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The Inaugural Edition of the first and only Carnival of Mathematics has been published at Abstract Nonsense, and my entry on spigot algorithms is in it! Most of the comments are about a probability “paradox” with similarities to the Monty Hall problem. But my favorite entry tells a famous John Von Neumann story (note, the Magyar stamp leaves out the Von).
If you are looking for the best posts for a particular topic, try a blog carnival. Here is a list of science-related carnivals. See if you can match the carnival below to their logo in the picture above.
Update [2/6/2007]: And now finally a Carnival of Mathematics!
Update [2/28/2007]: A Carnival of women in STEM (cience, echnology, ngineering, and athematics).
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Bora Zivkovic from A Blog Around the Clock has created a book on Lulu containing the 50 best science blog articles (culled by committee from over 200) in 2006. The first article is a short essay to Science Fair entrants, by Phil Plait, that everyone should read. If you live in the Northeast you might want to read the article Ticks and Time, by Diane A Kelly, with surprising new results about the etiology of Lyme disease. And there are a lot more gems in this great anthology.
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The origin of black diamonds, aka carbonado, has been a mystery. While conventional diamonds are mined in volcanic formations known as kimberlites, carbonado diamonds have never been found there.  Monday NSF researchers announced black diamonds are probably extraterrestial in origin.
At last month’s Emirates Millionaire Show 59,000 lucky UAE millionaires could buy a $620,000 Ud aka Oud aka Arab lute containing a 103.59 carrot black diamond, one of the largest in the world.  The stone is embedded in the Ud’s main rosette, pictured. Uncut carbonado looks more like a charcoal brickette, as pictured in researcher Steve Haggerty’s photo.Â
    
A couple of months ago Marcus Hutter offered up to 50,000 euros for losslessly compressing the 100MB English wikipedia corpus better than the then 18MB record. Since then there has been a 6.8% improvement, and counting – each 1% is worth 500 euros.
Now Netflix is offering $1,000,000 for the first person or team to publish an algorithm that can predict how a customer will rate a movie based on prior ratings 10% more accurately than their current algorithm. Be warned, the training files are big. There have already been 20 valid prediciton files submitted in the last 24 hours, and over 6000 teams from 92 countries registered. So hurry!
The movie with the most ratings:Â Batman Begins.
Update:Â Within 1 week the Netflix algorithm (subject of 15 years of research) has been bested.
Update2: Some have claimed that the problem gets exponentially harder as you drive toward 10%. We are almost half way there in under 3 weeks! If linear we should be done by Thansgiving – but even if exponential, we can forecast victory in about 3 months.
A spigot algorithm pumps out digits one at a time and does not reuse the digits after they are computed. In 1995 Stanley Rabinowitz and Stan Wagon produced a remarkable spigot algorithm for generating decimal digits of Ï€ (paper in pdf). Today the remarkable Akira Haraguchi finished reciting 100,000 digits of Ï€ from memory – a world record.
You can use the Pi-Search Page to find the location of the digits of π within π. For example, The string 3 occurs at position 9 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. It looks like the following plotted on a log chart.
For Mooslims and Pastafarians it may make no difference, but for those who follow the joke faith post-modern religion Discordianism, the IAU has named the minor planet formerly known as 2003 UB313, aka Xena aka “the 10th planet,” after their goddess Eris. According to their Principia [page 000015] not much is known about Eris:
Her geneology is from the Greeks and is utterly confused. Either She was the twin of Ares and the daughter of Zeus and Hera; or She was the daughter of Nyx, goddess of night (who was either the daughter or wife of Chaos, or both), and Nyx’s brother, Erebus, and whose brothers and sisters include Death, Doom, Mockery, and Friendship. And that She begat Forgetfullness, Quarrels, Lies, and a bunch of gods and goddesses like that.
One day Mal-2 consulted his Pineal Gland and asked Eris if She really created all of those terrible things. She told him that She had always liked the Old Greeks, but that they cannot be trusted with historic matters. “They were,” She added, “victims of indigestion, you know.”
At least the Greeks didn’t have two (2) “One True Symbol”s like the MOOs, nor did they confuse correlation with causation (in “Pirates are Cool”) like the Pastas (you can also correlate beer sales with teachers’ salaries).
By a 183-186 vote, the IAU failed to classify the dwarf planetary object, Pluto, a Plutonian Object. What is clear is that, despite the struggles to find it, Pluto is no longer a planet. So there are 8 planets and a new dwarf for Snow White.
