THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/20/10 -- Vol. 29, No. 8, Whole Number 1611
C3PO: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
R2D2: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Near Escape (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Baagh! Baagh! Baagh! (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Very Hard Math Problems (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Housing Developments (letter of comment by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Mnemonics (letters of comment by Kip Williams
and Keith F. Lynch)
This Week's Reading (THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
and 7 WOMEN) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Near Escape (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I am happy that science fiction got the future so wrong. When I
was young I look forward to flying cars, personal jet packs, and
travel to other solar systems. It was motivation to learn,
something to work for. I might have given up back then had I known
that the real future was Facebook and Twitter. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Baagh! Baagh! Baagh! (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Rush Limbaugh professes to be the "the Man Who Runs America." He
says in a rant against building a mosque "next to" (sic) the Ground
Zero of the September 11 attacks suggests sarcastically that we
build a Hindu temple next to Pearl Harbor. You can just see the
wheels of his mind asking, "What religion can I associate with the
Pearl Harbor attack? Of course, it must have been the Hindus." I
am trying to picture the Imperial Japanese Navy made up of Hindus.
(Okay, I can make this a puzzle of the week: Who is the first
person who can figure out why I titled this article "Baagh! Baagh!
Baagh!"? Incidentally, Limbaugh continued his suggestion by saying
we should build a mosque next to the Pentagon. Actually, the
Pentagon deals with enough Muslims that they have already built a
mosque inside of the Pentagon.) [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Very Hard Math Problems (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The public is finally getting interested in cutting edge
mathematics, at least where competition and prize money is
concerned. It is for this reason that the Millennium Prize
Problems program was instituted. It started with the proof of
Fermat's Last Theorem. I think this task of solving great
mathematical problems came to public attention in 1995 when Andrew
Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem.
This was the contention that there are no positive integer
solutions to the equation:
A^N + B^N = C^N for N>2.
The conjecture is simply stated, but proving it took more than 350
years.
After this problem was solved the Clay Mathematical Institute
instituted the Millennium Prize for solving very difficult
mathematics problems. They took seven of the most difficult of the
unsolved problems and offered a million-dollar prize for solving
any one of them. This would hopefully motivate some people to try
to solve these problems, but more importantly it would put
questions of mathematics before the media and the public. The
media seems to take note when people are trying for a prize of a
million dollars. It makes it seem like more of a sport.
In 2003 Grigori Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture, becoming
the first person to solve one of the designated Millennium
problems. This one is a little harder to make simply
understandable. Wikipedia quotes it as this: "Every
simply-connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the
3-sphere."
Now what does that mean? This is sort of a generalization to four
dimensions (and higher) of something that seems obvious in three
dimensions. I could put a slipknot around a sphere in three
dimensions and pull it until it comes off. There is no good way to
lasso a crystal ball and be sure it will not slip out of the loop.
On the other hand if I did the same thing with a ring I could put
my loop through the center of the ring and around the outside and
there is no way it could pull away because it is tied around a
piece of the ring. In general, if a thing has a hole in it you can
tie it up with a slipknot. If it does not have a hole, you cannot
be sure you cannot slip it out without untying the knot. The
Poincaré Conjecture is sort of generalizing that observation to
higher dimensions where things may not behave so intuitively.
Perelman has been offered the prize $1,000,000, but he does not
want to take full credit for integrating other mathematicians' work
and adding on enough so that he could write that last part of the
proof.
In August of this year a proof has been presented for another
Millennium problem that has been unanswered for decades. It seems
that P is not equal to NP as many had hoped. The solution is
disappointing, because it essentially is a limit on how efficient a
computer program can be. It is like the Laws of Thermodynamics for
computer programming. Vinay Deolalikar from HP Labs claims to have
proven that P is not the same as NP. So what does this mean?
Consider a salesman who has to drive to four cities. He wants the
shortest route that will take him to all four cities. He asks his
computer. Now the computer has to look at the various paths. He
could start at any of the cities so the computer has four choices
for the first city visited, three choices for the second, two
choices for the third, and only one choice left for the final city.
This is four times three times two times one. There are 24 paths
that have to be evaluated. That will not take long. But what if
there were a million cities. The computer would have a million
possible choices for the first city, 999,999 choices for the
second, etc. The number of paths would be one-million-factorial.
That is a very large number and it would take the computer a very
long time to check each case. Suppose we are talking about N
cities. It will take N-factorial iterations. The runtime of such
a program will be something like a constant times N-factorial.
That grows very fast as N gets big.
But is there a way to make the program more efficient so it does
not grow like N-factorial but instead grows like a polynomial?
N-squared eventually grows very fast, but not nearly as fast as
N-factorial since each additional step multiplies it by a larger
number. It grows faster than N^5. It grows faster and N^10.
Eventually it is growing faster than N^1,000,000. Something that
grows like N! eventually grows faster than any polynomial. Can the
problem of the salesman and the very big map be solved more
efficiently so that the program that looks for the shortest path
can with lots and lots of cities grow no faster than a polynomial?
That voice you hear is Vinay Deolalikar from HP Labs saying, "no."
If you go up to a million cities you will have to take something
proportional to 1,000,000-factorial iterations. There are problems
that by their very nature take an amount of time that grows faster
than any polynomial.
