WLOG Blog

Monday, August 30, 2010

A playlist for the week

The theme for this, the first of what I hope will be many "playlists for the weeks to come" is "Cover versions that surpassed the original. Here's the playlist; some comments on each song below.

Note, by the way, that I've intentionally omitted a bunch of songs which are "technically" covers, but whose original version is obscure or tremendously overshadowed. These are interesting in their own right, and may be the subject of a future playlist (admit it: you had no idea Quiet Riot didn't write "Come On Feel the Noise.") But that's not what concerns me here: I'm interested in bands who boldly dared to record new versions of songs that were already popular-- and somehow managed to raise the bar. Alright, enough chat. Give it a listen. A warning, one or two swear words appear.

Long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness style commentary on the songs and why I picked them below the fold. Also, a bonus track!

∫ A littler math puzzle

I was still working on coming up with a puzzle for my friend's neighbor and I came up with this little guy, which I think is easier than the previous one, and also easier to explain. I haven't decided if I'm going to use it yet, but either way, it's a nice little puzzle so I wanted to share it with someone. Lucky you!

So here's the puzzle: Jill walks into her math classroom at the end of the school day to find Jack sitting sullenly at one of the desks. "What's the matter?" she asks.

"I'm gonna fail my math class," says Jack. "The teacher told me I could do this extra credit problem for him to get my grade up to a C-, but now I'll never be able to solve it and it's not my fault."

"What do you mean?" asks Jill, sympathetically.

"I mean, he told me to start with 1 and then start adding the odd numbers together in order on my calculator, you know, like 1+3+5+7 = 16, and so on. And then he said ' If you tell me what the first nine-digit number you can make just by adding together odd numbers in order is I'll round your grade up to a 70.0%.'"

"So what's the problem?" asks Jill, feeling annoyed that all she gets in this dialogue are questions.

"The problem is, I sat here for an hour adding together odd numbers on my calculator, but then I realized that my calculator can only display eight digits at a time anyway. So I'll never be able to figure it out!"

"Don't be silly!" said Jill, finally using a declarative. "I know what the first nine-digit number you can make by adding up consecutive odd numbers is."

And the question, of course, is "What is it?" Answer below the fold.

Glenn Beck and double standards

This time I just have a short thought to share. I don't want to be too partisan, and I admit I haven't actually dug through the old news reports, but I'm just surprised no one else seems to be complaining about this. Am I the only one who thinks that, while its really not such a big deal where or when Glenn Beck wants to hold a rally, the real hypocrisy is what he's calling it? I mean, maybe trying to piggyback off the emotion MLK invokes is a little tacky, but who's surprised that Glenn Beck (just like Ed Schultz and other punditainment hosts) is playing with people's emotions in tacky ways? What really ticks me off isn't anything that Beck's doing, its what everyone else ISN'T doing. It seems to me that if any, literally any left-of-center political figure wanted to hold an event and said it was about "Restoring America's Honor," he or she would be flayed alive by conservative pundits/bloggers/facebookists. And Sarah Palin's twitter feed would read "Enuff w/ liberals unpatriotic H8! I Didnt kno USA had become DIShonorable?! If U hate it here u can MOVE 2 FRANCE!"

I don't think I'm just wildly speculating; I recall just this kind of talk helping to take down John Kerry and dragging Michelle Obama into a mini-scandal as well. Personally, I remember a few years back having a hard time expressing my earnestly held opinion that president Bush's policies had deeply damaged America's moral standing in the world. I was worried that if I ever said anything like that, the rest of my opinions would be written off as those of an "America Hater." And yet no one is questioning Glenn Beck's patriotism just because he happens to think that Obama and the democrats have damaged America's honor. Why? Because right-wingers are automatically patriotic.

I hate double standards like that. And to be fair, they happen in both directions. I happen to think that democrats get away with shamelessly raking in the dough from huge corporations and then turning around and cutting them huge breaks in regulatory policies. Why? Because the left is automatically against big-business. And while we're at it, why does everyone think Ken Salazar is doing a good job as Secretary of the Interior? Is it just because democrats are automatically good at the environment? The whole thing just really ticks me off. Good thing bloggers are automatically not required to offer constructive solutions and are just entitled to complain about the political status quo.

