Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Cuban exiles invade Bay of Pigs; Three astronauts of Apollo 13 land safely in pacific ocean; Benjamin Franklin dies at age 84; JP Morgan born in Connecticut; Ford rolls out the Mustang convertible.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
Well, I was going to talk about planetary science today (about which you’ll find plenty of links below) but instead I spent all night puzzling over what is supposed to be a simple 5th grade math problem.
Albert and Bernard just became friends with Cheryl, and they want to know when her birthday is. Cheryl gives them a list of 10 possible dates.
May 15
May 16
May 19
June 17
June 18
July 14
July 16
August 14
August 15
August 17
Cheryl then tells Albert and Bernard seperately the month and day of her birthday respectively.
Albert: I don’t know when Cheryl’s birthday is, but I know that Bernard does not know too.
Bernard: At first I don’t know when Cheryl’s birthday is, but I know now.
Albert: Then I also know when Cheryl’s birthday is.
(note: copied by me directly from the picture)
If you don’t want spoilers you’d better stop reading and figure it out now.
What is truth? Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?- 39 Lashes
Let’s start with one truth. This is not a simple 5th grade math problem.
You see the meme is that this is a regular old word problem from a 5th grade math test that Singapore children are expected to pass in order to graduate to the 6th grade which led of course to much Internet hand wringing about the abysmal state of U.S. education in general and particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) where the privatizing looters of our School funds and fiscal conservatives in general bemoan the lack of a qualified work force that must be supplemented by smarter (and cheaper) H-1B imported slave labor.
Here’s some tangential truth to start off- there is no shortage of STEM qualified native labor, in fact there is a surplus. The problem is that they expect salaries commensurate with their expensive multi year training.
Irrespective of that, almost every element of the meme is untrue.
This question is actually one of the more difficult math nerd questions given to high school students at a Math Olympiad.
Then there is some dispute about the semantics of the question. The New York Times goes so far as to re-write it so it is undisputably true that “seperately” in this case means that Albert knows only the month and Bernard only the day instead of another fair interpretation of the word that would mean merely that Cheryl told them independently. I’ll point out the official language of Singapore is not just English, but British English (hell, they even drive on the wrong side of the road) so that’s kind of a minor, if glaring, quibble; the sort that ought to make Alex Trebeck blush if not adjust the score during the commercial break (I give it a 25% chance, but what the heck).
There is however a deeper, logical flaw that allows for two (count ’em, 2) “correct” answers that is explained by The Guardian’s James Grime.
The 3 Easy Steps
1. Albert knows that Bernard doesn’t know.
2. Albert deduces Bernard can’t have a unique date such as 18 or 19.
3. Albert, smugly taunts Bernard, announcing Bernard doesn’t know.
As we’ve seen above in The New York Times discussion, step one is dependent on what the definition of “is” is. Clearly if knowing the date (as Bernard does) provides a unique solution, Bernard knows all which he admits he does not. This eliminates the 18th and 19th (you know my methods Watson).
The Difficult 4th Step
4. Bernard realises what Albert has realised, which is that Bernard does not have 18 or 19. Now if Albert was holding June he would know the answer, because there is only one remaining date in June, namely June 17. So Bernard deduces it is not June.
The “Wrong” Answer- QED
5. Bernard announces he knows the answer. This is the second statement of the problem.
6. If Bernard is so confident, he must have a unique date. We know it’s not 18 or 19. What other unique date can it be? There are two 14s, two 15s, two 16s and two 17s – but Bernard has eliminated June 17 – leaving him with August 17 only. That’s how he worked it out.
7. Albert is furious Bernard beat him to the answer. Albert puts himself in Bernard’s shoes, running through the six steps above. Finally Albert reaches the same conclusion we have, Bernard must have 17. Albert announces he knows the answer too.
So August 17 is a valid answer.
Or is it?
It is all about how you interpret the first statement. If Albert has to deduce that Bernard doesn’t know, then we get July 16.
But if Albert knows that Bernard doesn’t know – in other words, that this is a statement of fact, rather than a deduction – then we get August 17.
This incredibly subtle change – deduction vs fact – completely changes the nature of the question. Indeed, with fact interpretation the reader can now deduce the answer from just the first two statements of the conversation, whereas the argument for July 16 does require all three statements.
So, can we accept August 17?
Not any more. The originators of the question, Singapore and Asian School Math Olympiads, have rejected this alternative answer.
