Steve Kass

How big was this weekend’s really big mid-Atlantic snowstorm? So big that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson noted it in their diaries!

Really. The New York Times said so. Our founding fathers wrote in their diaries about this weekend’s storm. Awefomenefs.

This snowstorm was bigger than the U.S. Civil War, bigger than the moon landing, and bigger than Lady Gaga and Elton being on stage together last week! Geo. and Th. didn’t write about those other things, right? I mean, I spent most of the summer of ‘69 reading and would’ve seen something about the moon landing being in those guys’ diaries, I think. Yeah, Nixon was president, but still, we’d know, right?

Here’s the Times quote:

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although it was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Unless I missed something in Bits about time machines, I’m pretty darn sure the Times is wrong. Maybe they meant to write something like

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although it that was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

or

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, which occurred long before record-keeping began and was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Or maybe they meant this for an audio-only story, where it would be possible to say “Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although IT was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,” (still sloppy, but talk is a whole nother language from written) because if you say “it” very emphatically, you can intimidate it and make it change its antecedent.

And maybe I understood what they meant, too. But writers should write as precisely as possible; they shouldn’t write in the spirit of nearest-neighbor error-correcting codes and assume it’s fine to publish written nonsense assuming the reader will subconsciously refer to a Hamming distance ruler and an unabridged vector space of things that make sense and infer the right thing.

Any errors, whether regarding pronomial antecedents or otherwise, are my responsibility.

Starting today, funny math is moving to a new and better home, www.lolmath.com. Vulpigeration and other serious number-related topics will stay here.

[Corrected 1 Nov 2009]

In most of North America, Daylight Saving Time ends early tomorrow morning. You know the drill: when the clock strikes 3:00 2:00 AM tonight, turn it back to 2:00 1:00 AM. (Just once. At 3:00 2:00 the second time, leave it alone.) If you’re in Newfoundland, however, you have a lot more work to do. You flip your calendar to November, wait one minute, flip it back to October (and turn your clock back), wait 59 minutes, then turn it to November again. I’m not kidding. Daylight saving time in Newfoundland ends at 12:01 AM (which occurs at 10:31 PM my time), not at 3:00 AM like everywhere else.

As far as I know, this is the only place on the planet where the day of the week (and this year, the month, too) ever goes backwards. Hasta ayer!

Instructions Turn your calendar forward to November 2009 right after 11:59:59 PM on October 31, 2009. November 2009 (first time) lasts for one minute (red line), until 12:01 AM (Daylight Saving Time). At 12:01 AM on November 1, 2009, set your clock back an hour and also turn your calendar back a month, to October 2009. October 2009 then resumes for another 59 minutes (shaded box), until 12:00 AM (Standard Time) on November 1, 2009. Then turn your calendar forward to November and go to sleep.

[Added 1 Nov 2009] Thanks to my brother for pointing out that DST ends at 2:00 AM, not 3:00 AM. FWIW, I wasn’t the only one to think DST ended at 3:00. The TV listings at titantv.com showed the change an hour late also.

Almost every semester, I use the AOL Breach data as a point of departure for something in at least one of my classes. The data is fascinating. Most data is fascinating, but this data is particularly so: at once shocking, funny, creepy, poignant, sad, frightening, noble, ignoble, shrewd, and lewd. It’s also rich in the way data can be rich. It’s completeness—for a sample of several thousand AOL accounts, it includes the complete account search history during March, April, and May of 2006—which includes timestamped search strings and the result rank and destination of clicks-through, makes it ripe for discovering all sorts of patterns of human thought and behavior.

It’s AOL data week in one of my classes now. This morning, I proposed several nontrivial questions about the data that could be answered with SQL queries. We looked at the results and discussed what they might say about the unwitting study subjects. Then I asked my students to suggest some questions of their own. What are the typical time-of-day and day-of-week patterns of an individual AOL customer’s searches? Are there identifiable differences in the patterns (and by extension in the sleep, social, and perhaps employment or school behavior) of people whose searches included, say, “britney”? For what kinds of searches do users most often click through several pages of results? And so on.

One of my students suggested an excellent simple question. What are the most common searches of the form “how to …”? Out of millions of queries in the AOL data, there were many thousands of “how to … ?” searches. The most frequent was “how to tie a tie,” requested 92 times by a total of 47 distinct users. The rest of the top ten (in terms of most distinct users asking the question) were how to write a resume, gain weight, have sex, get pregnant, write a book, write a bibliography, start a business, lose weight, and make money, each sought by a dozen or more different people. AOL converted the queries to lower case and removed much of the punctuation, but they didn’t correct spelling. Consequently, how to masterbate and how to masturbate appear separately at ranks 49 and 51 respectively. The question would have nearly hit the top 10 without the misspellings.

Here’s a PDF file of the top 1000 “how to” queries submitted through AOL explorer by a sample of AOL users in the spring of 2006. You can probably guess that it’s not safe for work. Although there are no pictures, plenty of sex, drugs, and gambling is spelled out, and there are more than a few questions likely to offend in one way or another. Have a look.

Not long after my recent experience of laughing and throwing up, I took preventive measures, or what I thought were preventive measures, to keep it from happening again. I added a couple of F**news [obscenity censored] domains to my firewall’s list of blocked sites.

Not long after I added them, my Internet connection started acting up. Just the browsing part. Lots of broken image links, web pages loading without style sheets, and not a few “not available” or “may have moved permanently” errors, sometimes on major domains like bing and Google. Facebook, several news sites, and Weather Underground were especially troublesome. It was strictly a browser thing, a little worse on Chrome maybe, but at the same time Chrome told me the page was unavailable, I could ping the AWOL site without a problem.

