Displaying comments 1 to 13 of 13
MeFi post:
Big book of algorithms
Wolfdog, I had a math professor at Purdue (Bob Zink, if you ever have the pleasure of meeting him) who had several established mannerisms when he was lecturing:When he was nearing the end of a proof: "And now for the coup de grâce — that's when you attack your enemy with a lawn mower." (It makes more sense if you read it out loud.) When summing something together elegantly: "Put them all together and they spell 'mother'..." When a variable named... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi
at 9:18 AM on March 5, 2008
MeFi post:
the alphabet never sounded more beautiful
Avenger: Heh, I don't think that ad means what you think it means.
I'm wondering about how the birdsong encoding works, actually. There doesn't seem to be any sort of one-to-one correspondence between letters and bird chirps, but words seem to code uniquely into birdsong, and changing one letter in the word (usually) only changes one part of the song. My best guess is that there are several chirps for each letter, and different occurrences of the same letter in one word... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi
at 8:53 AM on January 15, 2008
MeFi post:
3.14159265itwasthebestoftimesitwastheworstofti...
jpdoane's point is true in general for compression algorithms — it's impossible to have a single algorithm that compresses all files to a size smaller than the original size. In fact, it's impossible to have a single algorithm that losslessly compresses all files by a single bit.
Suppose you did have such a compression algorithm. Then you could use it to compress all possible files of length, say, n bits (of which there are 2n), to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi
at 8:25 PM on December 4, 2007
agent: The question that will really bake your noodle is whether it's possible for π to contain itself but "half as fast," i.e., π ends up looking something like
3.14159...4371940125293...
Such a number can still be irrational. There might still be some reason why the above is impossible, though, probably having to do with power series. :)
posted to MetaFilter by pmdboi
at 6:40 AM on December 5, 2007