I’ll point out that in most classic logical problems all the statements are to be taken as fact rather than bluffs. On the other hand usually (but not always) all the information is relevant.
In any event I’m taking Alex to the mat on this one. Jeopardy is an incredibly lucrative franchise and they give away only a pittance in prizes. I know plenty of lawyers (looking at you PhilJD) and I think I get at least a settlement and an invite back.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
The Titanic sinks off the coast of Newfoundland; President Abraham Lincoln dies; Jackie Robinson becomes first African American player in MLB; US launches air raid against Libya; Pol Pot dies; Joey Ramone dies.
TORRANCE, CALIFORNIA – Just before 9 a.m. on February 18, the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance, California exploded, shaking the surrounding community with the force of a 1.7 magnitude earthquake, and sending a quarter ton of sulfur oxide gas into the atmosphere. With the capacity to refine more than 150,000 barrels of gasoline a day, the facility supplies nearly 10 percent of the state’s gasoline supply, and its reduced capacity increased the cost of filling up a tank of gas in California by 6 to 10 cents per gallon.
Workers inside the refinery likened the incident to a “loud sonic boom,” and soon roughly 50 firefighters were battling a three-alarm fire. First responders initially feared the possibility of radioactive materials at the scene, though that concern was ruled out some three hours after the initial explosion.
Here is where Roosevelt’s argument gets really interesting. He does not just present this Economic Bill of Rights as a question of fairness or some dreamy utopian ideal of equality. He sees them as a fundamental to national security:
“All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being. America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Breakfast Tune: Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key – Billy Bragg & Wilco (Banjo Cover)
Today in History
President Franklin Roosevelt dies; The American Civil War begins with the attack on Ft. Sumter; Yuri Gagarin is the first man to fly in space; Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off on its first mission; Late night TV host David Letterman born. (April 12)
Ah, screw it. Just make three lefts and while you wait for oncoming traffic I’ll passive aggressively stew here with my shotgun and whistle tunelessly.
It must be long, boring, and in an incomprehesible foreign language (even if that language is English).
The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.
Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.
Ballet is the same, but with more men in tights and without the superfluous singing.
I’m not afraid if the Terpsichorean Muse though I do like a nice bit of cheese-
I was a DJ after all and I know what (shudder) drags them out on the dance floor and it ain’t this-
You see, people only dance to the thoroughly familiar and cliched.
Those are ones I actually like.
Anyway the story of the Ballet goes something like this, the celebration of spring begins in the hills and a Crone enters to foretell the future which isn’t really even as interesting as a cold reading because this is a simpler, more primitive time and every Groundhog Day is pretty much exactly the same.
What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
That about sums it up for me.
Except that today is different. Today we go and kidnap us some virgins. I dunno, I kind of agree with that part about the railroad tracks.
And then we celebrate Festivus with the airing of grievances until the Sage comes and tells us to stop it and get on to the orgy.
End of Act I. Time to hit the lobby and get blasted because things are only going to get worse.
Act II
Evidently the ballerinas were out in the lobby too as they straggle on stage and wander around in circles for no particular reason. It’s just like a Sigma Alpha Epsilon party at UVA only with more roofies. One particularly befuddled co-ed is selected for sacrifice, sent off to perform goodness knows what kind of unspeakable acts with a bunch of dirty old men and then dances herself to death much to the amusement of the other performers and outrage of the audience.
As you might imagine this tale of pedophilic murder created quite a stir, even in Paris a city not noted for Puritanism. At the debut there was a riot between the wealthy patrons of art and the bohemian hip crowd that liked it for it’s novelty. From all accounts Nijinsky’s choreography sucked, but I think the whole concept was a bad idea from the git.
Despite my opinion it’s one of the most frequently recorded and performed ballets.
Oh wait, that’s Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. This is Le Sacre.
Don’t agree with my assessment? Well, that’s the Politics of Dancing-
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Peace talks conclude in Northern Ireland with Good Friday agreement; the Titanic sets sail; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ published; Comedian Sam Kinison killed.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.
Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
Welcome back to Science Thursday. This particular film was shot by CERN interns during some downtime, of which they have quite a lot actually since it’s broken more often than it’s working.
Science!
