Ended

I think you are right, and the solution is a meta-textual reassurance, specifically of the form: "if one of the statements is true, then which casket should the suitor choose?"

A great read, thanks. Incredible that he survived that fall.

Not just any professor, but Béla Bollobás!

It's simulated with Adobe After Effects; I would think it's probably broadly accurate, and uses some form of the underlying physics (Navier-Stokes equation) to produce the simulation. In that sense it's reproducing the processes which generate these patterns, as opposed to purely faking it by e.g. playing around with Fourier series to get things which look like waves.

But there's no way it gets the detailed physics right (kinetic energy spectrum, detailed free-surface position) - that's a research-grade problem requiring massive amounts of computer time.

The IOCCC page: http://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/hint.html

There is also a colour version. Very cool stuff.

On the other hand I find these results fascinating. They are like a microcosm of experimental science. Numerical coincidences like these can be found by any high school student with a calculator, but only some deep theory can tell us whether they really are coincidences, in the statistical sense, or whether they are a manifestation of some precise underlying structure.

The Ulam spiral is one of my favourite examples of this kind of thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral

Very cool. I would like to be able to send 'stats' (or whatever) and get back all graphs in a single email. In case I forget what I'm tracking.

This is a cool idea. My bank recently introduced a similar feature in their mobile app. You can move a small amount of money from your current account to your savings account in a couple of clicks (no need to log in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12xjelPXqWo

"He was tall and muscular, a blue-collar type"

A blue collar worker is lower class by definition. As phrased above, the "tall and muscular" bit is part of the writer's observation/stereotype that the man is a blue collar worker. "He was big and strong and (therefore) looked like someone who works in manual labour".

That's better, but still not entirely correct. An array of real numbers is not itself a vector. It is a representation of a vector in a particular basis. This is a technical point but very important to grok, especially when starting to look at vector spaces other than F^n.