Browsing Archive: April, 2014

Newcomb's Paradox

Posted by on Friday, April 25, 2014, In : Philosophy

After writing about Simpson's paradox a few weeks ago, and receiving such positive responses to it, I have been asked to write another article on a mathematical paradox. This time the topic of discussion is Newcomb's paradox.

Suppose that there is a game show in which you, the player, are shown two boxes labelled A and B. Box A will always contain $1000. Box B may contain a million dollars or it may contain absolutely nothing, which is decided before the game begins. The player is given a choi...

Heartbleed Bug

Posted by on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, In : Administrative

A few people have been asking me about the Heartbleed Bug in the internet, so I will pass along what I have been told so far.

This is a security flaw in the OpenSSL software used by many websites to secure their systems against unauthorized entry. The OpenSSL is basically software that is used by webservers to maintain security with transmitted information. It encodes any private information so that anyone snooping on the website won't be able to access information such as banking records or ...
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An Exotic Particle at LHCb

Posted by on Wednesday, April 9, 2014, In : Particle Physics

There is interesting news for the particle physics community today, courtesy of the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) experiment. They are now claiming that the hint of a new particle that they saw a few years ago has now been confirmed as existing, and the interesting part of the story is that it is not a traditional quark-based particle. This is the first piece of matter to be produced in the lab that is neither a meson nor a baryon, but something completely different. (The original annou...
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A Million Dollar Problem

Posted by on Wednesday, April 9, 2014, In : Mathematics

With tax season here once again, I thought it would be a good time to present an interesting mathematical problem that could be worth one million dollars to whoever solves it. It is simple to present, but has stumped mathematicians for decades.

Let me begin with a review of logic circuits (although it can also be considered as mathematical operations with no connection to electronics). You begin with a set of "inputs" that can have a value of true or false. You can have as many or as few as yo...
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Cassini & Enceladus

Posted by on Friday, April 4, 2014, In : Astronomy

The team behind the Cassini mission have made another fascinating discovery, and announced it today. They seem to have discovered a large lake of warm water on the surface of the moon Enceladus.

Enceladus is one of the moons of Saturn, and is actually relatively small being only the sixth largest of the moons. It was first discovered by Herschel in 1789, but due to its size and distance it was not well studied until the 1980s. Then the two Voyager probes passed close enough to photograph and e...
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Joe Jobbing

Posted by on Tuesday, April 1, 2014, In : Administrative

It would appear that over the last two or three days several people have been receiving spam e-mails from an account that I used to own but no longer use. I feel that I owe it to the public to explain this situation.

Most people happily use their email accounts and never question how they work. And although I won't give a long exposition on the SMT protocol or POP services, I can give a simple explanation. When you send an email message, the application that you are using adds header informati...
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Dr. Christopher Bird