redbaker's New Writeups

the smallest number that looks prime but isn't (idea)

2007-12-23T20:00:54Z

No joke — there's a semi-serious proof involved here. We're looking for the smallest number that could easily be mistaken for prime but in fact is not. How do we find it? Well, since it's not prime, let's look for its prime factors.

The number can't be a multiple of two — even numbers are too easy to spot.
The number can't be a multiple of three — there's an easy test for that.
The number can't be a multiple of five — thanks to our base ten number system, it's too easy to find those.
Seven? Sure, why not? Multiples of seven don't look special at all. But we need more than one prime factor -- everybody knows that 49 is seven squared.
The other factor can't be eleven — 7 x 11 = 77, obviously not prime. Multiples of 11, especially low ones, are fairly obvious.
But what about thirteen? 7 x 13 = 91. That...looks prime

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semantic saturation (idea)

2007-04-06T03:32:54Z

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Politics and the English Language (idea)

2007-04-05T20:39:56Z

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible...Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than

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September 7, 2005 (idea)

2005-09-07T07:57:30Z

Independent Study Proposal: Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

I don't know much about "alternative" (non-Copenhagen) interpretations of quantum mechanics. I would like to spend some time learning more about a few of the more prominent ones, and through studying them, attempt to figure out what exactly has been troubling me about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is a fairly broad area of study, and I expect that my focus will narrow as I learn more about the subject. I intend to start by studying the de Broglie-Bohm, many-worlds, and consistent-histories interpretations, as well as reading up on some "proofs" and conditions that interpretations of quantum mechanics must satisfy, such as the Bell inequality and…

carrier wave (idea)

2005-01-14T10:28:31Z

Say you want to send a message out on the airwaves. How do you do it? Well, sound is a wave, right? And radio is a wave too, right? So why not just convert the sound waves of your message directly into radio waves and broadcast that signal? There are a couple of problems with that. The human ear can hear sounds ranging in frequency from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. This means that your signal will have a similar range. But where in that range will it fall? As it turns out, it'll be all over the place, unless you plan on sending out A above middle C all day. The waveform of a human voice looks something like this:

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Report on the Borges Novel and its Aftermath (idea)

2005-01-14T10:28:28Z

Let's start by painting in some of the background in broad strokes, people. Take your seats. We're about to begin, as you well know. Ready? Good.

About 2,600 years ago, the ancient Greeks started to play with mathematics. Other civilizations had dealt with numbers before — the Egyptians and Babylonians, most notably — but it was the Greeks who first studied mathematics as an end unto itself, rather than a means to something like building pyramids or finding the size of a plot of land. The Greeks took math and abstracted it from its corporeal surroundings. They were the first to devise logical proofs of mathematical facts, such as the irrationality of the square root of two and the Pythagorean theorem. Euclid's Elements was the culmination of over three centuries of mathematical work by the Greeks, culling theorems and…