Mon May 7 12:20:35 EEST 2012
...And justice for all
Wikipedia on
Prosecutor's fallacy
The prosecutor's fallacy is a fallacy of statistical reasoning made in law. In this fallacy the context in which the accused has been brought to court is falsely assumed to be irrelevant to judging how confident a jury can be in evidence against them with a statistical measure of doubt.
The Sally Clark case
Sally Clark, a British woman who was accused in 1998 of having killed her first child at 11 weeks of age, then conceived another child and allegedly killed it at 8 weeks of age. The prosecution had expert witness Sir Roy Meadow testify that the probability of two children in the same family dying from SIDS is about 1 in 73 million.
Mrs. Clark was convicted in 1999, resulting in a press release by the Royal Statistical Society which pointed out the mistakes
A higher court later quashed Sally Clark's conviction, on other grounds, on 29 January 2003. However, Sally Clark, a practising solicitor before the conviction, developed a number of serious psychiatric problems including serious alcohol dependency and died in 2007
Sun Apr 22 11:39:55 EEST 2012
Lifeboats on the Titanic
From http://www.thebigquestions.com
Lifeboats on the Titanic
Lifeboats on the Titanic
Roughly 1500 died on the Titanic; according to Wikipedia, it would have cost about $16,000 to equip her with additional lifeboats sufficient to save them all. Call it $10 per life saved.The link has some more analysis.
Mon Oct 17 11:56:58 EEST 2011
$abc$ triples
Got two lucky numbers from the math lottery.
High merit $abc$ triples related to the $abc$ conjecture $$ 11^{30}+3^{15} \cdot 13^{2} \cdot 19^{2} \cdot 41 \cdot 137 \cdot 233^{2} \cdot 44203^{2} \cdot 4758269=2^{54} \cdot 5^{8} \cdot 7^{2} \cdot 43^{4} \cdot 1451^{2} $$ $$ 2^{29} \cdot 5^{4} \cdot 7 \cdot 11^{15} \cdot 43^{2} \cdot 1451 + 13^{4} \cdot 44203^{4} \cdot 4758269^{2} = 3^{30} \cdot 19^{4} \cdot 41^{2} \cdot 137^{2} \cdot 233^{4} $$ Merits $24.2$ and $24.21$
High merit $abc$ triples related to the $abc$ conjecture $$ 11^{30}+3^{15} \cdot 13^{2} \cdot 19^{2} \cdot 41 \cdot 137 \cdot 233^{2} \cdot 44203^{2} \cdot 4758269=2^{54} \cdot 5^{8} \cdot 7^{2} \cdot 43^{4} \cdot 1451^{2} $$ $$ 2^{29} \cdot 5^{4} \cdot 7 \cdot 11^{15} \cdot 43^{2} \cdot 1451 + 13^{4} \cdot 44203^{4} \cdot 4758269^{2} = 3^{30} \cdot 19^{4} \cdot 41^{2} \cdot 137^{2} \cdot 233^{4} $$ Merits $24.2$ and $24.21$
Wed Oct 5 12:19:32 EEST 2011
bug stories
i got involved in a bug in a major linux distro compromising their update system if one can do "man in the middle" (e.g. DNS). the bug had strange story. i forgot to pay the internet monthly bill. the isp stopped my net, redirecting all pages to them telling me to pay. before the internet got working, i got local mail from cron about apt-key not being able to import the html page as a key. this drew my attention to the brain damaged part of apt-key. the rest of the exploit was pure triviality. another bug with a strange story was an openssl |use after free|. i was generating rsa keys with another program. imported in openssl a test key using middle clicking with the mouse. unfortunately, i have failed to select a few digits of the number, making a prime a composite (if the prime stayed prime the story would have been different). basically this broke the math. in addition openssl crashed, which was a bug. it took some time to openssl developers to realize i didn't mind the broken math but the crash. a coincidence about several other bugs is they were found while drinking coffee and smoking. no computer in the room, just relaxing. suddenly i think of something i have read today and i find it quite suspicious. leave the coffee and go to check. almost every time i wasn't wrong about the suspicion. certainly the majority of bugs were black labour (i don't think |grep -rniI stuff *| is dead, though the prevailing opinion appears different). disclaimer: this is not a tutorial :)))
Wed Jun 1 18:18:59 EEST 2011
Division by zero (Ted Chiang)
Division by zero (Ted Chiang)
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/division/full/ Division by zero (Ted Chiang)
a scifi story of bugs and insanity.
strangely, scientist seem to be believe it well may come true (possibly modulo the insanity). even today Voevodsky claims something close to the story - basically math is really screwed up, but in a fixable way (i don’t understand the details).
more from Chiang http://www.freesfonline.de/authors/Ted_Chiang.html
Wed Jun 1 11:26:49 EEST 2011
Coq nonsense
Coq nonsense Critical systems use
warez like this.
Definition tr1(t:True) : Prop :=False. Coercion tr1: True >-> Sortclass. Lemma FUCKMS: forall a : True, a->False. Proof. compute. firstorder. Qed.