Clothing's destiny?

If you ran a shirt through the dryer sufficiently many times, would it eventually turn completely into lint?

The Computer Scientific Method

I was sent a presentation called How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia by David A. Patterson.

The best slide concerns the "Computer Scientific Method;" funny because it's true...

Physics Question: Leaky Inflatable Chair

At OSCON 2006, some O'Reilly developers and I were lounging in the expansive round upper-level of the Oregon Convention Center. It turns out that the someone had spread around a bunch of inflatable chairs which were molded after an overstuffed cushy easy chair.

Ryan Grimm had claimed a partially-deflated one. As I eyed it, I posed the following question:

Suppose that the air-filled chair had a pinhole leak on the side. Could it deflate faster depending on how you sat on it? In other words, would the air leave faster, slower or at the same rate if you spread your weight out as evenly as possibly in a wide slouch compared to if you stood on one foot and put all your weight on a few square inches?

I posed this to a handful of people, and none of them ever agreed with my answer. Maybe we can put this to rest now. What do you think and why?


Update with Legal Fine Print
All your weight is on the chair. You're not blocking the pinhole. In both scenarios, your weight is the same. The question is about over how wide of a space your weight is distributed.


Updated Example
You could rephrases this problem as something like:
"Will your inflatable mattress retain its pressure longer if you curl up in a cannonball or if you spread out like a pancake?"

Cookie Recipe

This recipe has served me well for the last 15 years.

3/4 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups chocolate chips

• The butter must be softened, but not melted. Melting it was a disastrous mistake I made a number of times.


• The line suggesting 1 teaspoon baking soda is a pack of lies. You must use at least 2.5 teaspoons.


• Don't overbake. I would tell you how long, but ovens vary so you will have to eyeball it.

2008 Election Correctly Predicted

Three European scientists have produced a document which correctly states who will win the 2008 US presidential election.

They don't need to give you the document (although they do) because they can give you the MD5 checksum. A checksum, which is a kind of fingerprint for the document, accordingly to the conventional wisdom can only come from that one document. In principle, other documents may exist with the same fingerprint, but are technically infeasible to find. Then, after the election is over, they will make the PDF available and invite you to measure its MD5. If it matches, that proves it has to have been the same one they fingerprinted back in Nov 30, 2007.

The fingerprint analogy goes pretty far. Imagine that they had said,
We know who will win the 2008 presidential election. To prove it, we found someone with his name and fingerprinted him. Here's the fingerprint ....

On the morrow of Election day, the person will visit your house, let you take his fingerprints and show his driver's license to prove his name is that of the person who won.

The catch, of course if that MD5s aren't really as good as fingerprints, despite widespread belief, even among experts. Marc Stevens, Arjen Lenstra and Weger have simply found an appealing way to exploit duplicatability of MD5s, constructing 12 documents with the same MD5, each with the name of different candidate (and some non-candidates). In our metaphor, this is coming up with 12 different people named after the candidates and then bioengineering them to have the same fingerprints. No matter who wins in 2008, they are "correct," simply by choosing which one to reveal.

Excellent work!

My best way to get out of bed in the morning

Something I wrote in a chat log

12:17:34 AM: I was wondering once what would be the best possible way to wake up
12:17:57 AM: but which would force you to get up
12:17:58 AM: and I decided that if I was the richest person alive
12:18:11 AM: I would have a bed built so that when the alarm clock went off
12:18:34 AM: it would unhinge in the middle so the two halves would swing down and gently drop me
12:18:36 AM: into a hot tub
12:19:00 AM: which would be a great way to start the day, and there's no going back to sleep

Women's Rights are Human Rights

Maybe one day this will be reality, when women have the same definition of decency as men do.

The next step is naturally for social acceptability, then dare we entertain it, for it to be just as acceptable for men to wear bras and dresses. MLK had a dream too!