It was mysterious enough that I even tightened my router and modem cables. I finally figured it out, but newsgroups, blogs, and Google search results, which usually help, didn’t have the answer. Maybe this post will help someone out.

The domain I’d newly blocked didn’t have a static IP address. It’s an akamaized domain, it turns out, that resolves to any of a dozen or so numeric IP addresses, and the resolution changes every minute or less. About 10% of the Internet seems to live on those same dozen or so IP addresses, too. (Among the domains there are static.ak.fbcdn.net, i.telegraph.co.uk, and abcnews.com.)

My firewall was blocking what it thought was the right IP address, but when the IP addresses of these akamaized sites flipflopped, the firewall was suddenly blocking the wrong site. Moments later, maybe it was blocking nothing, then the site I’d added, then different wrong sites…

Insert various image and DNS caching mechanisms between me and the Internet, and it’s an erratic mess of a mystery. At least it was for me. No matter how bad it was, though, it usually got better in 10 or 15 minutes. I didn’t go so far as to start using OpenDNS, which was one web-grown remedy I heard about, but I can imagine it might have changed the caching and resolution landscape enough to have made some difference. Enabling or disabling Google’s DNS prefetching, another web remedy, didn’t work for me. Once I unblocked the offensive domains, the Internet was butter again.

If you’re having this problem (the dodgy Internet problem, not the laughing and throwing up problem), first try running a traceroute on one of the problem sites you can’t browse to. If traceroute says it’s tracing a route to something like a20.g.akamai.net, or if successive traceroutes over a few minutes show different IP addresses for the domain, it’s possible something between you and the Internet is blocking one route to some of the akamaized web.

• someone who’s shown an interest in baking pans and irons
• someone who has shown an interest in classical music recently
• someone who has shown an interest in toys
• someone who has shown an interest in hot cocoa
• someone who has shown an interest in men’s clothing
• someone who has shown an interest in men’s apparel
• someone who has shown an interest in men’s dress clothes
• someone who has shown an interest in Gillette, Old Spice, and Zest [1]
• someone who has shown an interest in cutlery
• someone who has shown an interest in joint health for your dog [2]
• someone who has shown an interest in computers and wireless devices
• someone who has shown an interest in camcorders
• someone who has shown an interest in men’s shoes
• someone who has shown an interest in GPS, sporting goods, or automotive
• someone who has shown an interest in headphones
• someone who has shown an interest in HDTVs
• someone who’s shown an interest in rice cookers
• someone who has shown an interest in Frito Lay chips and snacks
• someone who has shown an interest in Leonidas chocolates
• someone who has shown an interest in Haribo gummies [3]
• someone who has shown an interest in air tools and compressors
• someone who’s shown an interest in car care products or grinders and polishers
• someone who has shown an interest in plumbing fixtures
• someone who has shown an interest in hand tools
• someone who has shown an interest in mice, keyboards, and tablets
• someone who has shown an interest in groceries
• someone who has shown an interest in seasonal lighting
• someone who has shown an interest in ornaments
• someone who has shown an interest in seasonings

[1] I’ve never shown an interest in Old Spice.
[2] It wasn’t my dog. It was my God dog, Scudder (below).
[3] I’ve shown more interest in Albanese gummies.

If a sentence is short enough to be a headline, it isn’t true.

In today’s online edition, BBC News published “Faulty 20p coins ‘worth £50 each’”. A Coin Factfile sidebar to the article notes originally noted that

British coins do not carry the name of the country of issue – neither do those of the USA

Coins of the USA, of course, do carry the name of the country of issue. Instead of sending the BBC feedback (which I did), maybe I should have offered to sell them my collection of “faulty” US coins on which the words United States of America appear. I’d have taken a mere £20 a piece.

At least BBC News attributed their “factfile” facts. They came from the London Mint Office. Despite its august name, the London Mint Office isn’t the Royal Mint. It’s more like a British Franklin Mint, I think. According to their web page, the London Mint Office is

a wholly-owned subsidiary of one of Europe’s most successful direct marketing organisations’, the Samlerhuset Group.

How the London Mint Office qualified for a .org domain beats me. Not to mention how any of this qualifies as news.

I’m singing Mahler’s Eighth with the New York Philharmonic this week. It’s a phenomenal experience, not to mention a spectacular piece of music, performed by one of the world’s best orchestras and some amazing soloists. All backed up by 170 adult and 40 children choristers, of which I’m one (of the adults).

On August 25, 2009, the New York Philharmonic will release a recording of our performance through iTunes, Amazon and other retailers. If you don’t have tickets and don’t want to wait until August, you can listen to tomorrow night’s performance live on WQXR 96.3FM in the New York area or on WQXR.com, and possibly on the NY Phil’s web site for a couple of weeks after that.

Shameless subplug: You can also hear me in this Dutoit/Montreal recording of Fauré’s Requiem and Pavane (the version with silly words – of the Pavane, that is), and in this Dessoff recording of choral works (good stuff you probably haven’t heard) by Corigliano, Rorem, Moravec, and Convery.

The Mathematics Genealogy Project now traces my mathematical genealogy back to Galileo, passing through Benkart, Jacobson, Chrystal, Maxwell, Hopkins, Sedgwick, Jones, Cranke, Postlethwaite, Whisson, Taylor (Walter, not Brook), Smith, Cotes, Newton, Barrow, de Roberval, and Viviani along the way. Cool.