mrdmnd

I was confused too - I think it references this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_laser...

The MIT Admissions website lets student bloggers write about essentially whatever they want - Lydia has written a number of excellent posts that are entirely unrelated to MIT admissions as well. In particular, this writeup is related to one of the MIT classes she's taking (a seminar in mathematics).

Submission statement: this is a remarkably accessible presentation (with hand-drawn diagrams!) on the concept of geometric invariants and their use in the proof of an early 20th century problem about equivalence between polyhedra.

We'd definitely like to use it too - please share! :D

My team at Airbnb is working on a tool called "Salus" - named after the Roman goddess of hygiene - that allows you to check the correctness of your data in a number of common, extensible ways. Perhaps this is something that the open-source community at large might be interested in?

The Mean Value Theorem strikes again!

Thanks for the bug report! I'll relay it to the proper engineer.

This code is one month younger than me.

Did you get API rate limited, by any chance?

Erons and I (you'll probably not recognize me?) worked on the bathroom server about a year ago - I think the infrastructure is still in place, it might just need to be reconnected.

I've been working on this problem as well - the idea is to come up with a "dynamic decision" boundary that allows you to have a "virtual p-value" for different points in time that is equivalent to the 5% p-value at the end of a standard experiment. For example, maybe you stop any test with a p-value less than 0.05 after 30 days, but you require a p-value less than 0.01 for 10 < d <= 30 and less than 0.001 for 1 < d <= 10.

Here are some sources on how to go about doing that:

http://people.bath.ac.uk/mascj/papers/cj_bwt_kuwait.pdf

http://people.bath.ac.uk/mascj/talks_2013/cj_york_may2013.pd...

Collectively, we call our engineers "nerds." That's the URL for the engineering blog.

Kelner was my advisor as an undergraduate - I loved listening to him talk about graph problems. He always seemed to have a novel way of looking at something like this. I'm glad to see him get some excellent new results!

Nifty! I'll have to try this out.

I took Alan Edelman's 18.337 class (Parallel Supercomputing) at MIT a few years ago, and on the first day he brought in some boards that had been used in the original Connection Machine - it was like looking into a piece of living history to see circuits that had been influenced by Feynman. Fantastic article!

You must not be using python 3, then.

I'm not sure you know what isomorphic means.

"Mathematicians who make big claims are obligated both to be right and to make themselves understood."

I spent most of this academic semester struggling with the material in MIT's 18.404 (Theory of Computation) class taught by Michael Sipser - at the end of one of his lectures, he mentioned that he keeps a large file of proofs on hand from people claiming to have resolved the P vs NP conjecture, but has little time or faith to read them... he calls this the "crank" file. It seems to me (and I'm just a lowly undergraduate math student, feel free to discount/discredit this) that solutions to many of the large, imposing academic challenges of our era might be found in the depths of other such professor's "crank" files.

Then again, there is definitely something to be said for establishing credentials - there's only so much time in the schedule of someone capable of verifying claims to be spent on verification, and it seems obvious that they should spend that time on solutions that come from people who have a track record of competence.

Congratulations, Chris! I'm sure Mr. T and Mr. S are very proud, too. The work looks fantastic; Jeremy and Ashu have done a great job getting art assets into place for you guys.

-- A friendly HS alum

This is probably a bug, and will be treated as such. I wouldn't worry about this one.

Under what circumstances are you okay with giving up 3x performance? I find the while-loop code ("Version 2") as readable and idiomatic as the one using count(). If you can write fast Scala code (and you've already shown that you can), why not do it? Have you measured how much readability is impacted by slightly more verbose (or C-like) patterns?

Also, hi Russell!

Can't tell if serious...

Script hangs on server launch process -- cat server.log yields a NoClassDefFoundError for java/util/concurrent/LinkedTransferQueue.

That's pretty strange - any idea where my machine is borked?