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The Social Software Problem concerns humanity's history of endless conflict, focussing primarily on Millenarian Movements.
Jonathan Swift
swift@softwareproblem.net
A page or so below the fold is one of the problems from the final exam of the Probability class my entire Sophomore Class of two-hundred and twenty students attended during the third Quarter of our Sophomore year.
I'd like you to submit your answers to my little brain teaser the same way you answer Teh Riddlar's questions: post a top-level comment that announces you have an answer, then a reply to that top-level comment where you post your answer itself.
That way your answer is hidden from view from those who want to obtain their own answer themselves.
The problem seems so incredibly easy at first that even the simplest fool could answer it in but a few minutes, but in reality is mind-bendlingly difficult!
I put damn near every last one of their sorry lot completely to shame by almost immediately obtaining the insight required to completely correctly solve the problem in but ten minutes!
If memory serves me, but six of us out of our class of two hundred twenty had such success.
After posting the problem itself, I give some of the reasons that I have just about always been able able to obtain that kind of insight so easily.
It has a lot to do with my genetic heritage, the way both my mother and my father raised me, the way I raised myself, and the way I approached my original career goal of obtaining the Nobel Prize in Chemistry at first, then for Physics for research in Optical Astronomy, then for Physics for Experimental Elementary Particle Physics research, and now the Medicine Prize for solving The Mental Software Problem, as well as the Peace Prize, for solving The Social Software Problem as well.
Most Universities have Honor Systems, the violation of which can get you suspended or even expelled.
Caltech has an Honor System, but every last Caltech student who has ever set foot in the City of Pasadena regards Caltech's Honor System with the very same deep contemplative reverence with which deeply faithful Christians regard The Holy Trinity.
That's because no attempt is ever made whatsoever to determine whether any cheating has taken place.
All Caltech midterm and final exams are take home.
Provided you turned in your answers by a certain specific deadline, you could take them anywhere you wanted to - I took all of mine in my room in Ricketts House - and you could take them any time you wanted to.
Most commonly I started at nine in the evening, but I went to sleep early one night, set my alarm for four in the morning, did everything into my power to actually get out of bed when the alarm went off, set into my final when I managed to crawl far enough out of the completely stupour I've had every time I've ever waken up in my entire life, turned in my Blue Book - so called because exam books are inexpensive bound books of a dozen sheets of paper with a light blue cover, got it in mere minutes before the deadline, yet actually got a pretty good grade!
Every last course taught at the entire Caltech campus is so mind-alteringly difficult that the vast majority of exams not only allow you to use your course's textbook, but any book of your heart's desire! Only a very few are Closed Book.
I don't recall which type this actually was, but based on my memory of our textbook, most likely it was Open Book.
Before he ever attempted to pass out our exams to us, our instructor carefully, slowly and quite sternly told us that our exam had but one specific requirement:
No calculators of any sort were permitted throughout during the entire exam!
Thus none of YOU sorry lot are not permitted to use any manner of calculator either.
Here We Go:
Our entire exam - there were four, maybe five questions - had a time limit of three or four hours.
But provided none of you ever go anywhere near anywhere a calculator when you work on this problem, I am quite happy to give each of you until the rest of your days.
It happens that I just scored a really good contract.
Because I would be very, very, very surprised if so much as one of you ever figured out how to solve this particular riddle, and because Scoop records the data and time of each post, I'd like to offer you the following incentive:
I Will Personally Award One Hundred Dollars To The First Kuron To Post The Correct Answer!
Your choice: I will send you a personal check, or else a PayPal.
Would You Like Some Chocolate Chip Cookies? They're Still Hot From The Oven!
A Chocolate Chip Cookie factory mixes up the dough for each day's cookie production run first thing in the morning in a giant hopper.
The cookies are then baked in the very same kind of continous process tunnel oven that Domino's Pizza employs to cook its pizzas.
Equally spaced rows and colums of raw cookie dough are squirted onto a fine chainlink steel conveyor belt just outside one and of the oven.
The conveyor belt runs quite slowly through the oven throughout the entire workday. When the cookies emerge from the other end, they are completely baked.
The conveyor belt runs through the open are a few yards or so, where it enters another continuous process tunnel, but this one has quite chilled air blowing through it, so that the cookies cool down to room temperature quite quickly and so become hard and firm enough that they don't break when they are packed into the boxes that will eventually appear on the grocery store shelves.
