27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Shannon and Thorp Hack the Roulette Wheel
It was in this tinkerer’s laboratory that they set out to understand how roulette could be gamed, ordering “a regulation roulette wheel from Reno for $1,500,” a strobe light, and a clock whose hand revolved once per second. Thorp was given inside access to Shannon in all his tinkering glory:
Gadgets . . . were everywhere. He had a mechanical coin tosser which could be set to flip the coin through a set number of revolutions, producing a head or tail according to the setting. As a joke... 1 
notes
notes27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Shannon's Learning Mouse Theseus
Theseus was propelled by a pair of magnets, one embedded in its hollow core, and one moving freely beneath the maze. The mouse would begin its course, bump into a wall, sense that it had hit an obstacle with its “whiskers,” activate the right relay to attempt a new path, and then repeat the process until it hit its goal, a metallic piece of cheese. The relays stored the directions of the right path in “memory”: once the mouse had successfully navigated the maze by trial and error, it ... 1 notes
notes13 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
Farmers Hurt Themselves Financially to Avoid Paying Taxes
gonzoflip 1 hour ago | unvote [-]
I have family that farms in Iowa and I also worked in the agriculture industry there for a while after leaving the military. One thing that increases the stress on the farmers is the way they avoid income taxes at all costs so they rarely save any of the profits from good years to help them float during the bad years. This is all anecdotal but I have personally talked with several farmers that would rather buy new equipment they say do not even need than pay... 1 notes
notes25 OCT 2017 by ideonexus
Blockchains
Ownership on the Bitcoin blockchain is determined by a pair of cryptographic keys. The first, called the public key, resides in the blockchain for anyone to see. The second is called the private key, and its owner keeps it safe from view. The two keys have a special mathematical relationship that makes them useful for signing digital messages. Here’s how that happens: Helmut takes a message, combines it with his private key, does some calculations, and ends up with a long number. Anyone who...Folksonomies: technology blockchains
Folksonomies: technology blockchains
1 notes
notes24 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Knowing One Thing Well is Barbaric
To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age). 1 notes
notesThe enlightened mind knows many things, specialization means we live among many barbarians.
13 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Freestyle Chess
In fact, the best game of chess in the world right now might be played neither by man nor machine.47 In 2005, the Web site ChessBase.com, hosted a “freestyle” chess tournament: players were free to supplement their own insight with any computer program or programs that they liked, and to solicit advice over the Internet. Although several grandmasters entered the tournament, it was won neither by the strongest human players nor by those using the most highly regarded software, but by a pai... 1 notes
notesSimilar to correspondence chess, where computer programs are allowed to offer suggestions and the players act like coaches directing the moves.
09 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
On Atoms Sharing Electrons
Saying that each of two atoms can attain closed electron shells by sharing a pair of electrons is equivalent to saying that husband and wife, by having a total of two dollars in a joint account and each having six dollars in individual bank accounts, have eight dollars apiece! 
1 The idea that by sharing electrons they close their shells seems absurd.
18 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Did Adam and Eve have Navels?
All other men, being born of woman, have a navel, by reason of the umbilical vessels inserted into it, which from the placenta carry nourishment to children in the womb of their mothers; but it could not be so with our first parents. It cannot be believed that God gave them navels which would have been altogether useless. Folksonomies: bible creationism
Folksonomies: bible creationism
1 notes
notesThe navel is a scar from the umbilical cord. So no; yet the pair is almost always depicted with belly buttons.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Newton's Experiment Proving White Contains All Colors
Newton wasn't the first person to make a rainbow with a prism. Other people had already got the same result. But many of them thought the prism somehow 'coloured' the white light, like adding a dye. Newton's idea was quite different. He thought that white light was a mixture of all the colours, and the prism was just separating them from each other. He was right, and he proved it with a pair of neat experiments. First, he took his prism, as before, and stuck a narrow slit in the way of the co... 1 notes
notesUsing a prism to split light into a rainbow, he then used a lens to merge the rainbow back into white light and split it apart again.
05 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
A Unique Statement of the Law of Universal Gravitation
The relative interattractiveness invisibly operative between any two remote-from-one-another cosmic
bodies, as compared to any other pair of cosmic bodies, equally distanced from one another, is
proportional to the multiplicative product of the respective couple's masses, and the interattractiveness
of any pair of celestial bodies varies inversely as the second power of the distance between them. Halve
the intervening distance and the interattractiveness increases fourfold.
1 That does not use the word "Gravity".
