Dara Zeehandelaar: Mathematics, Vegas-Style
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M ath teacher Dara Zeehandelaar was working on her Ph.D. in astrophysics at the University of Maryland when she took a hiatus to teach. "Everybody has their thing," she says. "My thing is public education."
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In one of the most famous attempts to declare a mathematical truth by political fiat, the Indiana legislature comes this close to establishing an exact value for pi. Good thing a math professor happened to be wandering by.
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On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new post pointing to the second part of their look at the Manning Publishing book "PHP in Action".   If you've been anxiously awaiting part two of this series then your wait is over. Here's a short introduction to the section part of this series written by the author of the book, Dagfinn Reiersol. I had the privilege of meeting Dagfinn at phpuk last week. Below the introduction is the link I know youâve been waiting for.   The new PDF they link to focus on two different patterns - the Decorator (a wrapper class) pattern and the Null Object (an object that works like the others but does nothing behind the scenes) pattern.
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Encryption circles are buzzing with news that mathematical functions embedded in common security applications have previously unknown weaknesses.
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A month ago I was introduced to the works of Michel Gondry.  In short, I was amazed and tantalized by his short films and music videos.  Even if you haven't heard of him, you've probably seen his many works in Gap commercials, various music videos, and the recent movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.    Many of his works explode with visual elements that, when taken alone, are simple and mundane.  However, under his masterful guidance, these elements come together to form a highly mesmerizing visual experience.  He never ceases to push visual technologies and challenge our ideas about the visual medium.
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Nick Halstead has started up another programming competition today - this time it's a bit broader in scope and doesn't focus so much on just PHP.   I have a couple of licenses for Zend Studio Professional that I have been holding back to give away for a competition. So after writing yesterdays programming 'tips' I thought perhaps I should get my readers to submit their own tips and then give away one copy for what I think is the best 'tip' and then I will also hold a online vote for the second copy.   The basic process is to submit your favorite tip to Nick and he'll pick his favorite of the day. This happens each day and at the end of the week, there'll be a drawing for the licenses from each day's top tips.   Submit your entries via his contact form.
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Sara Golemon brings us some news from the front about PHP6 in her latest blog entry today.   While everyone else has been busily gearing up for the release of PHP 5.2 and the new features that are going to come with it, Andrei and his small band of merry babelonians (yours truly included) have been making inroads on preparing PHP6 for a preview release. In the past week we've managed to roughly double the number of builtin functions (those which are part of the main distribution) that have been reviewed for unicode safety, either flagging them as good or upgrading their functionality   She also talks about what kinds of functions this entailed and how far along they are total (around 22%). She also encourages anyone that wants to get involved to help to jump right in.
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Mathematicians could be on the verge of solving two separate million dollar problems. If they are right - still a big if - and somebody really has cracked the so-called Riemann hypothesis, financial disaster might follow.
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At age 7, Terence Tao was taking high school math classes. At 31, he is one of the worldâs top mathematicians, tackling an unusually broad range of problems.
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F reshman algebra teacher Deanne Florindi launches into a review a little more than two weeks into the school year.
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In the last part of this series, we look at creating constants with the define() function, the constant() function, predefined and "magic" constants. By Ellie Quigley. 0129
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In a new blog entry today, Matthew O'Phinney talks about updates (and refactoring) that he's done to a PEAR package he's developed, File_Fortune.   Over the past few evenings, I've refactored File_Fortune to have it implement Iterator, Countable, and ArrayAccess -- basically allowing it to act like an array for most intents and purposes. As a result, I've eliminated the need for the File_Fortune_Writer package, and greatly simplified the usage.   The package is designed to make an interface between the casual PHP user and the fortune files common on most *nix machines. To illustrate he update, he includes some code that grabs the fortune file, parses it to grab a random one and echoes them out. Also included is the save() method so you can add your own to the list easily.
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Sebastian Bergmann is attending this year's php/db|works conference happening in Toronto and has already posted some of his experiences and photos from the event to his blog today.   He summarizes both Monday (flights and sleep) and Tuesday, "Tutorial Day". Specifically, he mentions attending the PHP 5 Certification Crash Course and the Extending PHP talk given by Wez Furlong.   He's also posted some photos of the event over on his Flickr account to check out some of the festivities.
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When a kid flunking algebra finds a motive in the sky to get his math game on, a hobby and a career path are born.
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A newly unearthed paper shows how AT&T researchers working to combat fraud developed an extension of the C programming language called Hancock.  It can comb through masses of telephone and internet data and plot relationships, opening the door to a new type of warrantless data-mining.
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In photo land, a new gizmo extreme white balancing than the traditional white paper. David Becker's PMA coverage continues in Gadget Lab.
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Life is but a series of bets. Herewith, a guide to boosting the odds.