Simple classification of radioactive decay

In how many different ways can an isolated neutral non-exotic atom decay? When an atom decays, it spontaneously changes into something else. That “something else” is inevitably two or more particles, none of which is the same kind of atom as the original. I also need to also explain what a “kind of atom” is.……

How to walk around the Earth

Suppose we start at Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. We are challenged to travel from there to Tasmania (the big island south of Australia). We can travel freely over land, but only for X consecutive kilometers over water. How small can X be, and still allow us to reach Tasmania? Ground……

Survey of MacPaint brush patterns

MacPaint is a paint program for early Macintosh computers. You can see it, and try it out, at the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/details/mac_Paint_2&gt;. Its native image file format is very limited, and very obsolete. But a large number of MacPaint files were created, back in the day, and some of them can still be found. For……

True AI would definitely destroy us

I’ve never seen a single credible reason why an artificially intelligent computer program (AI), one comparable to a human brain, wouldn’t spell doom for humanity. (Please note that I’m talking about true, strong AI, which by all accounts does not yet exist. I’m not talking about a neural network that beats you at chess, or……

Corrupting ZIP files

The ZIP (PKZIP) compressed file format is organized in a backwards fashion. To unzip a ZIP file, you start by looking for a special byte sequence near the end of it. This is a marker for a data structure (the end of central directory) that points to other data structures that appear earlier in the……

Superstalemate solution

This is a solution to the chess challenge I posed in a previous post. It is not the only solution. From this position: 8/7p/6p1/2K3pk/6pb/6p1/6P1/8 b – – 0 1 Black plays …h6. Any move by white then stalemates black. Occasionally in a chess discussion group, someone will suggest that stalemate being a draw is a……

Superstalemate: A chess challenge

Challenge: Find a legal chess position in which one player is stalemated, and in which the stalemated player would still not have any legal moves, even if the rules were changed to make it legal to move your king into check, or otherwise leave your king in check. I don’t think this is a very……