known that most other super powers are deactivated by soggy (external) underwear and public humiliation.
Three months and counting, until I move to Cambridge, England. I wonder if my super power will work in the UK.
Update:
Rock-paper-scissors (RPS) is based on the non-transitive property: R > S, S > P but R < P. If RPS were transitive: R > S, S > P and R > P. Transitive RPS wouldn’t be much fun: rock always wins.
Similarly gun-knife-maths (GKM) should be non-transitive so that G > K, K > M and G < M. Correction to my original post: Bring a maths book to a gun fight but never to a knife fight.