Points scored in overtime are not real points

I should know better than to write about college football, a sport that I pay little attention to. But it’s a particularly egregious example of an irritating phenomenon. On November 24, 2018, in American college football, Texas A&M and LSU were tied 31–31 at the end of regulation, and Texas A&M won in overtime. But……

The new record largest known prime number

A few days ago, the discovery of a new record largest known prime number (282,589,933−1) was announced, making my post on “finding” record prime numbers somewhat obsolete. I could update it, but that would be silly. Instead, I’ll discuss these record primes. It happens every couple of years: A new record large prime number is……

Win32 I/O character encoding part 3

This is the third, and possibly final, post in my series on Microsoft Windows console mode character encodings. It describes how to use Unicode reasonably cleanly, without the “chcp 65001” hack discussed in Part 2. Again, the idea is that you are writing a command-line computer program in C or C++, and you want it……

Why throwing a game is against the rules

On November 29, 2012 (six years ago today), there was an NBA basketball game that got some attention. It was a nationally televised game featuring two powerhouse teams: the San Antonio Spurs (Tim Duncan, etc.), versus the Miami Heat (Lebron James, etc.). To the dismay of many, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich more-or-less threw the game,……

Win32 I/O character encoding part 2: chcp 65001

In a previous post, I summarized the character encodings used by Windows console mode programs. This is a short post about a not-very-good mitigation technique for some of the resulting problems. In a future post, I’ll go over some better solutions. Sometimes on an internet forum, someone will complain about a third-party Windows console program……

Examining the SHA-1 collision files

SHA-1 is a cryptographic hash function. You give it a computer file, and it produces a 160-bit hash that is completely determined by the input file, but not in any obvious way. In early 2017, a group of researchers, using advanced mathematics and 6500 CPU-years of computer searching, found the first ever SHA-1 collision: two……

How long does it take to fall through a ball of ice?

Planet FrictionlessIceball has a straight, narrow tunnel connecting two points on its surface. How long does it take to slide through the tunnel? Simplifying assumptions As with most story problems, we have to make some simplifying assumptions. But I think they’re fairly reasonable. We assume the faller starts out motionless, at one end of the……