In light of all of the debate over the SOPA/PIPA controversy, I was delighted to see this lighthearted talk that takes a look at the math behind the claims that the music/movie industry makes about their losses due to copyright infringement.
TED Talk Tuesday part 3 coming around 6:00 today.
A Photo of a Closed Circuit Camera Used by British Police
I bet that they wish that they could have come up with this one, but this is apparently entirely legitimate. The headline alone is worth the post, but I’ll include part of the article just to back it up (there are more specifics in the full piece, found here). (HT: Jesse Thouin)
CCTV police officer ‘chased himself’ after being mistaken for burglar
An undercover police officer “chased himself round the streets” for 20 minutes after a CCTV operator mistook him for suspect.
The junior officer, who has not been named, was monitoring an area hit by a series of burglaries in an unnamed market town in the country’s south.
As the probationary officer from Sussex Police searched for suspects, the camera operator radioed that he had seen someone “acting suspiciously” in the area.
But he failed to realise that it was actually the plain-clothed officer he was watching on the screen, according to details leaked to an industry magazine.
The operator directed the officer, who was on foot patrol, as he followed the “suspect” on camera last month, telling his colleague on the ground that he was “hot on his heels”.
The officer spent around 20 minutes giving chase before a sergeant came into the CCTV control room, recognised the “suspect” and laughed hysterically at the mistake.
The Cover Image for the Game SET
SET is an extremely addictive, fast-paced card game found in toy stores nationwide. Although children often beat adults, the game has a rich mathematical structure linking it to the combinatorics of fi nite affine and projective spaces and the theory of error-correcting codes. Last year an unexpected connection to Fourier analysis was used to settle a basic question directly related to the game of SET, and many related questions remain open.
So begins a recent paper on the elegant mathematics of the card game SET. For those of us who enjoy card games that require logic and quick thinking, rather than simply luch, and the mathematical beauty and surprising interconnectedness of different mathematical fields, this paper is interesting. Warning: you need a certain level of algebraic understanding to follow the paper (having had an algebraic structures course beyond “linear algebra” in college will help). The paper starts out by giving the background of the development of the game, and how it is played. Then the authors turn to problems of algebraic interest regarding the game and show how to answer some of these questions.
Personally, I love the game. I was introduced while visiting my graduate alma mater (Virginia Tech) by a former student here at Messiah College who was in graduate school at Tech. She introduced my wife and I to the game, and I fell in love. For those familiar with the game SET, or would like to try it out, it is available online here.
No Longer Normal