Archive for April fool
the polls weren’t wrong [alt book review]
Posted in Statistics with tags applied mathematics, April fool, book review, CHANCE, Chapman & Hall, conspiracy theories, CRC Press, Donald Trump, FiveThirtyEight, political polls, polls, Significance, statistical literacy, US elections 2016, US elections 2020, US elections 2024 on April 1, 2025 by xi'an
riddle of the week
Posted in R with tags April fool, FiveThirtyEight, New York city, R, riddle, The Riddler on April 21, 2022 by xi'anThe Riddler of April 1 offered this simple question:
start with the number 1 and then try to reach a target number through a series of steps. For each step, you can always choose to double the number you currently have. However, if the number happens to be one (1) more than an odd multiple of 3, you can choose to “reduce” — that is, subtract 1 and then divide by 3. What is the smallest positive integer one cannot reach this way?
Which I turned into R steps (while waiting for flight AF19 to Paris)
while((!(x-1)%%3)&((x-1)%%6)){
oor[2*x]TRUE
oor[x<-(x-1)%/%3]=TRUE}
but running an exhaustive search till 10⁸ did not spot any missing integer… Maybe an April fool joke (as the quick riddle was asking for the simplest representation of (x-a)(x-b)…(x-z)…!)
April fool on…April 4
Posted in University life with tags April fool, arXiv on April 4, 2011 by xi'anAn April fool joke on arXiv somehow went wasted as it only appeared today… It was submitted on March 31, maybe too late for validation on April 1. I am a wee surprised the administrators of arXiv let it through, though. (Especially given that it does not have the same depth as Andrew’s past provocations!)
