Monthly Archives: June 2010

A twist of fate

Posted on 11 June 2010 by Brian Hayes

The school of philosophy called Antipodianism briefly flourished on the fringes of the Hellenistic world more than 2,000 years ago. The sect held that every person has an opposite number, a mirror image who inverts all our beliefs, feelings, actions … Continue reading →

Posted in problems and puzzles | 6 Comments

Disentangling Gaussians

Posted on 10 June 2010 by Brian Hayes

The printed program for the recent STOC meeting in Cambridge announced the following talk: Unfortunately, the fourth author could not be present (and he is not listed as an author on the paper itself), so the talk was given by … Continue reading →

Posted in computing | 2 Comments

The snarXiv

Posted on 7 June 2010 by Brian Hayes

The snarXiv is a ran­dom high-energy the­ory paper gen­er­a­tor incor­po­rat­ing all the lat­est trends, entropic rea­son­ing, and excit­ing mod­uli spaces. The arXiv is sim­i­lar, but occa­sion­ally less ran­dom. Inspiring! Soon bit-player, too, will be generated by a context-free grammar, and … Continue reading →

Posted in physics | 1 Comment

A hole in the bottom of the ocean

Posted on 4 June 2010 by Brian Hayes

The explosion and fire that destroyed the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon on the night of April 20 was a run-of-the-mill industrial accident. In saying this, I don’t mean to make light of the disaster, in which 11 workers perished. Nevertheless, … Continue reading →

Posted in modern life, off-topic | 7 Comments