Clark Hall Radio

I successfully turned my advanced physics lab into a radio station. Cornell's only on-campus radio station broadcasted Modest Mouse at 103.9 FM for over two hours. The range was at least a half mile and the station was running at a fraction of its full capabilities. So, let be known that Clark Hall on Cornell's campus has a hidden radio station on the third floor, disguising its self as Lab station C-9.

[[Here is my lab report]]

Nice Captcha Google

Google has gotten creative with their captcha's (a test to determine whether the user is human).



After realizing this is worth sharing, I got a last minute snap of the screen-shot yesterday.

Etymology: Manilla Envelope

What the hell is a manilla envelope? Sure, I know what it is, but why is it Manila? As a young and naive child I had the misconception that it was called a Vanilla Envelope, aptly named because of its vanilla colored appearance. However M is 8 letters away from V in the alphabet [See memorizing the alphabet], completely changing the adjective's meaning.

Well, its taken me many years to consult an answer box on this issue, but now its done. It's derived from the material used to make it: Manila Hemp. Manila hemp, also known as manilla, is a type of fiber obtained from the leaves of the abacá (Musa textilis), a relative of the banana. The name, 'Manila', refers to the capital of the Philippines, one of the main producers of abacá.

The XKCD Effect

On Jan 21 XCKD, a very popular web comic, posted a comic referencing the Fujitsu Q2010 laptop:



Prior to this, due to a lack of search volume, Google Trends had no global search trend data. However, the day XKCD published a webcomic referencing the Q2010 there was a global traffic spike. Not only does this demonstrate the high volume of XKCD traffic, but it also tells us where the top readers are.



On Jan 23 XKCD posted a comic referencing skynet:



The impact of XKCD on skynet also had a noticeable impact on global search trends! The traffic spike on Jan 23 can be clearly seen in the United States search trends:



The XKCD effect is big and all comics are still released under the Creative Commons License. I wonder how much an XKCD shoutout costs? From the trends below, I suspect things might change.

A New Equals Sign - Dot Equals

I think that mathematics could use a new commonly used character to describe certain types of equalities. Typically, the equals sign, = , is used to denote the equality of two quantities. A simple example of this would be



A lot of times, algebraic manipulations of expressions are made and the equals sign is also used. An example of this would be:



In this latter example, I think a unique equality character should be used to distinguish equalities made solely from mathematical manipulation.

So I propose the following a dot equals to denote equalities made solely from mathematical manipulation or evaluation. A simple example being:



Or




Although this symbol is available in unicode and Latex, if the character does not exist an equal with a period ( .= ) could be used. I must note that I have seen this to denote "in the limit of". I do not think this is a common use, and as an alternative a dot underneath the equals sign could be used or anything else similar to an equals sign. This symbol and many others exist in Unicode or Latex. For inspiration, check out all of the unicode symbols here.

Autogram-Spoonerism

I'd like to try and come up with complex literary phrases that are layered with forms of word play.

Spad Boonerism

This is both a Spoonerism and an Autogram.

Memorizing the Alphabet

The English language uses a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters. This number is comparable to many other phonetic alphabet systems. Twenty six is not an incredibly large number, yet it has given me much difficulty throughout my life. As a child too much time was spent alphabetizing words for the tedious homework tasks given to me by my elementary teachers. As an adult, I embarrassingly still mumble the alphabet song to myself when looking up words in an appendix or dictionary. There seems to be no apparent organization of letters in the accepted sequencing of the alphabet. Shouldn't Q join X and Z at the end? Or maybe the vowels should be grouped together. Since it is the 21st century, we could even use a sequence modeled from Dvorak's Simplified Keyboard. Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles in order to improve typing proficiency over the now accepted QWERTY standard. And just like the QWERTY keyboard, it looks like the organization of the alphabet is not going to change.

So, I have realized it may be worth my time to take matters into my own hand. I will unnaturally acquire the intuitive feel for letter sequencing that others have obtained through their life. I propose doing this through assigning numerical values to each letter. Numbers, have arguably the most intuitive organization imaginable. If one obtains immediate knowledge of the numerical placement of each letter in the alphabet, alphabetizing becomes trivial.

I started this process briefly in the car. Some letters seemed easier to me than others. Obviously A, B, C, and Z are easy. Some other ones to note: H = 8 - they look similar, I = 9 and L = 12 - they sound similar. Counter intuitively, M, which is symmetric, is 13 an odd value not divisible by 2 while N, an antisymmetric letter, is 14 and perfectly divisible by 2. Also, G would never have struck me as being the luckiest letter in the alphabet, but I'm not surprised about M being unlucky.

I could go on about the feeling letters give me and the associations I make from them, but it would detract from the point of this article and also take away from its credibility. I have posted the letters and their corresponding values for others to think about. In the future, I would like to create an interactive website for memorizing alphabetic values.

A = 1
B = 2
C = 3
D = 4
E = 5
F = 6
G = 7
H = 8
I = 9
J = 10
K = 11
L = 12
M = 13
N = 14
O = 15
P = 16
Q = 17
R = 18
S = 19
T = 20
U = 21
V = 22
W = 23
X = 24
Y = 25
Z = 26