The 3n+1 domain
In an earlier post, I said: The second proof depends on the (unproved) fact that lowest-term fractions are unique. This is actually a very strong theorem. It is true in the integers, but not in...
View ArticlePetard corrections
Eric Cholet has written in to mention that he is familiar with the fried choux pastry that I mentioned yesterday, but under the name pets de nonne, not pets de soeurs, as I said. (Nonne, of course, is...
View ArticlePreventing multiple SMTP connections
As I believe I said somewhere else, I have a lot of ideas, and only about one in ten turns out really well in the end. About seven-tenths get abandoned before the development stage, and then of the...
View ArticleMore on multiple SMTP connections
[ The previous article is here. ] Two people so far have written in to ask why I didn't just have the SMTP server delete the lock files when it was done with them. Well, more accurately, one person...
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The Kansas state quarter
In the 1986 Baseball Abstract, sportswriter Bill James, a Kansas native, included an article titled A History of Being a Kansas City Baseball Fan. The article begins: I am, and have been for as long...
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Approximations to pi
In an earlier post I mentioned G.H. Hardy's astonishment when he first encountered Ramanujan's approximation to π: [ Addendum 20060402: I inexplicably put in the wrong formula here. The one I meant to...
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The Almighty Dollar
BuyMartin Chuzzlewitfrom Bookshop.org(with kickback)(without kickback) I continue to read Martin Chuzzlewit. I have reached the point in the book at which Dickens realized that sales were poorer than...
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Generating strings of balanced parentheses
About a year and a half ago, the Perl Quiz of the Week question was to write a program which, given an argument n, printed out all the strings containing n balanced pairs of parentheses. For example,...
View ArticleAccidental Features
Last week I was away in Chicago as part of my Red Flags world tour, about which more in an upcoming entry. I mentioned before that I always learn something surprising from giving these classes, and...
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The wings of flies
BuyThe Diary of Samuel Pepysfrom Bookshop.org(with kickback)(without kickback) I was leafing through The Diary of Samuel Pepys recently. Pepys, in case you hadn't heard, was an official of the Royal...
View ArticleMore approximations to pi
In an earlier post I discussed the purported Biblical approximation to π, and the verses that supposedly equate it to 3. Eli Bar-Yahalom wrote in to tell me of a really fascinating related matter. He...
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Saguaros
In a recent post, I discussed an uninteresting travel book I had read recently, and compared it with Kon-Tiki, which is an interesting travel book. I'm sure I'll write more about travel books later; I...
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Biblical infallibility and pi
Two recent minor themes of the blog have been the value purportedly given for π in the Bible, and the value of serendipity and random browsing in the library. Here's a story about the Library Gods and...
View ArticleMore low-tech sound recording
In an earlier post, I wondered how Robert Hooke could have discovered the frequency of a vibrating string in 1664. I suggested a device involving a bristle that traced a sinusoid on a smoked glass...
View ArticleThe rate of a vibrating string in 1666
In an earlier post, I discussed a report by Samuel Pepys, from 1666, that Robert Hooke claimed to be able to tell how often a fly beat its wings, by comparing the pitch of the sound with that of a...
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More on the frequency of vibrations in 1666 and other matters
In a series of earlier posts (123) I discussed Robert Hooke's measurement of the frequency of G above middle C: he determined that it was 272 beats per second. There are two questions here: first, how...
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On the prolixity of Baroque authors
As readers of my blog know, I have lately been reading scientific and philosophical works of Robert Hooke, the diary of Samuel Pepys, and various essays by John Wilkins, all written during the 17th...
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Oral and non-oral reading
BuyMercury, or, The Swift and Secret Messengerfrom Bookshop.org(with kickback)(without kickback) I am browsing through the Right Reverend John Wilkins' book Mercury: The Secret and Swift Messenger,...
View ArticleBlog Post Escapes from Lab
My blog pages get regenerated when I run Blosxom. Also, I have a cron job that runs it every night at 12:10. Files named something.blog turn into blog posts. While posts are under construction, I name...
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