Just a matter of time.

The Kepler mission has been a great success up to now.  The Kepler space telescope was created to search for solar systems with multiple planets, and the results have been astonishing so far. According to Ian o’Neil’s article on discovery.com :

“The number of known multi-planetary star systems has just tripled. What’s more, the Kepler space telescope science team has just announced that they have doubled the number of confirmed exoplanetary sightings made by the observatory.”

“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”

It seems that it’s only a matter of time before we find the first habitable planet – like earth- in a nearby star system. This could very well be the greatest discovery of all times !

Best Mathematical Puzzle ?

One of the most interesting mathematical problems ever :

There are 100 prisoners who are sentenced to death. However, the prison’s head, being merciful, offers them a possible way out: He puts 100 identical boxes, perfectly arranged in a row, in the death chamber and places the prisoner’s names in them, one name per box. The prisoners wait in a room outside the death chamber. Each prisoner is asked to proceed to the death chamber and open at most 50 boxes. If he finds his name in one of them he is transferred to the mercy room where he waits. If all prisoners succeed in finding their names then they are all spared from death and are released. On the event that one of them fails to find his name in one of the 50 boxes of his choice, the process is stopped and all prisoners are immediately executed. The prisoners can talk to one another whilst in the waiting room, but, once a prisoner gets transferred to the death chamber or the mercy room, he cannot tell the others anything at all.

Can the prisoners devise a strategy to increase their chance of survival?

Without a strategy, each prisoner has a 50% chance to find his name, and the chance that all of them find their names and survive is practically zero (1/2^100). Give it a shot. Hint: The prisoners actually have a good chance of survival.

Professor Takis Konstantopoulos posted this a few weeks ago and he also posted the answer here if you are ready to give up.

Having your way with statistics

The British government released the official figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK. According to them, 7m people are engaged in illegal file sharing in UK alone.

How did they come up with this number you say ? PcPro traced the number and came up with a nice story.

It all started when the music industry trade body (BPI) commisioned a private survey to Jupiter Research. Jupiter research interviewed 1,176 house holds with internet access and, 136 of them admitted that they have been engaged to illegal file sharing. This 11.6% figure was then changed to 16.3% “to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.” (Just to be on the safe side).

The official figure of english people with internet access is 33.9 million but Jupiter Research chose the number 40 Million, for no reason at all (or maybe to compensate for the households that use their neighbours’ wifi connection).

So they got the number 6.52 million (40*0.163) which was rounded up to 7 million propably because their software couldn’t handle floating points.

A few months later, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property -a Government advisory body- commissioned the research from a team of academics at University College London, who apparently got the 7m figure from this interesting study.

nice huh ?

The normal result of this study, taking the real numbers into account would be 33.9*0.116 = 3.93 million. But this is still based on a 1000-answers telephone survey, and should be further rounded *down* , for example to compensate for all the house holds that do not have a telephone line. But, hey, what can you do, it is an official number now.

The 7 sins of windows 7

Free software foundation has launched a campaign against the upcoming windows 7 operating system, listing 7 of its “sins” that should be considered before using it. Windows 7 is destined to dominate the world computing for the next years, so people should really be informed of what this will mean.

The sins listed are :

1. Poisoning education

2. Invading privacy

3. Monopoly behavior

4. Lock-in

5. Abusing standards

6. Enforcing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)

7. Threatening user security

Quoting from the site:

“Microsoft is up to their usual tricks again — only this time, they’re also inserting artificial restrictions into the operating system itself. While not the first time they’ve done this, this is the first release of Windows that can magically remove limitations instantly upon purchasing a more expensive version from Microsoft.”

If this is true, it is crystal clear that the software industry is no longer governed by free market laws. You cannot pull tricks like that if there is a chance that you will lose money or market share. The operating system market is a Microsoft Monopoly for decades now, and rumors of such tactics have been heard before. But lately, windows have been faced with increased competition from Apple and Linux.

However, the much needed competition in the operating system market will come to a full stop if MS is allowed once more to illegaly use its monopoly power to keep users tied to their products.

Feudalism in 21st Century

There are many similarities between the modern society and feudalism. Simply susbstitute kings and dukes with banks and you will get a pretty medieval picture.

In the bad old days the simple people would have to work for all their lives for a master who would provide them with land and a house to live in. In exchange the peasants would give a large portion of their income to the landlord.

Do you see the similarities? The bank loans you money to buy a house, a house that you litterally have to work all your life to repay.

Of course you own the house. That’s something, right ? Well, not really. That simply means that you also get to pay all the corresponding taxes and accept all the risks involved. If  your house gets demolished, you still owe the bank the money, and you have no house. And keep in mind that after 30 years, when the mortgage will be paid (in triple at least) the house will be old and not of much value. Your children will still need a new house.

Am i missing something here ?

Dogs intelligence

According to the telegraph dogs are as intelligent as 2-year old children. They can understand up to 250 words, they can understand gestures, they can add 1+1 and they can deceipt you in purpose. I have a dog, and somehow i knew all of this. As anyone who has a dog already knows, they are very easy to communicate with as they have a very human-like intelligence,  apart from all this sniffing around of course. Still it’s nice to have proof

wikipedia community

As the guardian reports,  wikipedia is now only adding 1300 articles per day, as opposed to 2200 a couple of years back. This can be normal though, as there are obviously less things left to write about. But the article also points out a much more important thing, that the dynamics of the community are changing. The few elite editors are slowly becoming a closed class, where a newcomer has trouble entering.  This is a common problem to all communities. The elders don’t have any respect for the newbies as they expect them to devote the same amount of effort to the project as they did. This is to be expected and the newbies, well, they just have to deal with it.

However, wikipedia is not like other open source projects. It bears a power beyond measure, and it’s not a question if the project will go on. Even without up to date information, wikipedia will always be an invaluable resource for information. And it’s beacuse of that power that it can be a target for editors with a very specific agenda. So how can a free encyclopedia remain objective ?

The short answer is that it cannot. There is no way for wikipedia to contain all aspects of a historical event. There is no way to be absolutely right on anything you say about cats. Wikipedia is not and will never be an authoritative source. It’s extremely valuable, extremely informative, but not authoritative. It has without a doubt a much less percentage of junk and misinformation than the rest of the internet. It is a huge and extremely well done project, and the world is a little better today because of it.

The future of European Union

European union is aging fast -and i am speaking demographically-  and the future doesn’t seem so bright.  An austrian toy manufacturer was quoted saying

“The toy trade is slowly dying across central Europe. There are not enough children any more”

On the other hand of course the health industry is alive and kicking, enjoying a golden era.

What are the reasons for the low birth rate of developed countries ?

There are many physical and metaphysical explanations for the low birth rate, however the bottom line is this: having many kids, somehow seems to be more trouble than its’ worth. The typical european has no more farms and cottages for their kids to work, no more family businesses that need extra hands. The europeans work all day and a kid is just another 8-hour of work every day for them. Something is really wrong with this picture, but i’m sure that if large companies had the oportunity to breed workers some of them might just try it out.

The internet in 5000 days

Did you know that the internet is only 5000 days old?

Can you imagine how it will be after another 5000 days ?

Kevin kelly gives some insight:

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