Small, automatically operated spatulas scoop up some precise number of cookies then deposit each cookie in an open paperboard box, at which point a small squirt of hot glue is applied to one box top flap, that flat is pressed down to it is flat to the top of the box, with the other box top flat being pressed down against it until the hot glue cools and so hardens, thereby sealing the box shut.
After each box is sealed, it's popped into a packing case of a dozen cookie boxes.
The cookie cases are then loaded by hand on a wooden shipping pallet.
After the required number of cases are on the pallet, a workman rapidly runs around the pallet to fasten all the boxes tightly together with a roll of the same kind of plastic film used for Saran Wrap but that is far thicker and so stronger.
A forklift operator then loads the pallet of Chocolate Chip Cookies into one of the trucks that is backed up against the factory's loading dock.
When the customer's daily cookie order is aboard a truck, it drives the cookies over to the central distribution warehouses of one of the grocery store chains that carries the factory's cookie brand.
Each individual store's cookie order is loaded onto pallets, but these pallets have cases of lots of other kinds of groceries from other food manufacturers.
A similar wrapping process takes place, with the pallets then being loaded on the truck that delivers fresh groceries to each grocery store, where they arrive around midnight each night, night after night.
Stock clerks distribute all the boxes around the store ailes, placing them on the floor in the general vicinity of where the groceries will be shelved.
They then use the very same of Box Cutter Knife that Usama bin Laden employed to pull his little prank on three thousand New York City high rise office building workers to quickly cut the top of each box.
They then stack the product boxes quickly on the store shelves.
Just before Sunrise, they gather up all the empty boxes, collapse them, then carry them out to the back behind the grocery store, where a devices that's just like a large trash compactor compresses the empty boxes into a dense bail of cardboard, and fastens it all together with heavy wire.
The bales of cardboard are then stacked behind the store just like haybales are stacked.
After a full truckload of cardboard bales has accumulated, they are hauled by a truck to an industrial cardboard recyler, with the eventual result that the Chocolate Chip Cookie factory saves a lot of money on the cost of packing cases, because it uses almost one hundred percent post-consumer cardboard!
The result of all this incredibly expensive effort is that dozens of boxes of incredibly tasty fresh-baked Chocolate Chip Cookies are to be had on the shelves of damn near a hundred supermarkets across a huge region, well before each store opens for each day's business.
My Question For You:
That particular Chocolate Chip Cookie factory has a maximum daily production capacity of one hundred thousand cookies.
PRECISELY!
How many Chocolate Chips does one have to mix in to the dough used to bake one hundred thousand Chocolate Chip Cookies so that ninety-eight percent of the cookies contain at least two chips?
BON VOYAGE!
Don't forget to bring some Dramanie with you. You never know, you might get seasick.
The reason I have such a deep insight into what makes not just software work, but computer hardware as well whose theoratical foundation is Quantum Field theory, with layers upon layers eventually coalescing into the simple considerations of Boolean Algebra that makes all Digital Electronics work its special magic, is what enables me to have become what I am now completely convinced is the very finest low-level debugger who has ever walked the face of the planet Earth.
I'm every bit as good at reverse-engineering software as I am at debugging, and so was once in very high demand. That's what got me my Debug Meister position at Apple Computer in the mid-90s, because much of our Quality Assurance testing was performed by running third-party applications that were thought to be reasonably stable on new system builds to see whether any problems turned up.
If a hard system crash, or the occasional very subtle and difficult to reproduce bug should occur, is it our fault or theirs?
When any really interesting such bugs would ever occur, one of Apple's very finest Quality Assurance Engineers would struggle for as long as a week to reproduce it. Upon doing so, he'd ring up one of us Debug Meisters so we could come have a look at it in his cube. Because these bugs were always so difficult to reproduce, we dare not allow the Central Processing Unit execute so much as its very next instruction.
We had to use a very low level but rather brilliantly architected machine debugger called MacsBug - named not after the Apple Macintosh, but the "M" being for Motorola, who supplied the original and incredibly primitive MacsBug in the form of a hex dump on some lineprinter paper to those who purchased MC68000 microprocessor developer boards - that replaced the entire operating system with itself whenever any hard crashes ever occured, to then reverse engineer not just the third party application but in most cases many components of your own operating system.
