It's 4:00 p.m. PST on Saint Patrick's Day...

and I am stone sober and my bracket is already crap.

As for the first anomaly, I work this evening so I will still be sober until well after 7:00 p.m.

As for the second situation, having a bracket go to crap really doesn't count as an anomaly with me.

Yes, I know there are bigger troubles all over the place, but if the Leader of the Free World can put together an NCAA bracket, I think a broke-ass math professor should have the right as well.

Here's hoping things are going better for you.

Only 603 days til Election day! Should we care?

It doesn't just seem like election seasons are starting earlier than they used to. They start earlier now. Back in 1968, Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey weren't even declared until after New Hampshire and the first person to declare against L.B.J. was Gene McCarthy in November 1967. I was looking back at more recent polls from about 20 months before the general election and most years, the front runners from February or March a year before were the nominees. In 1995, it was assumed Bob Dole was the standard bearer and he was beating Clinton in head to head match-ups. Bush was the assumed front runner in 1999. The biggest recent error was in 2007, when the polls showed Rudy Guiliani the person hardest to catch and ahead of Hillary Clinton (or Barack Obama) in important battleground states.

The thing is, in most recent elections, there would be several people declared to be running by now. No one has actually declared yet, so we get nonsensical speculation that puts former reality TV star Sarah Palin as something akin to a "front runner". We also have Newt Gingrich, who is at least fifteen years past his freshness date, Mitt Romney, who is almost exactly what the Tea Party doesn't want, and Rick Santorum, who has the problem that Googling his name brings up an unsavory sex act. Donald Trump seems to be completely blissfully unaware that people don't like him very much.

As for Michele Bachmann, she's like the anti-matter version of Dennis Kucinich, but without the good looking wife.

It's my best guess that none of the above will be the party's nominee come the summer of 2012, and if any of them are, the Republicans will be hard pressed to win the White House.

But again, it's 603 days until the votes are counted. Maybe it's best if we don't care about it just yet and get down to the business of how to get out of this mess that started on the Republican watch, largely due to the Republican idea that wide scale theft by the rich helps everybody and that markets can regulate themselves.

Sunday Numbers 2.0, Vol. 4: Logic and the Britons

Mathematical logic got its first great boost forward in the 19th Century, though at the time there was little practical use to it. The great mathematicians on the continent were working trying to understand magnetism and its implications to physics, but a hearty band of British oddballs decided to revolutionize the study of logic.

George Boole is considered the originator of modern mathematical logic, so much so that the field is called Boolean Algebra. He wrote his important treatise The Laws of Thought in the 1850s.

Augustus de Morgan is another important pioneer. The ways to distribute a not sign ~ through parentheses are called de Morgan's laws. (v stands for the or operator and the ^ is the and operator.)

~(p v q) = ~p ^ ~q
~(p ^ q) = ~p v ~q

He was one of the first professors at University College London, the first major school in Great Britain that accepted students who were not Church of England, which meant that Catholics, Jews, protestants of denominations other that Church of England and those who professed no faith whatsoever could get a first class education in Great Britain due to deMorgan and a few others dedicated to education and religious freedom.

Charles Babbage was another British logician, and he wanted to take mathematical logic to the next step. He designed the world's first mechanical computers, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, both of which were designed to run on steam. Problems arose when trying to build the machines and neither was ever completed.

The literary genre known as steampunk, a derivative of cyberpunk, is based on the "what if" world of Babbage actually succeeding at making a computer.

This did not stop Countess Ada Lovelace from designing programs for Babbage's machines. Besides the acclaim for her work in logic, she was the only legitimate daughter of the famed British poet, libertine and addict Lord Byron, who was as dedicated to illogic as his daughter was devoted to its opposite. The Countess Lovelace was educated by de Morgan and is given credit as the first computer programmer. The language Ada is named after her.

The best known of the British eccentrics fascinated with logic in the 19th Century was Charles Dodgson a.k.a. Lewis Carroll. While still famous for Alice in Wonderland, he was also a mathematician, clergyman and photographer, and enjoyed putting together logic puzzles based on the ideas of syllogism using silly but logical statements. For example:

(a) No ducks waltz.
(b) No officers ever decline to waltz.
(c) All my poultry are ducks.

