Hummings of a Happy Hurkle

You are a young tech just hired by Artslet (your friendly Telco) and obviously someone is out to make your life hard!

You have just assisted your supervisor to lay 1 Km of special cable containing 100 individual wires. As he was about to head off for a very long lunch, he left you the job of tagging all the wires so they can be connected to the correct equipment, promising to buy you a drink if you get there before knock-off time.

Unfortunately, the wires are completely indistinguishable — this would have been a much easier job if you could have done it before the cable was laid!

To assist you in this task you have a large supply of numbered tags, a chart in which you have to record the tags attached to each end of each wire and a simple continuity tester consisting of a battery and a light. If you (say) joined 2 wires together at one end, you could then walk down the other end and test to find out which 2 wires are joined. There is no limit to how many wires you could join and test like this.

The question is: how far are you going to have to walk to tag and record all the wires? What strategy will you employ? Do you have any chance of the supervisor buying you that drink?

(more…)

A horrible disease has broken out in the Kingdom of Faroffia. There is a wonder cure, and you have a 1000 bottles of it which must be distributed today to save the kingdom. Unfortunately, you have just found out that one of the bottles is contaminated with a deadly poison. You have a supply of laboratory mice which can be used to test for the poison, but because it takes some time to have its effect, you only have time to conduct one test.

How many mice do you need in order to find out which is the poisoned bottle?

If someone leaves their stuff on your premises, some interesting things happen from a legal point of view.

(more…)

Not everyone accepts this view instantly, so it seems I need to explain my position.

No, I am not closed-minded. However, I have reached a firm conclusion based on the available evidence: astrology is bunk. I shall stick with that conclusion unless or until someone comes up with far better evidence than any I’ve seen so far. I offer two approaches.

A. If astrology is proposed as a physical fact, it must conform to the rules of scientific investigation. There must be a hypothesis, and an experiment. The experiment must rely on objective methods, observations and interpretations. These are well established, so I don’t need to go into them.

At the conclusion of the experiment, both sides must accept the outcome: astrology is confirmed, or it is refuted, or further experiments are clearly needed.

My reading of the current situation is that either no such experiments have been conducted to the satisfaction of any scientists, or any experiments that have been conducted have totally failed to confirm astrology as a physical fact. (The lack of successful claims on the $1m prize offered by the Skeptics provides further evidence, if it were needed).

In this situation, a scientist will reach same the conclusion I have: astrology is bunk. A non-scientific person who would like astrology to work will refuse to accept the situation and will keep demanding “an open mind”. In my opinion the only closed minds are those who refuse to accept the evidence and keep looking for physical fact where there is none.

B. If astrology is not proposed as a physical fact, it need not conform to the rules of scientific investigation. Those who wish to use astrology as a personal tool to guide themselves or others in their daily affairs are (as always) free to believe whatever they wish.

I do not wish to deny people their cherished beliefs. In return, I ask that they do not propose as physical facts, any events and mechanisms which clearly have no such basis. Astrology is one of these, but there are countless others.

To all of them I say: XXX is bunk! (Substitute your own favourite in here).

Astrology is bunk. Lots of people believe in astrology.

Here are 3 statements that I think are true but are not widely understood or accepted.

1. There is no such thing as infinity in the real, physical world. The observable universe is not infinite, and nothing in it is infinite. Infinity is a mathematical abstraction, not a physical reality.
2. Most of maths is incompatible with the concept of infinity. Most operations cannot be performed on infinities. Virtually every proof or operation in maths is so constructed as to avoid infinities. Where an infinity occurs, the maths fails.
3. Infinity is given a specific meaning in maths, based on set theory, to allow it to be used in a certain restricted set of operations. It’s a very odd definition, and it takes some thinking about. The definition is (roughly):
   

   “An infinite set is one that can be placed in a one-to-one mapping with a subset of itself.”

   Only a mathematician could love it!

The wondrous thing is how many competent people there are in the world. Imagine for a moment that you went to the supermarket, and it was deserted. You can take anything you want but there is one little problem. There is a security guard who won't let you out until you pay. And he doesn't know how to work anything, or how much anything costs. He wants to see a cash register printout.Can you master the computer systems well enough to do that? You might criticise a checkout chick who makes a mistake, but can you really do her job? I don't think so. You need her to make that quick purchase.

You don't hire people to do things because they do them better.You hire people to do things because then you don't have to do them. They almost invariably don't do them as well, or as quickly, or tidy up afterwards but that absolutely isn't the point. The point is: to choose what you spend your own valuable time on. To do what you want to do, not what you have to do.

Here on EAST (+11), 23:59:59 was followed by 24:00:00 (or 00:00:00) but 10:59:59 was followed by 10:59:60 and then 11:00:00. I wonder whether the correct adjustment was made to the TV news, phones, computers, etc, etc, and if so when.BTW GPS time was not affected. It doesn't use UTC.

I genuinely don't understand how my spelling thing works. I read text, and words with unexpected spelling just have the wrong "shape" to them — they're too long or fat or bumpy or something and they almost leap off the page at me. I can tell you where in a word the error lies long before I can work out what the mistake is.