∫ I learned from teaching undergraduates: Mass Spectrometry Edition

During TA training at Stony Brook this week, one of the things they had us do was perform one of the lab experiments taught in the freshman lab courses and give a presentation on it as though we were explaining it to our students. I was assigned a lab about measuring the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron, which was a pretty slick lab in and of itself. But along the way I also learned something new about how mass spectrometry works, and I learned that phasers might just be electron beams fired in a fluorescent gas. But first things first.

∫ A little math puzzle

A week or two ago an eighth grade girl who lived down the street from one of my good friends told me how much she liked math; I told her that I would send her a math puzzle and leave a little prize with my friend that she could claim if she solved it.

Actually, the first thing I told her was that she could have the prize if she figured out what perfect numbers were and described them to me. I figured she would consult an encyclopedia or her math teacher, but she proceeded to text "what is a perfect number" to ChaCha and read me the answer verbatim. So I called her a cheater and then resolved to come up with a puzzle she couldn't just look up the answer to.

Anyway, while I was walking to the grocery store the other day, the following little puzzle occurred to me. Unfortunately, I'm worried its a little too easy, since you can get the answer without really knowing what's going on, so it's not going to work as a puzzle form the little mathematician. But I liked it enough I wanted to put it someplace. Don't worry, its pretty easy, but it's based on something kind of neat that I didn't personally realize until the other day. Here goes:

The king's royal mathematician is about to retire, and he has to name a successor. He has two students, both with excellent marks on their exams and both of whom have shown real promise as mathematicians and as mental calculators. Thus, the old man announces a test: In the presence of the king and his court, he will write a 5-digit number on a piece of parchment and place the parchment on the table before the two students. Whichever one of them can be the first to correctly tell the king what the first (one's place) digit in the square of the number on the parchment is will be the new royal mathematician. However, to prevent them both from simply blurting out a guess (with a one-in-ten shot at winning), anyone who answers wrongly will be executed.

When the day of the test arrives the old man takes his quill pen, dips it in the bottle of ink, and carefully writes down his number of choice. Then, to ensure everything is fair, he squares the number himself, whispers the answer in the king's ear and turns around to place the parchment on the table and begin the test. However, just then the mathematician clutches at his chest, and falls over on the table, dead of a heart attack. As he falls, he knocks over the ink bottle, spilling it across the parchment and obscuring everything except the one's-place digit of the number he had written, which is a 7.

"Sire," says the first student, "I know the answer." He announces it to the court and the king nods in amazement.

The question is, what did he say, and, given that his life was on the line, how could he be so sure?

Answer and explanation is below the fold

A note about the integrals

Occasionally blog posts will show up with with titles like these:

∫ A Little Math Puzzle

∫∫∫∫Why I Love Parseval's Theorem

I intend the integral symbols (the things that look like this "∫") to be a warning that the post contains some technical math or science. The number of integrals indicates the dimensionality of the underlying metric space. Er, sorry, in this context it indicates the level of background knowledge I think you will need to get anything useful from the post. Incidentally, the bad joke above is a weed-out joke. If you understood it well enough to groan, then you can consider yourself weeded out from reading the rest of this post and just keep reading the rest of the blog with impunity ;-)

If you didn't, good for you! And thank you for helping me prove that I have friends who are real people. However, if you still want to read the blog, just use the integral symbols as warning signs. They'll let you know how much heavy thinking you're in for.

Note that, within the post, there may be separate sections that have more technical information than the post as a whole. In keeping with the above description, I'll always mark a multi-part post with the value of the easiest section, because you can still get something out of the post even if you might find reading the whole thing to be a bit taxing. When possible, I'll separately mark the technical sections inside the article.

The general guidelines I'll use are:

Welcome to WLOG: The personal explanation

Welcome to WLOG: The personal explanation
Okay, so I just told you a why, from a technical standpoint, this is called the WLOG blog. The explanation was basically this: I like math and physics, conveniently, there's this acronym "WLOG" that gets used a lot in math and physics, and the name "WLOGblog" sounds funny. I think that about sums it up.

Really, though there's a second reason, which is probably just as dorky but at least not as nerdy. And that's this: I'm starting this blog just as I'm simultaneously starting graduate school, in pursuit of a Ph.D. in physics, and as you might imagine, that requires a lot of specialization. In fact, in this day and age, getting an advanced degree in any field of study is going to really narrow your outlook on the world, as Matt Might so effectively demonstrates in his Illustrated guide to a Ph.D.