John Borwick's blog

I just finished categorizing all my entries, back to when I started blogging in 2003.  My blog taxonomy is a little unwieldy, perhaps because I was making it up as I went along.  Here they are, by category (please note one entry can be in multiple categories):
Technology: 199
Entertainment: 157
Politics: 100
Links: 53
Winston-Salem: 38
Self-Improvement: 32
Tweets: 21
Work: 18
Language: 17
Science: 17
Travel: 14
Writing: 8
ITSM: 6
Religion: 3
Some problems: “Technology” is such a large category as to be useless; and technically everything on here should be able to go under “Entertainment.”

I feel like I need a “re-balancing” algorithm, where if a category is more than N times … Continue Reading

Today is the winter solstice! Sunrise here was at 7:28 AM!

I think Thoreau once argued that, given a nearby city he had to travel to, the ordinary person would earn their wages for coach fare and travel the next day, whereas Thoreau would just walk and get there.

The only flaw with Thoreau’s thought is that some time is more valuable than other time. For example, if I had to get to the nearby city to catch a friend before they left, I might be willing to take out a loan.

I’ve been playing Urban Dead, a zombie game. As a human, you can search for ammo or you … Continue Reading

Professor Libbrecht from Caltech was kind enough to explain the snowflake problem to me, and to give me permission to quote him.
Let’s make the numbers a bit smaller to make things clearer. Say a snowflake contains just 10,000 molecules, and these lined up in a straight line. Most of these are ordinary water molecules, but let’s say 100 are heavier isotopes.

Then the question is, how many ways can you arrange these 100 heavier molecules in this linear crystal? Well, the first heavy molecule could go at position 1, or 2, or any position up to number … Continue Reading

A snowflake has approximately 10^15 unique characteristics. The birthday problem’s generalized solution is
Pr(k, s) = 1 – ( s! / ( ( s-k)! * s^k ) )
k is sample size.
s is the number of possibilities.
I need to know two things:

1. For what minimal k does Pr(k, 10^15) exceed 0.5?
2. How many snowflakes have ever fallen in history?

Unfortunately, I don’t really know how to find the answers to either question. My math is rusty about how to deal with factorials, and I have a hard time visualizing how many snowflakes are in one cubic foot of snow. … Continue Reading

You know how they say that every snowflake is unique?

Have you heard the proof about how if 30 people are all in a room, the odds are that two will have the same birthday?

Can’t you put the two together to prove that, somewhere in the course of history, there have been two identical snowflakes?

Some of the Slashdot geeks are talking about the Atkins Diet. I really don’t know how such logical people can think it’s a good idea to eat slabs of meat.

Atkins diet rebuttals:

• Atkins Diet Alert, from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
• The Guardian: Atkins diet is ‘pseudo-science’, say experts
• Big Fat Fake: The Atkins diet controversy and the sorry state of science journalism
• Atkins diet banned in Scottish hospitals

update: I posted on Slashdot for the first time.

The UK’s government has officially warned people about the Atkins diet.

From the Christian Science fair winners:
1st Place: “Life Doesn’t Come From Non-Life”

Patricia Lewis (grade did an experiment to see if life can evolve from non-life. Patricia placed all the non-living ingredients of life – carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) – into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. (Patricia also prayed to God not to do anything miraculous during the course of the experiment, so as not to disqualify the findings.) No life evolved. This shows that life cannot come from … Continue Reading

The Guardian reports, Long odds for massive meteor impact. My favorite part:
Bookmakers William Hill say that they are happy to take bets at odds of 909,000/1 that the asteroid will hit Earth on March 21 2014 and wipe out life on the planet. “On the principle that if the asteroid does wipe out life on Earth we probably won’t have to worry about paying out to winning customers we will happily take all such bets – although one customer who placed a bet on the world ending said that he would collect his winnings in heaven,” said … Continue Reading