It turned to be about half and half. If we managed to obtain any real insight into what the third-party developer had done wrong, we carefully explained that insight to someone at Apple Developer Technical Support so he could pass the bad news on to the developer.
I won't tell you just now what the other one was, but one of the two most successful reverse-engineering efforts of my entire year and a half spent as a Debug Meister came when I was able to certifiably identify the precise byte offset into Microsoft Word 6's executable file at which lay a single incorrect machine code instruction that causes an incredibly hard to produce system crash about a minute or so exter quiting from Word during periods of incredibly violent backing store file thrashing!
Word set a timer that, after it fired, would reset it self, thereby ticking just like a clock. Because the Classic Mac OS never had any real manner of process architecture, even after Word had completely shut down, that timer would continue to fire for a little while before it somehow managed to finally stop.
If you were thrashing violently on your virtual memory you would sometimes - but only very, very rarely - manage to overwrite that subroutine's machine code before the timer stopped firing. The next time the timer fired, you'd crash into MacsBug.
I spent at least a week puzzling over what could possibly be going on.
That bug was so incredibly hard to reproduce that three separate Quality Assurance engineers as well as myself filed that exact same bug in Apple's Radar Bug Data Base only to have it closed as unreproducible every last time!
When someone reported it for a fifth time, the decision was made to have one of us Debug Meisters figure out how to reproduce it rather than a Quality Assurance engineer.
I can't recall anymore how I reproduced it, but I required four, maybe five days. It was still quite difficult to reproduce, so I studied the bug for another few days until I required the required insight:
While the crash was obviously the result of jumping off into hyperspace, the Instuction Pointer was always in the same general vicinity when the crash occured. Perhaps it would be helpful to look at Word's dissassembled machine code in that same general vicinity during completely quiescent conditions.
BINGO!
No more than two, maybe three more hours were required for me to obtain that mistaken machine code instruction's offset. That whole subroutine was certifiably buggy, but what I supplied to Apple Developer Technical Support to pass on to our friends in Redmond was the instruction that fired the timer.
Apple has always maintained an extensive library of third-party software for this purpose, which had thousands upon thousands of titles when I worked there, because it contained damn near every application ever published for what at the time was the Classic Mac OS.
Any Apple employee who wanted to - not just QA engineers - could check out any title they wanted to. But they took great pains to ensure that you would not keep your own copy of the title, and that you would return it to the library by the deadline, which I think was a week or so.
I've always found reverse-engineering work incredibly tedious though, so I never do it anymore unless I absolutely have to.
From time to time I turn up what I suspect is a compiler machine code generation bug, and in one case it really was, but when I worked for Ignorant Mother Fucker Number One, it was a simple build setting in which someone had rather ignorantly neglected to specify that our Snow Leaopard 64-bit iSCSI device driver was to be built in Kernel Mode, and so violated the Mac OS X - as well as Linux - convention that an x86_86 Application Binary Interface time and space optimization known as the Red Zone that anyone in their right mind would consider a Crime Against Humanity is to be applied only to user space code, and never to kernel code.
If you use the Red Zone in Linux or OS X kernel code, from time to time an interrupt or exception will occur, with the mind-alteringly bizarre result that as little as just one byte of stack data - a local variable - from just one subroutine is changed to a completely different value!
If that causes some kind of subtle bug, and you don't know what the Red Zone is or what it is used for, you will never in your entire existence have any hope whatsoever of ever doing anything about it.
I only got lucky because my particular build setting problem produced an incredibly rare and incredibly difficult to reproduce kernel panic.
Why I Realy Could Win The Nobel Prize But I Lifted My Finger.
Caltech is no larger than a Community College, but it is absolutely rotten with Nobel Laureates.
Back in the mid-1920s some graduate student in his early twenty's won the Mother Fucking Nobel Prize in Physics by experimentally discovering the long theoretically predicted Antimatter through the use of nothing more than a large piece of photographic film - or perhaps a plate - and a strong electromagnet.
Charged particles expose the light-sensitive gelatin that coats photographic film even more effectively than Photons do. Thus photographic film had long been used for all manner of particle physics experiments.
But rather than passing the charged particle perpendicularly through the film as one does with light to capture an image, one passed the particle from one edge of the film, all through the gel just above the surface of the film or plate, and out the opposite edge of the film, thereby calculating a strongly exposed, incredibly narrow, accurately recorded and so precisely measurable image of the path the particle took as it passed through the gelatin.
