There are nine million bicycles in Beijing, it's a fact
I participated in the
World Quizzing Championship on Saturday.
Overall, I finished #18 in the USA and
#81 in the world.
But, I was tied for #2 in the USA (and tied for #4 in the world) on the Science section!
It was fun.
Dough is what I got
To my pleasant surprise,
today yesterday I discovered that my TiVo had recorded a
TED talk given by my former groupmate and underwater roboticist AnnMarie Thomas.
Who is the man who arrives at the wall?
TACIT alum David Seal is featured in the
New York Times.
You're gonna hit something, but that's the way it goes
A Korean woman passed her multiple-choice driving exam
on the 950th try.
She had to get 30 out of 50 multiple choice questions right.
Clearly she wasn't just guessing randomly. Assuming four answer choices per question, on average it would take 6,089,075 tries to pass by guessing randomly on every question.
If she usually knew about 11 of the 50 answers and guessed randomly on the rest, that would be consistent with passing after about 950 tries.
Cracked through time/space, godless and dry
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, of course.
I've been reading
Octavia Butler's novel
Parable of the Sower. The book opens in 2024, but today, July 20th, 2009, is supposedly the day that the protagonist of the novel, Lauren Olamina, is born.
And since Lauren's father is exactly forty years older than she is, that means he was born on the day of the first moon landing.
This surely isn't a coincidence. The character Lauren starts a religion which looks forward to the human colonization of space as a kind of future heaven. But the birthdate significance isn't explicitly spelled out in the book.
I thought it was an interesting little discovery.
To rouse the Spirit of the Earth
My former labmate Sharon Laubach got a mention in the
Wall Street Journal.
Highway run into the midnight sun
Langskaill, Orkney, 12:05 am, June 17
