Many geminid meteors tonight December 13, 2006
Posted by dorigo in astronomy, news, personal, science.3 comments
Tonight is a very favourable moment to observe a honest meteor shower. The Geminids peak at 8AM UT, which is convenient for most observers in the United States. The moon will be of little hindrance for most of the night.
The Geminid meteors are originated from asteroid 3200 Phaeteon, which orbits the sun with a highly elliptical orbit which brings it to 0.15 AU from it every 1.4 years. They usually display a wide peak lasting several hours of high activity, with a ZHR (zenith hourly rate, or the number of meteors a observer would see if the radiant point were at the zenith and the conditions were perfect) of about 120. That is typically about a meteor a minute for most observers in most conditions.
I just went to my terrace (it’s 11PM here in Venice) and in 10 minutes -without dark adaptation and with a lousy sky above- I saw two meteors, one of them quite nice - a -1.5m white-blue streak through Orion. Judging from this rather meager observation, the rate is now at ZHR = 100+-70 already.
Have a look and let me know what you see!
Computers cannot play chess - no, I’m serious. December 13, 2006
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, chess, computers, games, internet, news, personal.8 comments
Not kidding.
After a few weeks of absence, I went back to pay a visit to Tim Krabbé’s refreshing Open chess diary, http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/diary.htm . Tim is a web-friend of mine, a strong chessplayer, and inexhaustible source of chess trivia of the highest level, besides being a talented writer of novels (many of you have probably seen the movie “The Vanishing”, featuring Sandra Bullock and Jeff Bridges: it is based on one of his novels, although he is unhappy of the movie).
If you visit his site, besides getting hooked, you will find item 330, which is a jaw-dropping demonstration that indeed, computers -even the strongest ones in circulation, that is, including Fritz 10 and Rybka 2.2- cannot play chess. In two ways: first, by not seeing a mate in one or a queen en prise. Second, by showing they do not know the application of one of the most important practical rules of the game.
If you love chess, you are strongly encouraged to check Tim’s diary. If only to claim we humans are still superior to machines… However, the problem is in the way we humans program the darn silicon beasts!
Your phone number inside PI December 13, 2006
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, computers, games, humor, internet, mathematics, science.add a comment
From http://backreaction.blogspot.com I got a link to a nice web site today. It allows you to search the millions of known digits of pi (the ratio between circumference and diameter of a circle) for any given string of numbers.
Your success to find any finite-length string of numbers would be certain if we knew all digits (or equivalently, if we possessed an infinitely fast pi-digits-computing algorithm), because pi is a transcendental number, as Sabine well explains in her site (link above). But our stone age of computing limits us to the first few hundreds of millions of digits, so you have better try your luck with -say- less than 12-digit strings. For 100 million digit searches, your chances of finding your 10-digit phone number is 0.995%. Worth giving a try at http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery !
Especially recommended to hot babes with a penchant for mathematics (there are some after all): imagine how cool if upon being asked for your number you could reply “ok, it’s the ten digits after the 635,444th of pi, dude!”.
… Sure, you would get laid quite less often though. But the happy ones you got would be smarter than the average John.
More speculations on non-175 GeV single top from D0 data December 13, 2006
Posted by dorigo in internet, physics, science.6 comments
Minutes after posting about D0’s recent evidence of single top production (to see it scroll down two posts, too lazy to link it here!) I got a message from Tony Smith (http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/) containing many questions on the D0 analysis and their decision tree discriminant. I answered his questions, and then thought they might be of interest to two or three of the many of you who visit this blog erratically… So here is an amended version of the mail exchange.