This is known as a particle track.
The incredibly huge, incredibly complex and so incredibly expensive particle detectors used by the giant particle accellerators such as CERN in Geneva capture just these same kind of tracks, but instead large three-dimensional grids of electronic radiation detectors such as small Geiger Counter tubs are used to produce a short, sharp pulse as a particle passes through it, that runs a long and quite carefully measured length of coaxial cable to a vast expanse of Rack Mount Units a little to the side of of the detector, where the precise timing of each individual pulse, which precise radiation detector detected it, as well as how strong it was, is quickly measured and converted into a binary number and then passed out a digital cable - an optical fiber for the larger experiments - where the particle's detection is recorded to magnetic media.
All but a very few of the particle interections that are of interest to Elementary Particle Physicists are incredibly rare. To have any hope of all of ever observing such interactions, let alone enough of them that you get enough samples to take the desired measurements with any accuracy, modern particle detectors use all manner of incredibly complex computerized and electromagnetic control systems to generate two incredibly dense and populous but slow and so quite low-energy energy beams of Particle and Antiparticles, then gather each into bundle together so that it is no thicker then a human hair is, then use incredibly complex computerized and electromagnetic control systems to not only accellerate the particles in each beam as close as to the speed of light as they possibly can, but along a very precise and carefully measured path throughout the entire length of accellerator pipe that is damn near as evacuated as intergalactic space, then carefully point the two beams directly at each other in an incredibly carefully controlled way so that all of the particles in each beam slam together right in the very middle of the detector with collossal force.
The technology one requires to pull this off now results in a bunch of particle tracks being captured by the detector that somewhat resembled the paths of the bright sparks found in fireworks shows, but are far, far more numerous.
Thus you would have no hope whatsoever of recording such vast torrents of data by writing it to a disk drive. Instead, one uses arrays of as many as a couple hundred high-speed tape drives, all working in parallel:
If you want to record one single thirty-two bit number, you record the low order bit to one drive, then the second bit to the next drive and so on down the line until your thirty-two bit number is recorded as just one bit on thirty-two completely different tapes!
When each tape is full, a robotic arm is used to quickly remove the tape from the drive and to insert a fresh tape.
There is no way you could ever hope to have a tape drive manacturer make a such a tape drive array for you. Instead, they buy a bunch of good quality, high-speed and high capacity cardtridge drives completely off the shelf, then round up a whole bunch of Physics graduate students who are quite good with both circuit board design and soldering guns, so they can make a completely homemade parallel tape deck array in an electronics shop found in the Physics departments of one of the Universities that is participating in the experiment.
One requires a binary file on a hard drive to do the required data analysis that transforms all the individual particle detections back into continuous particle tracks. That's done by using just such a parallel tape deck array and some manner of high-speed I/O bus to reassemble the bits back together, with all of the data for each individual collision being saved as a huge binary file stored on a collossal RAID volume.
One can identify precisely which type of elementary particle created each track, as well as its mass, electric charge and energy by by applying some basic Laws of Physics to explaining the path of each track. Most of this work is done by Experimental Physics graduate students and the occassional Postdoc in big Sun Workstation labs such as the one where I spent the Summer having the absolute fucking time of my life throughout most of the Summer of 1993.
My UC Santa Cruz undergraduate thesis was performed in much the same manner as these physical measurements are performed, but in my case I used a very high quality, high speed and high capacity Pseudorandom Number Generator to numericaly similate such collissions and particle tracks.
I used a process known as Monte Carlo Analysis to calculate the Acceptance - loosely speaking, the Sensitivity - of the detector in our giant experimental hall a hundred yards from our office building, in which a particle known as a Muon that is just like an Electron but far more massive, strike one of the three Quarks that make up each Neutron and Proton found in atomic Nuclei, with the result being that a far more lightweight Electron flies off in the general direction that the Muon was originally travelling along.
Despite the very best of effort to design and construct these detectors so that the track of every last particle that ever passes through them can be accurately measured, because the stuff you have to make detectors out of such as the thin steel tube used to contain the low-pressure gas of Geiger Counter tubes has no sensitivity to the particles passing through it, quite a few particles get through without enough of their tracks being captured to capture any meaningful measurements from.
