For a lot of engineering problems, “almost right” isn’t good enough. Remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? Traveling through space for nearly a year, and covering 700 million kilometers, the Orbiter disintegrated after entering the Martian atmosphere at an altitude just one-hundred kilometers lower than planned. That’s like a $100 million dart exploding when you miss... »
This article is co-authored with
Bethany Soule. If you want to
(bee)mind
how you spend your time (and
Anyone who knows me knows that I love power laws. What other distribution even comes close? The normal? Boring. Poisson? Too fishy. Hypergeometric? Ok, that one’s pretty cool, too. But still, power laws reign supreme in my mind. Evidence of the mystical power of power laws is found by simply looking at references to “power laws”... »
BREAKING: IBM’s question answering computer, Watson, defeats Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter! Not to detract from IBM’s achievement but I’m disappointed by the buzzer aspect of this. Background: Watson gets the question (or “clue” or “answer” as they call it on Jeopardy) as plain text at the same moment that the humans see... »
When I was a kid we had a small black & white television that never quite worked right. If you positioned the rabbit ears just so---and no one turned on the kitchen blender---the signal to snow ratio would be just barely high enough to make it through an episode of "The Cosby Show." Humans are... »
Today Messy Matters celebrates its 25th anniversary, in internet time. Here are three meta topics to mark the occasion: Typo Bounties, Meta Poll, and a Bonus Puzzle. ... »