Therefore (d) None of my poultry are officers.

Makes sense to me. Sort of.

I should have done more research.

Last Monday, I wrote a blog post about a production vehicle that Volkswagen would be releasing in China in 2012.

This is what I get writing a blog post based on an e-mail without doing any research.

The pictures are from 2009. The rumor then was it would be released in 2010.

You know, one of those marvelous future things that is always one year away?

Other stories on the Internet say the price would be closer to $25,000, which seems ridiculously high to me, but I'm a cheap bastard without a car right now. Yet other stories said it was just a one-off experiment and there were no plans to even show it at any of the jillion auto shows around the globe.

So once again, let me apologize about spreading a false alarm. I promise to do better homework in the future.

Maru (and the person who feeds and films him) are safe.

I can't even tell you how shallow I feel, but after some geeky mathy thoughts about Richter scales and tsunamis and nuclear reactors, my next thought was "OMG!!! Maru!" After all, this is the only living soul I really know in Japan.

Maru and his videographer Mugumogu are fine, thank Odin, Buddha and the little baby Jesus. It would be a blessing if you can spare a thought and a few bucks for the folks in Japan who aren't.

Maru would thank you, too. Not enough to get out of a bag and let you have it, because all bags belong to Maru, silly human. But still, Maru would thank you in a special Maru type way.

It would probably involve being lazy and/or cautious and/or adorable.

You're welcome.

Tsunami travel times.

The big news this morning is a huge 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Japan which caused a tsunami. This picture shows how quickly the wave will travel all across the Pacific. Best wishes to all in its path and if haven't found cover yet away from the ocean, stop reading this and run!

To those of you still safely in front of your computer screens, I previously discussed the math of a tsunami about three years ago, which are significantly different from other waves. A normal everyday wave has a crest and a trough, while a tsunami is a solitary wave or soliton, all crest with no corresponding trough. Waves with crests and troughs tend to run into each other and cancel each other out. Solitons don't get canceled out and big ones travel faster than small ones, so parts of this wave created in Japan will even hit Antarctica sometime in the next day or so with a lot of destructive force.

That's the thing about nature, isn't it? Beautiful, fascinating and terrifying all at the same time.

Trademark lines for impressionists quiz. UPDATED.

It's been a very long time since I had a trivia quiz, so I got an idea for a new one based on trademark lines that should be used by anyone trying to do a vocal impersonation of a famous person.

For example, if you are going to do Jimmy Cagney, you pretty much have to say the line "You dirty rat!"

As soon as you say "The name is Bond. James Bond." You're doing a Sean Connery. (NOT a Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan or anybody else!)

Personally, I always use a line from Murder in the Sun when I do my James Mason impression "I could have sssssscampered down the hill and crushed her neck in thessssse powerful handsssss.", but that is obviously a much more idiosyncratic choice.

In any case, here are ten words or phrases associated with vocal impressions of people or characters from film or TV, spanning many decades. See how many of them you can get.

1. Pilgrim.
John Wayne, answered by danielk.

2. You realize of course, THIS means war!
Bugs Bunny, answered by Ken.

3. And not a lot of people know that.
Michael Caine, answered by the Googling Karlacita!

4. You betcha!
Sarah Palin, answered by danielk. (Would have also accepted Marge Gunderson.)

5. Engage.
Patrick Stewart, answered by danielk. (Jean Luc Picard would have been more precise.)

6. Eee-yeeeeeeeeees? OR Ooooooooooh, goody!
Frank .... oh hell, that guy who used to turn up on the Jack Benny show, answered by danielk. (Partial credit here. Frank Nelson, who also got work on I Love Lucy.)

7. Thankya ver'much.
Elvis Presley, answered by danielk.

8. Tenk you very much.
Latka, character played by Andy Kaufman, answered by danielk.

9. I know you are, but what am I?
Paul Ruebens, answered by danielk. (Pee Wee Herman would have been more precise.)

10. Well....
Ronald Reagan, answered by ken.

Well done to all who answered.