That is sad, but if Vinay Deolalikar has his proof verified, then
at least we will know that limitation. And there will still be
five more unsolved problems.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_problem. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Housing Developments (letter of comment by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In response to Kip Williams's, Tim Bateman's, and Paul Dormer's
comments on the naming of housing developments in the 08/13/10
issue of the MT VOID, Evelyn Leeper adds, "Clearly Neal Stephenson
did not realize the rule about naming housing developments over
what was there before, but I rather like his names in SNOW CRASH:
White Columns, The Mews at Windsor Heights, The Heights at Bear
Run, Cinnamon Grove, and The Farms of Cloverdelle. There is a
similar weirdness in naming shopping centers these days: around
here we have 'The Shoppes at Old Bridge", "The Shoppes at North
Brunswick", and so on. (I must admit I haven't investigated these
thoroughly, because none of the "shoppes" I can see from the road
interest me.) I do like the idea of "Crappy Mini-Warehouse
Estates". I guess POLTERGEIST was set in Indian Cemetery Hills,
and the sequel to the Chekhov play would be Cherry Orchard
Cottages. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Mnemonics (letters of comment by Kip Williams and Keith
F. Lynch)
In response to the various comments on Pluto and mnemonics in the
08/13/10 issue of the MT VOID, Kip Williams writes:
Last time we were at this (that I can recall) was in 2006, and
someone (Amethyst) said we seemed to have two or three new planets,
and asked if anybody could come up with a new memory aid. I, of
course, was glad to help:
"My Eleven Ripe Cantaloupes Ultimately Return Your Very Evil Nurse
Unto Sam's Evil And Rather Tender Hearted Mom's Aunt's Reversible
Satanic Jalopy, Unless Plausibly Iterating Twin Elvises Reverse
Said Aunt, Turning Ugly Radishes -- Never Ugly Raisins -- And
Normally Unusable Salads Nicely Eaten, Provided They Understand
Nobody Ever Profited Largely Unless They Overstated Calculated
Earnings Reports, Especially Supremely Cretinous Harpies And
Robotic Overlords; Nonetheless Everyone Rises In Spain."
Best of all, if you omit "Profited Largely Unless They Overstated,"
it still makes Just as Much Sense! [-kw]
In response, Keith F. Lynch writes:
Impressive, even though Xena has since been renamed Eris.
I've seen various mnemonics for the digits of pi. Those are
easier, since each word only has to have the right number of
letters. It doesn't matter what letter it begins with. However,
all such mnemonics that I've seen stop short. None of them
represent *all* the digits of pi. Perhaps you can remedy that.
When you finish that, please do the same for all other real
numbers, such as e, the square root of 2, the seventh root of the
log of the cosine of Euler's constant, etc. Thanks.
There's no hurry. I don't need them until tomorrow. [-kfl]
And Evelyn adds, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piphilology is all
about 'the creation and use of mnemonic techniques to remember a
span of digits of the mathematical constant pi'." [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
The book-and-movie science fiction group chose THE HITCHHIKER'S
GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams (ISBN 978-1-400-05292-9) for
this month, and the film (rather than the radio play, the record,
or the television series) for the dramatization part.
Even though the work is very familiar, there are still new comments
to be made. "They still think digital watches are a pretty neat
idea"--nowadays I think digital watches are in decline, as more and
more people are using their cell phones as their timepiece. "Small
green pieces of paper" made no sense in a British context--it was
only American money that fit that description and even American
money seems to be moving away from it. (The movie also seems to be
Americanized, with American billions, and "zee" rather than "zed").
[As Keith Lynch pointed out in the 03/19/10 issue of the MT VOID
American billions have been the same as British billions since
1974. That is, in both countries a billion is 10^9. That is
called the "short" scale. Prior to 1974 as in Britain and in many
other countries all along a billion was/is 10^12. That convention
is called the "long" scale. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales. -mrl]
The actual "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" seems to be an early
example of an ebook in fiction.
Was the eponymous character in the film FORD FAIRLANE inspired by
Ford Prefect?
One of Adams's distinctive stylistic touches is the use of positive
adverbs (e.g., totally, exactly) paired with negative verbs or
prepositions (e.g. failed): "more or less exactly failed to please
the eye" or "almost entirely, but not quite, unlike tea".
Adams wrote about Prosser being a direct male-line descendent of
Genghis Khan well before a geneticist discovered the Genghis Khan
Effect, which is that there are approximately 15,000,000 direct
descendents of Genghis Khan alive today (though not all in the
direct-male line). (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#Descent for details.)
Adams claims that in space you asphyxiate and taking a lungful of
air before being ejected helps. Actually, that's backwards--
expelling the air from your lungs is what you want to do.
And I found Alan Rickman's voice far too familiar to use for
Marvin; I kept thinking of Rickman as walking around in the Marvin
suit.
I also just saw the 1966 John Ford film 7 WOMEN about the women at
a mission in western China in 1935. The women are Doctor
D. R. Cartwright, Agatha Andrews, Jane Argent, Emma Clark, Florrie
Pether, Miss Binns, Mrs. Russell, and Miss Ling. Do you notice
anything about that list? [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
When we are born, we cry that we are come to
this great stage of fools.
-- William Shakespeare, King Lear