Category: Thoughts

This single list of link has fueled a lot of reading for me over the past few months … The most counterintuitive facts in all of mathematics, computer science, and physics:

It is possible to compute over encrypted data without access to the secret key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption It is possible to prove that you know a value x, without conveying any information apart from the fact that you know the value x: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof It is possible to play poker by telephone in a trusted way which prevents cheating: http://math.stonybrook.edu/~scott/blair/How_play_poker.html If customers take on average 10 minutes to serve and they arrive randomly at a rate of 5.8 per hour then the waiting time for one teller is five hours while the waiting time for two tellers is 3 minutes: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/10/21/what-happens-when-you-add-a-new-teller/ There exists a set of three dice, A, B, and C, with the property that A rolls higher than B more than half the time, and B rolls higher than C more than half the time, but it is not true that A rolls higher than C more than half the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_dice Causation does not imply correlation: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03118 The Earth makes 366.25 rotations around its axis per year. (Related: 0% selected the right answer on this SAT question: Circle A has 1/3 the radius of circle B, and circle A rolls one trip around circle B. How many times will circle A revolve in total? youtube.com/watch?v=kN3AOMrnEUs) There is a surface that has only one side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobius_strip It is possible to travel downwind faster than the wind: 

youtube.com/watch?v=jyQwgBAaBag read more