There are many things we measure in these detectors, but the simplest to explain would be the reaction rate: if you collide two particles together at a certain specific energy, there is a certain precise probability of an event occuring such as an incredibly massive Muon striking a Quark then transforming itself into the quite lightweight Electron.
If one carefully counts how many particles of any sort bounces off that Quark, as well as of course how many result in Electrons, and manages to count such events long enough, eventually a process known as Poisson Statistics enables you to measure that random probability to any precision you desire.
The problem is that you already know that you're going to miss many of the particles from all types of the interactions that take place. Thus, before you even apply for the government grant that will enable you to start building your experiment's detector, you know well ahead of time that your measured probability will, in reality, be wildly inaccurate!
The Acceptance allows you to publish the correct measurement. It's a graph of the sensitivy of the detector to the event you seek, but is a three-dimensional graph that resembles an aerial photograph of a large city: the sensitivity is the height of each skyscraper, the energy of the particule is the streets running north and south, with the momentum running along the streets east and west.
If you divide the observed value for a given energy and momentum bin by the sensitivity for that bin, you obtain the correct value to publish in the academic journal.
Thus, the fact that I wandered down the hall of the UCSC Physics Department to introduce myself to each professor, point out that I was an experience software engineer, then ask if the prof had some computing I could use for my thesis, resulted in my stepping in a huge, cruel, steel-job trapped placed just outside his door for that specific purpose by Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics High Energy Particle Physicist Clemens Heusch.
Despite being from the sort of powerful and politically connected family known as "old money", one is never permitted to refer to him as Dr. Heusch. One must always call him Clem instead.
He's from Germany, with his father having once been the mayor of Aachen. He came to the US to study at what quite bizarrely is some rather small Liberal Arts school in the woods of the New England State of Maine, then stayed here, eventually becoming a United States Citizen.
Clem is an incredibly dedicated educator, and so one of the finest teachers I have every known in my entire life. I am quite, quite certain that he is one of the very finest Experimantalists to be found in the entire Scientific Community, and a brilliant theoretician as well, but the way he explained why he wanted me to measure the Acceptance of a Muon-In, Eletronic-Out event, as well as what his explanation of that Acceptance is as well as what it is used for, has me completely convinced to this very day that Clem bounces checks on a damn near daily basis, because he lacks the required insite into arithmetic to keep his own checkbook, let alone the deep insight into Mathematics that every Experimental Physicist requires to do his own Data Analysis through a process that Mathematicians refer to as Numerical Analysis, but that lots of Physicists refer to as Computational Physics.
Not only did I not have the first clue as to what Acceptance was when I arrived in Geneva, I completely failed to see the point of searching for Muon-In, Electron-Out interactions for well over a week after I arrived in Geneva. I happened to mention to this to some of the graduate students in our collaboration when we were at Pizza D'Oro one evening, along the road from the Swiss side of CERN towards Geneva.
Upon realizing that I had not the first clue about one of the most vital computations any High Energy Physicist could ever hope to perform, not only did they explain Acceptance to me, they explained what Clem was hoping to get out of all this:
The Mother Fucking Nobel Prize In Mother Fucking Physics!
That's called Non-Conservation of Lepton Number, the verifiable and then indepently repeatible observation of so much as one interaction each in the original and repeating experiment would be just about the most Mother Fucking Mind Boggling Violation of one of the most Fundamental Laws of Physics that God-Almighty Himself has ever conceived of!
Some rather basic considerations of some other particle number conservation laws make it plainly apparent that a massless and incredibly weakly interacting and so damn near impossible to detect particle known as a Neutrino must be expelled and fly off at the Speed of Ligt whenever any of the Protons that form the Nuclei of Hydrogen fuse to form any of the isotopes of Helium.
Hydrogen Fusion is what gives both Hydrogen Bombs as well as the Sun their such collossal power. Hyrogen Bombs produce Neutrinos in incredibly vast quantities, but Neutronos interact so weakly you'd never have any hope of experimentally detecting so much as one!
All of the known Laws of Physics other then Einstein's General Theory of Relativity that explains Gravity all together are known as The Standard Model.
The scientific community had long been in agreement that The Standard Model was not quite right, but had yet to identify just what was wrong with it.
While it is incredibly hard to detect Neutrinos, one can do so by burying giant tanks of distilled water deep underground, with their interior surfaces covered with arrays of Photomultiplier Tubes. From time to time, a flash of blue light known as Cherenkov Radiation would occur inside, when a Solar Neutrino from the Sun's core had interacted with one of the elementary particles in the water.