What a lot of people don’t know about the Large Hadron Collider is that it’s basically been operating at half capacity since an accident during the test phase blew out a large section. Now, after two years of re-building, it is poised again to create that Black Hole Apocalypse that swallows the Earth into it’s singularity (not to worry, as it turns out micro Black Holes are unstable and loose mass (energy) through Hawking Radiation at a rate too great to sustain themselves indefinitely, so you can rest assured that we’re far more likely to die of Global Climate Change).
Anyway it’s been down for two years (much like Shell’s Arctic drilling scheme) and started it’s run up to full capacity next week. Beyond nailing down the Higgs Boson, a lot of what they expect to find is nothing.
Huh?
Scientific method. A Theory is not a Theory unless it makes predictions that are experimentally disprovable-
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
The dog did nothing in the night-time.
That was the curious incident.
A lot of the work for CERN from here on out is testing some of the predictions of various Theories and seeing if the experimental results match. The fuzzyness of the Higgs Boson for instance could indicate Supersymmetry which predicts up to 5 types of Higgs Bosons.
If the Standard Model is in fact correct, it covers only 4% of the observed Universe. 27% is “Dark Matter” that is currently undetectable but exerts a huge Gravitational influence (umm… Black Holes are detectable so it ain’t that). “Dark Energy” even less so, but this is the force that observationally inflates the Universe beyond a size where Gravity can ever collapse it.
The Large Hadron Collider might, might produce energy levels sufficient to detect Dark Matter. Nobody is talking about Dark Energy yet.
Oh, and ‘Dark’ in this context means undetectable by current means, might as well call it Rebellion.
So how to do you detect the undetectable? Why, by it’s absence. The hope for Dark Matter is that certain types of collisions will, instead of producing results that conform with the Standard Model, lose detectable energy (mass) in a replicatible way that advances the math describing it’s nature.
The pat on the back and call to arms marked the restart on Sunday morning of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. More than two years after it handed researchers the Higgs boson, and was closed down for crucial upgrade work, the machine is ready to make scientific history for a second time.
How that history will be written is unknown. High on the wishlist for discoveries are dark matter, the invisible material that appears to hang around galaxies and makes up more than 25% of the universe; hidden extra dimensions that would explain why gravity is so puny compared to other forces of nature; and an explanation for why the world around us is not made from antimatter.
But there is another history that keeps scientists awake at night: the possibility that the LHC’s discoveries begin and end with the Higgs boson, that it finds nothing else over the next 20 years it is due to run. As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and professor at the University of Texas in Austin, told the Guardian: “My thoughts on the possibility of the LHC telling us nothing new don’t go beyond hopeless fear.”
…
Until now, the Large Hadron Collider has run at only half its design energy. The machine was restricted to 7TeV collisions after a weak connection led to a short circuit that caused an explosion less than two weeks after it was first switched on in September 2008. The blast covered half a kilometre of the machine with a thin layer of soot and closed the collider for more than a year. The repairs cost the lab £24m.
The machine was switched back on in 2009, but Cern took the precaution of running at half energy to slash the risk of another accident. The gamble paid off. On 4 July 2012, the lab’s Atlas and CMS detector teams declared they had discovered the Higgs boson months before the machine was shut down. A year later, Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh-based physicist, and François Englert from Brussels, won the Nobel prize for their work on the particle, which is thought to give mass to others.
…
The Higgs boson was the last piece of what physicists call the Standard Model, a series of equations that describe how all the known particles interact with one another. Though successful, the model is woefully incomplete, accounting for only 4% of the known universe. With the LHC, scientists hope to find physics beyond the Standard Model, a first step to explaining the majority of the cosmos that lies beyond our comprehension.
“The LHC will be running day and night. When we will get results we don’t know. What is important is that we will have collisions at energies we’ve never had before,” said Arnaud Marsollier, a Cern spokesman.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive organization that brings together conservative politicians and major corporate interests, is out to correct the impression that it’s a “climate denier” organization by threatening to sue groups that refer to it as one. But after a string of abandoned sponsors, the expansive free-market group’s threat to sue Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters appears to be more motivated by containing its public relations spiral, rather than reshaping its anti-climate and anti-clean energy agenda.
As the Washington Post reports, in recent weeks attorneys for ALEC sent letters to the two organizations asking them to immediately “cease making false statements” and “remove all false or misleading material” suggesting that ALEC does not believe that “human activity has and will continue to alter the atmosphere of the planet.”
Well, I was going to talk about planetary science today (about which you’ll find plenty of links below) but instead I spent all night puzzling over what is supposed to be a simple 5th grade math problem.
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