The Balls and Urns Paradox

Start with an empty urn having an unlimited capacity, and a infinite number of balls, labeled "1", "2", "3", etc. At time T minus 1 second, put balls #1-10 into the urn, then take ball #1 out. At time T minus 1/2 second, put balls #11-20 into the urn, then take ball #2 out. At …

Chess and drawing by threefold repetition

Chess is an ancient game with simple rules, so you might think the official written rules would have evolved to be very clear and concise, and to unambiguously cover all corner cases (at least as to which moves are legal, and how the outcome of the game is determined). But I'm not so sure. I'll …

The finer points of TIFF “ASCII” fields

This post concerns the TIFF image file format, and some related formats: Exif, DNG, and JPEG XR. A TIFF file contains a set of "fields", each of which contains some sort of data element. Each field has a "tag": a code number that tells, logically, what is stored in the field. For example, tag #256 …

The oldest living former X

Sometimes we can't have nice things, just because the nice thing is difficult to state clearly in words. For example, the record low daily high temperature for this date is arguably just as meaningful as the record high daily high. But the weatherman never tells us the record low high, probably because it would confuse …

My list of frequently misspelled words

I've read a number of lists of frequently misspelled words, and I always end up thinking "Really? That doesn't match my experience at all. If your methodology says that supersede is misspelled more often than its, then I think you need a new methodology." Of course, context matters. Professional writers misspell different words than internet …

Beta-stable nuclides with the same mass number

I claimed in a previous post that, for a given atomic mass number, there is one and only one nuclide that is immune to all forms of beta decay. It occurs to me that I was probably technically wrong, especially since I made it clear that I considered atoms with different nuclear energy states to …

IPv6.001

Or: Why IPv6 failed (This post is about Internet Protocol, the communications protocol that the Internet runs on.) (Rant alert! I'm trying to be nice on this blog, but I can't seem to make this post much less mean than it is.) The successor to IPv4 is not IPv6. It might be IPv7, or it …

JPEG thumbnail formats

How many ways are there to put an extra "thumbnail" or "preview" image inside a JPEG (.jpg) image file? This isn't just trivia. One problem with thumbnails is the possibility that they might be neither updated nor deleted when the main image is edited. If you're not careful, your edited JPEG file could contain a …