Dogs in China

My dad had a great article in the paper the other day on dogs in China: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/world/asia/25dogs.html?ref=global-home.

Gerund of cout

(cout as in C++'s printf())

"cout-ing" or "c-ing out"?

The Dangers of Twitter and URL shorteners

Oh, gosh, this is so surreal... a spokesperson for Meg Whitman, the Republican nominee for governor of California, tweeted a link to the campaign website... only it wasn't a link to the campaign website. They used a URL shortener, and, when tweeting, accidentally left off an 'r' at the end. I won't spoil what it linked to, but I will provide the link: http://bit.ly/bNCAV.

Cats Morph into Croissants

Waaah... what a hilariously amusing video. I can't stop watching it...

(thanks to Wendy/Sarah for showing me this!)

Bridge Crossing

There are four people who want to cross a bridge. They take 1, 2, 5 and 10 minutes, respectively. They're crossing at night, so, to cross, you need a lantern, and they have one between the four of them. The bridge is only wide enough to fit two people crossing at a time.

What's the floor on their crossing time? That is, what's the shortest possible time for them all to cross?

A Wonderful Puzzle

(thanks to Wendy for giving this to me)

You read in a stream of integers one by one. You don't know in advance how long the sequence will be, though, of course, you can recognize the EOF char when you get to it. You have to find which integer is the majority, where the majority is defined to be the integer that appears at least (n/2) + 1 times, where n is the length of the sequence.

Do it in constant memory. And, linear time, of course.

Jack-in-the-Box Pluralizations

A weird discussion with Wendy and Frank led to the question, how does one go about pluralize "Jack-in-the-box?" The following would have weird denotations, though they're what an online search brought up:

• Jacks-in-the-box (á la passersby ou coups-d'etat, though note: tête-à-têtes)

• Jack-in-the-boxes (one Jack in multiple boxes)

Which leaves us with "Jacks-in-the-boxes." Which sounds like it should be right.

Mandelbrot is dead :(

He died of pancreatic cancer. Apparently he first developed the concept of a fractal when he was asked how long Great Britain's coastline is, when he realized that the answer seemed to grow as one "zoomed in" on the coastline.

His approach to math is interesting (quoted from the NYTimes article; link in post):


"Dr. Mandelbrot received more than 15 honorary doctorates and served on the board of many scientific journals, as well as the Mandelbrot Foundation for Fractals. Instead of rigorously proving his insights in each field, he said he preferred to “stimulate the field by making bold and crazy conjectures” — and then move on before his claims had been verified. This habit earned him some skepticism in mathematical circles."

16th International Fryderyk Chopin Competition

The competition only happens every five years! It's been going on since October 3, now. The finals start in two days! This is basically the most prestigious piano competition that exists today. Martha Argerich (a former winner of the competition) is one of the judges! Participants must be between 17 and 30 years old. By the time one gets to the finals, they will have learnt nineteen pieces (all by Chopin) from a selection of about... 40? Ten people qualified for the finals, and there were 80 at the start. For the final, they have to play one of the two concertos, with an orchestra instead of a second piano reduction, I think.

There's a live broadcast going on (resumes on Monday); it's definitely worth a listen. The Chopin concertos are super-awesome. I'm currently learning one of them, Op. 11 in e.

As an aside, Yundi Li (李云迪), who I'm going to hear play the Tchaikovsky concerto in the Spring in SF, won this competition at 18. He was the first person to win the first prize in 15 years.

Prokofiev concerto 2 and Flight of the Bumblebee

This must be the most technically impressive piano playing I've ever seen in my life. Here's Wang Yujia (王羽佳) playing the second movement of Prokofiev's second concerto and, for an encore, Cziffra's arrangement of Flight of the Bumblebee. In the Prokofiev, by the way, that movement has the right hand and left hand playing almost 1500 16th-notes each in under 3 minutes, or basically 10 notes per second, both hands together.

That's the kind of finger independence each pianist wishes for: each finger on each of her hands is controlled completely individually! And look at how relaxed her hands are throughout! It's just astounding. Check out 6:55-7:00, especially.

By the way, that's Michael Tilson Thomas conducting -- he's the head conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a nearby orchestra I go to often (just heard Beethoven 7 and on Oct. 24 is Beethoven piano concerto 4).

3D Duckrabbit

The famous Duckrabbit illusion, recreated through taxidermy:

Here's the original: