by Dad on Math Riffs, Off Topic!
As I type this, the calm clicks of the keys are punctuated once a minute by a sound I can most accurately ascribe to an evil, mutant cricket. It is the smoke detector at the top of the stairs, warning me that its battery is low. It has, in fact, been warning me quite urgently and persistently since 3:22AM this morning. I do not believe the timing is random, and I suspect it is actually, motive unknown, part of a sinister plan to do me in.
Having invested our full share to inflate the housing bubble, our home meets all of the recent building codes pertaining to fire safety. This includes a full complement of hard-wired smoke detectors — one in each bedroom, at the top and bottom of any stair way and in locations within hallways whose precise specification eludes me. The net result of this is that we have no fewer than nine smoke detectors in the house. I discern at a minimum that the authors of the current building code possess significant stock holdings in smoke detector companies, even if they are not fully complicit in the threats against my life. Read the rest of this entry »
by Dad on Math Riffs
Not All Brains Have Equal Processing Capacity
There’s all sorts of interesting supercomputer news out there recently. Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Roadrunner supercomputer narrowly edged out Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jaguar to take the title of the world’s most powerful with a score of 1.1 petaflops of computational power. Not to be outdone, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced they were contracting with IBM to deliver a 20 petaflop machine in 2009. That would actually create a machine more powerful than the 500 fastest supercomputers on the planet and represents a significant leap forward.
Naturally, all of us are looking for faster computers these days. Ray Kurzweil’s hope is for computers fast enough to deliver full blown supra-human artificial intelligence. As in brain-in-a-jar, download your head and live forever stuff. You can read all about it in his book The Singularity Is Near
. Be forewarned… If you’re the least bit apprehensive about computers inside your skull, Ray’s train of thought may have you pricing cabins in Montana. Ray pegs the arrival of the Singularity as circa 2040. Read the rest of this entry »
by Dad on Math Riffs
In the previous post we set out to talk about the comparison between brains and computers, looking specifically at whether Ray Kurzweil’s prediction for human-level artificial intelligence is likely in the next few decades. Our main conclusion based on looking at the structure of a brain is that we’d need roughly 32 petabytes of space to accurately model what the brain looks like. This post delves into what kind of silicon-based infrastructure you would need to process a data structure that size. Read the rest of this entry »
by Dad on Math Riffs
What Do You Need to Win?
267 Votes versus 271 Votes
39 States Plus D.C. versus 11 States
It’s officially two weeks until Election Day, and we’re already gearing up here for an evening of popcorn in front of the TV. With Dad not being a big sports fan, election night is something like the Super Bowl around here, and this is the first election where the kids realize there’s something like “teams” we root for throughout the night.
That said, if we learned anything in the last two elections, it’s that score keeping is hard. Seriously, if football had scoring rules like the Electoral College I think we’d be looking at a lot more hockey fans out there. Let’s take a closer look! Read the rest of this entry »
by Dad on Math Riffs
A Hundred Billion Pennies Saved, is $1 Billion Earned...
Big numbers starting with seven are in the news this week, and it’s worth a Math Riff to try to get a handle on just how much tax payer contribution our elected leaders are asking us to sign up for. It’s those billion dollar figures again that boggle the mind. Did you know a billion dollars worth of pennies weighs 312,000 tons, and would make a cube 126 feet on a side? Or that there are over 2 billion pennies in circulation today?
The $7 billion dollar amount is the current revenue short fall in California. Governor Schwarzenegger is getting ready to hit up Uncle Sam to cover the gap until the credit markets loosen up and the state can go back to conventional lending sources to cover its cash needs. That should get California through this fiscal year, but what the state will do next time around is anybody’s guess… Unless the California tax payers can find two million pounds of pennies in between their couch cushions or car seats, there could be an even bigger crunch come next year.
Read the rest of this entry »
