The Stench of Civilization

dedicated to L. Rowlands

Both the barbaric and the civilized bicker
And fight
And wound
And kill
And go to war
It takes civilization to think oneself righteous in doing so

Mostly “Milkiest” “Math” “Problems”

(for the day The Milk could start to legally drink)

(1) Say something nice to The Milk.

(2) Find the median of the set of all even primes that can be expressed as the sum of two odd numbers.

(3) The Milk decides to drink 21 liters of milk. It can only, however, consume 8 liters in one day, and if it consumes more than 5 liters, it will regurgitate the remainder the coming night. After how many days can The Milk have completely consumed 21 liters of milk?

(4) Pecker’s Nerd Sniping Board breaks into three pieces in an unfortunate accident. If the pieces must be put back together such that for at least two of the three possible pairs of pieces an edge must be shared between the pieces and one point must be a vertex of all three pieces, what is the maximum number of orientations for piecing the pieces of the board back together possible?

(5) Having established itself, born October 20, as the one true Anti-Weed, the Random Milk sets out on a crusade against the herb. It sets out for the US state with the lowest highest point of the states of the US, Florida. The highest point in Florida is 15m higher than the top of the Green Building, and The Milk dictates that anything higher than the top of the Green Building is too high. Suppose there are 2000 people that live this high in Florida. If The Milk can convince a person to deweedify every day, and for every second person, can convince them to spread The Milk’s message in the same manner that The Milk does (convincing a person every day, and convincing every second person to spread the message recursively), how many days will it take for Florida to have no one that is too high as decreed by The Milk?

(6) Wood burns spontaneously how many degrees Fahrenheit higher than paper?

(7) See the piece of paper that looks like a puzzle.

(8) Pass the Turing test. Politely.

(9) How many orders of traversing the ten floors of Random (the eight inhabited floors plus the roofdeck and AiW), such that once you’ve exited the floor you don’t enter that floor again in your path, exist?

(10) Do we really just don’t know?

(11) A bank requires PINs to have 4 digits. Assuming that two-thirds the customers will use their birthday for their bank PIN, and assuming that births are temporally uniformly distributed, what is the expected number of guesses necessary before successfully entering a randomly selected customer’s PIN, given optimal strategy?

(12) An MIT student is furious at one of their classes and decides to flood the room the class occurs in with water one day. Water drains from the classroom at a rate of 8 liters per second, and the student can cause the influx of water into the classroom at a rate of 40 liters per second. Assuming the classroom can contain 32000 liters of water and started out 0$\%$ filled with water, at least how many liters of water is needed to reach the state of a completely flooded classroom?

(13) Life starts settling in this flooded classroom. Because of an astronomical anomaly at this classroom, the life inside quickly evolves to produce RNA from protein. Assuming this process exactly reverses the process of coding for amino acids from mRNA codons, and assuming all twenty amino acids begin with equal frequencies in the protein pool, which nitrogenous base will end up with the highest frequency?

(14) How many Randomites can fit in the hole at the bottom of the back 282-side staircase before any asphyxiate?

(15) Cherry Two-Forks eats all of her meals with two forks, including onion rings. Assuming no allowed spatial overlap between the forks, what is the highest genus a surface composed of the fusion of two identical four-pronged forks and an onion ring can have, assuming the inner radius of the onion ring is larger than the prong distance of the fork, which is larger than the annular radius of the onion ring?

(16) Cherry upgrades to forks that can just pass through each other. Now, what’s the highest possible genus of the above-described surface?

(17) If the Milk drank so much that it passed out, what is the most random number?

(18) MIT’s Lyrical Seismic Calibrator (LSC) sucked so badly that it exploded. Unfortunately, that means there was no instrument to measure data about the earthquake it produced when it did so. Fortunately, MIT knows quite a few professional singers that could emulate the role of the LSC and reliably retrieve data about the earthquake. It recruits six singers from Tetazoo and asks them to singe the lands around the epicenter site to contribute to accuracy of estimation. Two of the singers can singe a square 1-acre area per minute and four can singe the same area per two minutes. Assuming the recruiting process was instantaneous, and each singed acre produces 16 bits of data about the earthquake divided by the Euclidean distance of the farthest corner of the square to the epicenter, with a data degredation half life of four minutes, what is the upper bound for the amount of data that can be collected about the earthquake, assuming the epicenter occurs at a lattice point between these 1-acre squares?

(19) Arkadiy is two years younger than The Milk. If The Milk is in its twenties, the next time The Milk’s and Arkadiy’s ages are both prime and add up to a perfect square, how old will Arkadiy be?

(20) These problems are only mostly milkiest. Don’t let off your guard, and suspect any of them. Ask each one personally whether they are or have ever been a not-that-milky math problem.

(21) Offer your condolences to The Milk for having had the last nice birthday, er, expiration anniversary.

One Year of a Crowded Inbox

After a certain inbox capacity, MIT inboxes receive an e-mail warning that the inbox is quite full and should be cleared more. It turns out one can still use one’s e-mail functionally even after one’s inbox reaches capacity (but others might get annoyed at you because of the bounceback e-mails they receive about your inbox capacity). Here’s a chart of how full (in %) my inbox was over the past year, according to the inbox capacity e-mail I got on that day.

There are a few gaps in this graph which probably represent times when I deleted the warning e-mail, possibly even for little bits of space. The one big gap in the middle, however, might actually be a segment of time when my inbox was legitimately filled to less than the warning capacity.

Categories MIT

Human Body

Bug Reports
1) Needs to sleep. FOR A THIRD OF ITS FUCKING LIFE. And on top of that, falling asleep and waking up are ridiculously difficult to control.
2) Fingernails and toenails. Just a waste of time each weekend and a means of enhanced interrogation.
3) Appendix.
4) Digestion is disgusting. It ends in this thing known as shitting. It’s not cool. It feels like the process of digestion in humans was some evolutionary April Fools’ Joke that stuck.
5) Excessively prone to having emotions affect rational decisions.
6) In groups, has ridiculous tendency to be hivemindy.

Feature Requests
1) Wings. How did we lose out on that one?
2) Eyes in the back of the head.
3) More arms.
4) More fingers on each arm.
5) Hardware pens, laser pointers, watches, etc. Uh, yeah, like cyborgs. There we go.
6) Anaerobic support. Species these days.