Because measurements of the numbers of Neutrinos emitted from the Sun's core reliably producing a value that was one-third the required one, some theoreticians somehow came up with the idea that this might be explained if Lepton Number wasn't always conserved.
Each type of Elementary Particle any more energetic than the extreme violet end of the visible light spectrum are incredibly deadly to every form of life there is.
That's basic high-energy particles such as the massless Photon interact quite strongly with each type of charged particle. Whenever a Photon of any energy whatsoever comes anywhere in the general vicinity of any charged particle, that particle absorbs all of the Photons energy and gets a boot to the ass, sending it flying of in the direction of the Photon's original direction of travel.
The reason that spending a few hours out in bright Sunlight without wearing Suntan Lotion will give you a Sunburn, that the very same kind of regular, responsible sunbathing that results in that light-brown, completely even all-over tan that so many women desperately desire because so many men find such Suntans so incredibly attractive, will have the inevitable result that by the age of forty, your once fine, smooth skin is horribly ruined and wrinkled, and to hang out in bright Sunlight for years on end without always wearing a long-sleeved shirt, or, for bald men such as myself, without wearing a hat, will doom you to die of Melanoma, one of the deadliest cancers there is, a form of tiny skin cancer that doesn't have to grow very long at all before vast quantities of cancerous Melanoma cells are freely released into your bloodstream, with the result that within just a few weeks, your Melanoma has metastasized all over your entire body...
Is that the kick given to Electrons by the Near Ultraviolet light that the Sun emits in vast quantities, and that the Earth's atmosphere absorbs very little of, when captured by the Electrons found in Atoms, gives all those Electrons quite a violent enough kick to their fat, hairy asses that they are knocked completely free of the Atom, with the Electron flying off away from the Atom, with what's left of the Atom now being positively charged, because there are no longer enough negatively charged Electrons to balance the positively charged Protons in the atom's Nucleus.
Positively charged Atoms are powerfully attractive to every last Electron in their general vicinity. Almost instantly, whatever other Atom happens to be closest to that Positively charged Atom is sucked up just like a Mother Fucking vacuum cleaner, with one of the Electrons from the originally Neutrally charged Atoms now entering an orbital that surrounds both Atoms in what is known to Chemists as a Covalent Bond.
All of the Elementary Particles whose energy is any higher than the extreme violet end of the visible spectrum are together known as Ionizing Radiation, because the process I just described in which an Electron captures a Photon and is thereby ejected from the Atom is known as Ionization. Both the free Electron and the Positively charged Atom are known as Ions.
The reason that all forms of Ionizing Radiation are incredibly deadly to all forms of life is that the chemistry required to keep a living cell alive as well as to do its little thing during the course of its life, and to divide the cell in two, with its double spiral genetic code of DNA being separated in two down its length, with one now single spiral going to one of the little baby cells, and the other spiral going to the other baby, with each baby now reconstructing the double-helix of DNA they need to survive to adulthood, is incredibly complex, and has to be carefully governed in all manner of complicated ways.
But one just one single particle of Ionizing Radition strikes just one single Electron in any manner of living cell, a powerful chemical reaction takes place damn near at random, with the result that a molecule whose chemical structure is just is random is now to be found somewhere within that living cell, at which point all Hell breaks loose all over the entire cell!
I'm pretty sure that Sunburn is the result of Ionizing Radiation breaking down the incredibly thin and delicate cell membrans of our skin cells, and that the way ladies who crave that incredible smooth and even all over tan destroy all of their body's skin, as that they flood every last skin cell on their entire body with all manner of incredibly toxic poisons.
It took a long, long time after the discovery of Ionizing Radiation before anyone ever clued in to the fact that exposure to much of it at all would doom you to a slow, lingering death of terminal cancer.
High-Energy radiation gives you cancer because all those same manner of damn near random chemical reactions happen along your entire DNA helix! There are lots of places to be found along our genetic sequence where knocking off so much as one Electron loose will result in the very next cell division taking place not just once but continuously, thereby forming a cancer tumour all by itself!
I'm pretty sure Marie Curie was the first woman to have won the Nobel Prize, but I don't know whether it was in Chemistry or Physics.
