What To Do When Nothing Has Happened?
Raymond “Randy” Freeman
Process Safety Progress September 2011 (Vol. 30 No. 5)

How should you estimate the probability of some catastrophic event that hasn’t happened yet?

Interesting paper:

Impact-induced initiation of a Snowball Earth: A model study
Minmin Fu, Dorian S. Abbot, Christian Koeberl, Alexey Fedorov
Science Advances, 10 eadk5489 (2024) 9 February 2024

Wikipedia has this entry for Benford’s Law, which deals with the distribution of leading digits of a collection of samples.

The old Daily Coding Problem email list gave us this problem around 2020:

Daily Coding Problem: Problem #237 [Easy]

A tree is symmetric if its data and shape remain unchanged when it is reflected about the root node. The following tree is an example:

        4
      / | \
    3   5   3
  /           \
 9             9

Given a k-ary tree, determine whether it is symmetric.

This problem is less well described than I thought when I worked on it in 2020.

Idly looking up a coding problem got me to investigate Dyck Languages, which led me to update my binary tree Go package.

I’ve got even more ideas for Starship Troopers fanfic. If you think you can write one of these, do it! Let me know so I can read it.

There’s an older programming job interview question:

Given a string of round, curly, and square open and closing brackets, return whether the brackets are balanced (well-formed).

For example, given the string “([])”, you should return true.

Given the string “([)]” or “((()”, you should return false.

I read a blog post titled The golden ratio as a number base. It had an interesting statement:

According to Zeckendorf’s Theorem, every positive integer can be represented in a unique way as a sum of distinct, non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers.

In September of 2020, I still subscribed to the Denver Post, Denver’s only remaining daily newspaper. I got the Wednesday and Sunday editions in paper because I’m a dinosaur. It’s just more fun to read the funnies on paper. I started to read the Letters to the Editor and editorial pages.

Conquest of the Moon (Viking Press, 1953, Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Fred Whipple) describes a lunar expedition that could be accomplished with the technology of 1950. It’s the second of three books that explore the implications of Project Mars.