“… an admirable artifice which, by reducing to a few days the labour of many months, doubles the life of the astronomer, and spares him the errors and disgust inseparable from long calculations.” — Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) on logarithms At the start of the pandemic — seems so long ago! — the media showed us […]
Barry Evans
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Summer Puzzles: Answers
Amazon Interview Question Half the cable length is 40 feet, so the cable must be hanging straight down, i.e. the poles are touching. Live Another Day The outcome of the two tosses will either be the same or different, so they decided on a simple strategy: Tulip will always predict the same (e.g. she sees […]
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Summer Puzzles
Summertime and the livin’ is easy. So are some of your summer puzzles; others are a bit tricky. I bet when you see the solution of some of these, you’ll go, “Oh, duh! Of course!” Amazon Interview Question An 80-foot-long cable hangs from the top of two 50-foot-high poles. The center of the cable is […]
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Is the Search for ETs Futile?
It was a match made in the stars. In 1964, about the time the California Institute of Technology announced the discovery of a weird, super-intense radio source in the sky, Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev published his classification of extraterrestrial civilizations. He rated advanced civilizations by their available energy (possibly to be used for interstellar communication): […]
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How They Got Here: Round the Horn
Last time, we looked at how about one-third of the estimated 300,000 “forty-niner” gold-seekers arrived in California via the Isthmus of Panama (“How They Got Here: Panama,” May 20). This time, we’ll look at the history of the other main sea route from the east (the U.S. East Coast and Europe): the stormy passage around […]
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How They Got Here: Panama
They came from all over, hoping to get rich, 300,000 of them between 1848 and 1855, changing California forever. Word of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in January of 1848 (“The Gold Bug,” Dec. 3, 2020) got out slowly, and most of the prospectors that first year — a few thousand at most […]
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Not So Dark Ages
“All the objects shone in the sunshine as on the day they were buried.” — Basil Brown’s diary, August of 1939. Britain’s “Dark Ages” may have formally ended in a field in Suffolk, England, on July 21, 1939. That’s when archaeologist Peggy Piggott uncovered a tiny gold pyramid encrusted with garnets from the Sutton Hoo […]
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Cryptocurrency: Bitcoin
“I think that the internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the internet, you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing […]
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Cryptocurrencyand the Blockchain
Cryptocurrency, especially the largest, Bitcoin, is often touted as “new gold,” a way of holding wealth independent of banks. I discussed cryptocurrency briefly a few years ago (“Cash, Plastic or Bitcoin?” May 5, 2016), when I compared explaining Bitcoin to the challenge faced by Marco Polo when he tried to tell 14th century Venetian city […]
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God, the Multiverse and You
“Our Universe has not been fine-tuned for life: life has been fine-tuned to our Universe.” Klaas Landsman, The Challenge Of Chanc The fine-tuning of many of the “constants of nature” is offered as evidence for both the existence of God and of an infinity of universes beyond our own, aka the multiverse. It’s pretty weird both […]
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Antarctic Atlantis?
Never mind Waldo or Bernie. Where’s Atlantis? The site of the “lost civilization” has probably caused more trees to be cut down in the service of books and magazines claiming to know the answer than any other pseudo-scientific boondoggle. As I wrote a while back (“Atlantis: The Lost Land,” Sept. 10, 2015), the mythical land […]
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How to Trust Strangers
We live in a society in which we interact with thousands of other individuals we don’t personally know, yet we have to trust those interactions. Every time we use a credit card, for instance, we’re relying on a network of anonymous people to ensure the payment we’re sending is, in fact, made honestly and free […]