She worked with her husband Pierre over a period of many, many years to carefully refine a large quantity of mildly radioactive Thorium ore, to eventually isolate a small piece of powerfully radiactive Radium.
Not only had Marie and Pierre Curie discovered an incredibly powerful, naturally occuring radiation source, they had also discovered a whole new chemical element!
From the very day Marie Curie had refined a piece of Radium of any singificant size, she began to carry a piece of it around in her pocket whereever she went. That was because she loved to delight people with one of the most incredibly strange phenomena that resulted from her discovery of Radium:
If your close your eye then hold a piece of Radium up close to it, you can see incredibly bright light all over your visual field!
Both Marie and Pierre Curie died of Leukemia about twenty years after they discoverd Radium.
Mary Curie now lies in the Paris Pantheon, which looks just like a cathedral but as provided for the eternal rest of those who make the very most valuable contributions of all for the people of France.
I visited the Panthen then descended down the steps to the crypt. Each such person has his own individual room with a locked wooden door. A small window allows one to see into the interior of the room, lit only by the light coming through that small window.
When I happened across Marie Curies room, I spent quite some time reflecting on how her incredibly painful sacrifice enabled me to know the greatest of all happinesses that I have ever known in my miserable fucking sorry excuse of an existence.
Let's get back to that guy who discovered antimatter.
When charged particles pass through magnetic fields, they pass through what appear at first to be circular arcs but what in reality are inward logarithmic spirals, because accellerating charged particles - not just moving them faster or slower, but altering their direction of travel - radiate what were once thought to be electromagnetic waves such as radio waves and light, but have long been known to be the elementary particle known as the Photons.
Positively charged particles curve in one direction, negative in the other.
This astute young man managed to snap a photo of a Positron, the positively charged Antimatter equivalent of the Electron, curving in the wrong direction!
When charged particles travel in curves, the photons radiate away circumferientally in the same direction as the charged particles travel. This is known as Synchroton Radion, because it is produced in great abundance in incredibly high energy by a type of circular particle accellerator known as a Synchroton.
X-Rays are used to take snapshots of dental cavities as well as to diagnose broken bones because X-Rays have such high energy that the only tissue in the human body that isn't tranparent to them is bone tissue. I'll explain why later on, but this has to do with the fact that both bones and teeth have lots of Calcium in them.
The most powerful X-Rays are those produced by Synchrotons. The US has a small but powerful Synchroton accellerator that is used for research in Materials Science, with the most powerful Synchron Radiation source in the World being the two curved parts of the Stanford Linear Accellerator in Palo Alto, California.
All along both of those rather short, tight curves are small, carefully designed experiments where they expose all manner of materials to that Sychrotron radiation just to see what might turn up.
I'd like to finally clue you in to why I wanted you all to puzzle over Brain Teaser Number One.
I aim to Solve the Software Problem.
Taken a whole, the Software Problem as a whole, and has an incredibly complex structure. But one can considerably simplify the the required research into the theoretical principles that are behind the Software Problem, the precise elucidation of its structure, as well as the various techniques required to provide a world-wide and permanent solution to the entire Software problem.
This descends rapidly downward into an increasingly broad heirarch of more and more Sub-Problems and Sub-Sub-Problems that at first appears to be a single-rooted tree, because in reality there is the occasional cycle or a few disconnected nodes.
I am now completely convinced that I can permanent end to the entire Software Problem by regularly publishing a series of articles, essays and works of fiction at the Solving the Software Problem website, as well as of course here at Kuro5hin.
Only a very few will ever be straightfordual factual articles such as this one, that is meant to eductate, with others being meant to inform, or the rhetorically persuasive essay.
The vast majority of written works will instead address the subconscious mind of my reader, thereby providing them with Insight.
Decades of study by Literary scholars have clearly identified that the way one plants Insight into the minds of one's reader is to practice what is known as Experimental writing.
The two most historically important Experimentally Written works at all are Finnegan's Wake by Irishman James Joyce, which appears to be nothing but the sort of nonsense words that little toddlers love to make up, but upon closer study starts to make some manner of sense, with the result that Literary scholars have been struggling for decades to figure out precisely what Joyce was trying to get at.
I've read some of Joyce's more-straightforwardly written works and agree that he is one of humanity's most brilliant writer ever.
I need to take a break for an hour or so, then will post another draft two or three hours after that.