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
If I'd known they'd line up just to see him, I'd've taken all my money and bought me a museum
We've heard there is a picture of Golem 1 in the
Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Fame!
Season ticket on a one-way ride
Congratulations to NPR puzzle veteran
Dileep Rao, who made his
movie debut this weekend to rave reviews.
Sometimes I get tired of the waiting
Wolfram Alpha is now available for use.
Perhaps I'm being too demanding for the first week of release, but I'm very disappointed.
It fails on just about every question I think of myself (as opposed to things on their list of prepared examples).
It does not understand "air density at 60,000 feet."
It understands "pressure at 60,000 feet." And it understands "air density at 2 mm Hg." But it is not able to combine these things. It does not understand "air density at (pressure at 60,000 feet) and (temperature at 60,000 feet)." That was pretty much my minimum expectation of what it would do.
It does not understand "pressure at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."
When I ask "distance to Barnard's Star in 10,000 years," it gives the impression that it is parsing the request correctly. It seems to know that I want the distance to Barnard's Star at the time 10,000 years from now. But it gives the wrong answer. It does not know that the distance to Barnard's Star is changing with time.
I find it hard to reconcile this weak performance with the claim that they have encapsulated most of the knowledge in a research library.
