WaMu Suffers Least Damaging Fraud in Bank’s History
In an attempt to move my several financial accounts to a single bank, I opened a new pair of checking and savings accounts with WaMu.
Banks continually monitor their accounts with a variety of automatic tools designed to detect fraudulent activity. I managed to inadvertently trip WaMu’s fraud detection system, a system which is — quite [...]
Aliasing in Seattle
The rain falls hard. Watch it hit the asphalt. Relax your eyes and see the illusion of motion: like hundreds of ants flitting to and fro.
I wonder just where this aliasing enters into the brain’s visual processing.
Vibrated Cornstarch
Anyone who hasn’t already seen it should immediately watch the video showing what the Chaos Lab at UT Austin managed to do with corn starch and water. (Ok, they actually call themselves the “Center for Non-Linear Dynamics”, but “Chaos Lab” is a much better name, and “chaos” is the name of the group’s subdomain.) If [...]
Creepy Spam
This one managed to slip past SpamAssassin:
Hi,
VIgAGRA for LESS [URL of website selling Viagra]
Your attitude is unacceptable. Answer my question or be punished.
that everyone is going to play?
Even if I was wanting to buy some Viagra, that email would really kill the mood.
Vandalism
Graffiti doesn’t seem to be a very big problem in Seattle, so I was more than a little surprised the first time I spotted this van (pictured above) parked on a quiet residential street on Beacon Hill. At second glance, it became clear the graffiti artist behind this striking sight was also the van’s owner. [...]
Snowflake Physics
In the course of my efforts to design an original theme for this blog, I went searching for snowflake photos; what I found was quite beyond what I had been looking for. Ken Libbrecht of Caltech has an amazing website devoted to the the physics of snowflakes and ice crystal formation. His lab does a [...]
Navier-Stokes Update
[Update to the news item which I posted earlier.]
Alas, the possible Immortal Smooth Solution of the Three Space Dimensional Navier-Stokes System has been “withdrawn by the author due a serious flaw”. For the time-being, we will all continue to toss in our sleep, worrying whether the Navier-Stokes equations are well-posed. Although her million-dollar proof appears [...]
Letter of Complaint
Who doesn’t love complaining? The world is full of madness which verily begs to be criticized, lambasted, excoriated, scarified, and said bad things about. In addition, complaining relieves stress and thereby promotes a long, healthy life! Unless, of course, the target of your tongue-lashing decides to retaliate. And for this reason, it generally is [...]
Existence of Smooth Solutions to Navier-Stokes
Update (10.10.06): The paper has been “withdrawn by the author due a serious flaw”.
The big math news is that Penny Smith of Lehigh University appears to have proved the existence of smooth solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. This is one of the ten Millenium Problems for which the Clay Mathematics Institute is offering a [...]
OpenPGP key
To go along with the new name, I made a new OpenPGP cryptographic key. Download it and then phone me to verify the key fingerprint.
For those of you who aren’t so familiar with cryptography, it is just a set of mathematical tools which enable people to exchange messages (e.g. email) over unsecured channels [...]
