Author: Caleb Yarian
Date: April 26, 2012
Category: Nerds
We’d be lying if we said we weren’t disappointed.
Fuzzco’s love for cruel and inhuman dictatorships is so great that any missed opportunity to design for a soul-crushing government makes us sad. The recent redesign of North Korea’s official website has been a sore point since its launch.
But when we discovered last week that the site that seeks to make the denial of personal liberties look like a trip to Big Rock Candy Mountain was built on a generic $15 WordPress template, we shed bitter tears.
To all present and future rulers planning to drink $720,000 worth of Hennessy in a single year, starving and imprisoning their people while eating lobster in a personal armored train: Fuzzco can do a better job.
So Kim Jong-un, if you want to follow in the false-image-projecting footsteps of your father, if you want to show the world that you’re truly “a great person born of heaven”, let Fuzzco show you the way.
P.S. This blog is my favorite thing about North Korea that’s ever appeared on the Internet. It’s a train-crazy Austrian’s tale of his not-quite-legal rail journey from Vienna all the way to the heart of the Hermit Kingdom.
Author: Caleb Yarian
Date: January 6, 2012
Category: Nerds
Q: Can you send an unattached stamp through the mail with an address written on it? A: No, you can’t but wow we wish you could.
This pointless question recently spawned a work-disrupting conversation about what can and can’t be sent through the mail. The rules governing mailable items have tightened up a lot in recent years. But in the first few years after the establishment of the parcel post in 1913 people were really pushing the envelope – sending butter, eggs, livestock and even stranger items.
Some even used the service to ship their children in an effort to avoid the cost of train travel, as shown in the photo above from the Smithsonian collection. On January 16, 1913, the New York Times reported on a disturbing letter received by the Postmaster General, in which the writer requested information on how to properly wrap a baby for transport. Eventually the Postal Service decided that children didn’t fit the definition of ‘harmless live animals which do not require food or water while in transit’, putting an end to a delightful and economical practice that made parents everywhere very happy.
For a real belly laugh, read the 1911 testimony of Mr. W. J. Pilkington of Des Moines, Iowa, delivered to a Congressional subcommittee considering the establishment of the parcel post service. He argued that if rural families were able to have goods delivered to their homes they would travel into town less frequently, affecting education, church attendance and ‘the finer instincts in our beings, which cause us to want to have better homes, better furniture, better everything.’
Some other gems from this font of reason:
‘…[T]he man who buys and wears up-to-date clothing because of having gone into a store and having it explained to him is a better man for wearing up-to-date clothing. …The man who rides in an automobile is a better man for his country than the man who rides in a two-wheeled cart.’
‘It would be better for our country if by some means we could force every farmer to visit his local town at least once a week…’
‘[The farmer’s children], when they visit the local town, see the well-kept lawns; they see things that tend to cause them to want these thing, these well-arranged homes, etc., on the farms where they live.’
Not surprisingly, Mr. Pilkington was the publisher of the local Merchants’ Trade Journal.
Author: fuzzco_admin
Date: March 27, 2010
Category: Nerds
Written by the flicker of candlelight
This blog post is in honor of David M. Bressoud, who was my advisor and friend while at Macalester. It’s his 60th birthday today! He is currently president of the Mathematical Association of America, which is a great honor. I think I took 24 credits (of a total of I think 128) with him, like a hawk to him I was… He was arguably the best teacher I have ever had.
In my first class with Professor Bressoud, and in my first week in college I read A Mathematician’s Apology by the English Mathematician G.H. Hardy. In a testament to the potential for elegance in mathematical proof, Hardy presented 2 simple proofs that are accessible to everyone who has survived high school math – that there are infinite prime numbers and that the square root of 2 is irrational. My favorite of the two follows:
Euclid’s Proof of the Infinitude of Primes (c. 300 BC)
Theorem
There are infinite prime numbers (which implies there is not a largest prime number).
Proof
(taken from Wikipedia)
Take any finite list of prime numbers p1, p2, …, pn. It will be shown that some additional prime numbers not in this list exist. Let P be the product of all the prime numbers in the list: P = p1…pn. Let q = P + 1: 1 more than this product. Then, q is either prime or not:
- If q is prime then there is at least one more prime than is listed.
- If q is not prime then some prime factor p divides q. This factor p is not on our list: if it were, then it would divide P (since P is the product of every number on the list); but as we know, p divides P + 1 = q. Then p would have to divide the difference of the two numbers, which is (P + 1) − P or just 1. But no prime number divides 1 so there would be a contradiction, and therefore p cannot be on the list. This means at least one more prime number exists beyond those in the list.
This proves that for any finite list of prime numbers, there is a prime number not on the list. Therefore there must be infinitely many prime numbers.
QED
**
Aren’t that pretty?
Thank you David Bressoud for being awesome + HAPPY 60th BIRTHDAY!
Author: fuzzco_admin
Date: March 25, 2010
Category: Nerds, Radicool
Written by the flicker of candlelight
Ever thought about tanning at the beach next to a parametric equation that is wearing trigonometry instead of sunscreen?
When I spent most of my time thinking about math problems I would often think about modeling very complex phenomenon, like writing a function that describes a cat’s motion throughout a day, or how a pretzel rises in the oven, or what a graph of a delicious bite looks like to your tastebuds….
I do believe that everything can be modeled, however complex, but that the complexity of doing this is not well behaved.
Anywayssss….. this girl Nikki Graziano took it to the streets. And by streets I mean to the forest and to the beach.
Written by the flicker of candlelight
In exciting news for Number Theorists, algorithmists, and people who like to try to make $100K running 75 machines in tandem, the 46th Mersenne Prime number was found, currently also known as the largest known prime number.
A Mersenne Prime has the form of 2^n – 1. The first few Mersenne primes are:
2^2 – 1 = 3
2^3 – 1 = 7
2^5 – 1 = 31.
This newly discovered 46th is
2^43,112,609 – 1 = a 12,978,189 digit number.
While prime numbers have 1 primary application – cryptography – the methods leading to the search for them often unveil new techniques in mathematics that lead to general advances in Number Theory, which is often considered to be one of the more recreational and non-applicaple fields of mathematics.
Anyways, more can be read here. And some general info about Mersenne Primes can be found here. Oh and to see the new prime, click here (warning will slow down your browser for a while).
