This one strikes me, and apparently others, as highly counter-intuitive, but it’s true because of mathematics! Take any two places in the world; call these points A and B. Take any two paths between A and B that are the same distance; call these paths C and D. Let C(x) be as far down path…
Month: February 2014
Reflection
“There’s a shadow in the mirror with a glimmer of the one that was.” My creative juices are like a gas-powered lawn mower that’s been kept a few too many seasons. I pull the cord and the engine kicks over a few times and I think that it’s the time that things will engage, but…
Pseudocode for the Russian peasant method of binary
Just for fun… Here’s the pseudocode for the method of building a binary number from a decimal number, based on the Russian peasant method of multiplication: function mybin(mydec) { mybin = “”; do while mydec > 0 { if mydec is odd: { mydec = mydec – 1; mybin = “1” + mybin; } else: mybin…
Russian peasants, number sense, and bases
Russian peasants do too much work There is a method of multiplication called the Russian peasant method. I’ve seen it mentioned here and there, but I was not explicitly educated in the process; it struck me as being more trouble than it was worth, and I didn’t previously bother to dig farther into it. I…
The Wayward Airline Passenger
This problem was brought to my attention on G+, but I wasn’t satisfied with the solution presented. There are actually two versions, the one that was originally presented on G+ and the corrected one that matches the standard version. I’ll discuss the standard version first. Standard version: All seats on an airplane are assigned. However,…