# Category Archives: Science

Anything technical or science related.

Two posts ago I showed how many coin flips it would take in order to have a 98% confidence of getting 92 heads in a row (Ã  la Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead). The answer turns out to be $$3.874\times … Continue reading Posted in General, Science | 5 Comments ## How to get 92 heads in a row A couple of posts ago I talked about how laughably improbable it would be to get 92 heads in a row on a fair coin. To sum up, the probability is: The probability of this happening is so abysmally low … Continue reading Posted in Science | 3 Comments ## People are predictably irrational in actions involving uncertainty I ran across this page that is an outline for a lecture given by a professor of statistics at Berkeley. The title of his talk is “The top ten things that math probability says about the real world”, but he … Continue reading Posted in Science | 4 Comments ## Genetic Super Mice Since it was on major news and aggregate sites yesterday, I can pretty much assume that all of the internet has seen yesterday’s story on the super mouse. Basically, researchers have found a way to genetically alter mice so that … Continue reading Posted in News, Science | 1 Comment ## i ^ i ^ i ^ … ? Today on the internet I saw the calculation for i^i, where i is the square root of -1. It can be solved pretty easily using Euler’s formula, where any number z in the complex plane can be expressed as \(\textstyle{}$$ … Continue reading

Posted in General, Science | 1 Comment

## answer to the ESP test

Is I mentioned in the earlier post, I would post the answer later. Most people that were kind enough to comment on it also gave the correct answer. I thought the trick was pretty sneaky, so I wrote an email … Continue reading

## Japan making the Bomb

Reading this news article piqued my interest. What I found interesting is not that Japan’s foreign minister proclaimed that Japan was capable of producing a nuclear weapon should it wish to, but that such a declaration was even necessary. Japan … Continue reading

## The secret of ESP

I saw a link to this ESP test and on a whim checked it out. Try the test a few times to see how accurate it is. Then, see if you can figure it out. It had me stumped at … Continue reading

Posted in Entertainment, Science | 5 Comments

## Economics of mass transit

I ran across this article that discusses the economic reality of why people in America don’t use the public transportation. I find it meaningful because he address the value of the commuter’s time, which he purports to be the most … Continue reading

Posted in Science | 2 Comments

## Technical Japanese = technically difficult

I’ve decided to try and use my communting time on the bus to and from campus every day more effectively. Up until now I have been reading books on my older Sony Clie, mostly Sci-Fi books that my brother emails … Continue reading