All right, amateur Sherlocks - what’s your best feat of deduction?
Here’s one that just happened recently for me:
A buddy of mine is a record producer and before that he was a drummer in London. He has a ton of stories about rock musicians and music types. One day, we were talking about him playing drums in a band in the early '80’s and he says “oh, that reminds me of a story: I was finishing a set, and this girl walks up to me and asks me about my snare drum…”
without really thinking about it, I say - “oh, Gina Schock.”
and his jaw just dropped - “how the HELL did you know that?!?”
I said “well, it was the early '80’s, the Go-Go’s were touring in the UK during that time and she was the most well-known female drummer that made sense.”
“How did you know the girl who approached me played drums?!?”
“well, I guessed she did 'cuz she asked you about your snare.”
Now, whenever he and I are together with someone else, he has to tell them that story…
When I was in seventh grade, I walked into the living room and caught about ten seconds of a piece of music that was being played on TV. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Had no idea what it was called or who wrote it. All I knew was that it featured two sopranos – a woman and a little boy, and that they were singing in a language I couldn’t understand.
Fast forward to freshman year of college. I had recently became acquainted with the music to ALW’s Phantom of the Opera. Opening the book of sheet music one day, I noted in the biographical sketch of the composer that he had also written a requiem. My mind suddenly made a connection between the voice of the lead soprano (Sarah Brightman) from Phantom and those ten seconds of music I’d heard one time, six years before. I headed for the nearest music store, found a tape of ALW’s Requiem, and listened to it in the car. I recognized the Pie Jesu instantly.
Well… I found a 1950’s diary in a box of junk, and from only the first names and dates mentioned by the (then) 18 year old author, I know now who she was, where she lived, when she died, who her folks were, where they’re buried, and just today I found her high school yearbook photo from her senior year. Go, me!
The trivial one was when I heard a song on the radio, “Dance in My Pants.” I had never heard it before, but it sounded familiar. After a few moments, I placed it: It sounded a lot like the songs on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell album. But it definitely wasn’t Meat Loaf. After a little thought, I said, “I’ll bet that’s Jim Steinman” (who wrote the songs in “Bat Out Of Hell”). Turned out I had hit it right on the nose.
The other was when I heard the reports about Joy Adamson’s death. Adamson was known for her book (and later movie), Born Free, and the original reports were that she was killed by a lion. I had recently read a book about building a railroad in Africa, and about hunting an actual man-eating lion. “That’s funny,” I thought. “Lions always break the neck of their prey before killing them.” None of the reports mentioned that Adamson’s neck was broken. “I wonder if she was murdered,” I thought.
While bored at work one day I figured out a way to express a term of degree n (IE : x[sup]n[/sup]) as a summation of polynomials of degree n - 1.
While this may be, for all I know, something already discovered in the math field, I have never heard about it, and I thought it was very cool at the time.
I’d be happy to, but the mathematical notation … I don’t zink ze boards, zey can handle it, no?
Hm. Maybe when I get home I can write it on paper and scan it, and put it on my website…
Or someone could suggest how I represent the summation symbol and all the fun items above and below it on here?
It’s pretty simple, once you get down to it… the trick for me was remembering to adjust it to account for negative numbers. (Lots of Absolute Value signs!)
Well, you’re all smart folks, maybe I can just describe it verbally.
For X[sup]2[/sup] , I was intrigued by the pattern of the differences between consecutive squares … 4-1 = 3, 9-4 = 5, 16-9 = 7 … the intervals were consecutive negative numbers. Puzzling it out, I was able to write X[sup]2[/sup] as
(X / |X|) * [The summation as k goes from 1 to |X| of ] 2 |k| - 1.
Then I wondered if X[sup]3[/sup] had a similar pattern. I finally worked it out as :
(X / |X|) * [The summation as k goes from 1 to |X| of ] 3k[sup]2[/sup] - 3|k| + 1
I noticed that the polynomials I was getting looked familiar to me.
I realized I was looking at all but the first term of the Pascal’s triangle expansion for the particular exponent. (If you’re not familiar with Pascal’s Triangle, it’s basically a list of coefficients for (x - 1)[sup]n[/sup])
So I tried 4|k|[sup]3[/sup] - 6k[sup]2[/sup] + 4|k| - 1 for X[sup]4[/sup] … it works.
So the coefficients for the polynomial in the summation are as follows, for the first few…
[…I realized I was looking at all but the first term of the Pascal’s triangle expansion for the particular exponent. (If you’re not familiar with Pascal’s Triangle, it’s basically a list of coefficients for (x - 1)[sup]n[/sup])
So I tried 4|k|[sup]3[/sup] - 6k[sup]2[/sup] + 4|k| - 1 for X[sup]4[/sup] … it works.
So the coefficients for the polynomial in the summation are as follows, for the first few…
This is the only time in my life I’ve felt like a smart detective in a TV show. And it’s true.
I was driving around London with a friend who was over from the States. He wanted to find a particular restaurant where a friend of his worked, but he didn’t know it’s name or location. He took out his digital camera and showed me a photo of the front of the restaurant, just in case I happened to know it. I didn’t.
However, a minute later I asked to see the photo again. I noticed that in the same photo you could just see a neighbouring shop, which has its phone number on the shop window. I used the digital camera zoom to make the number clearer, reached for my mobile phone and dialled the number. Spoke to the women in the shop and asked her which street her shop was on. Got the street, looked it up in the A-Z, drove there, found the restaurant.
Hebrews says Melchizedek is without father, mother or ancestry.
Genesis 5 says Enoch was no longer here for God took him.
God grabs Enoch and plays Einsteinian time dilation trick. Enoch spends one day with God while 2000 years go by on Earth. God sends Enoch back and he says his name is Melchizedek. He arrived on Earth as an adult without being born. No ancestry for 2000 years.
God plays dice with the universe but they are loaded.
I’ve done this for several artist whom I had never heard before, without even that much of a clue (besides knowing from word of mouth the artist’s general style):
Norah Jones
Mission UK
Sex Pistols
Agnostic Front
And more. Also Led Zeppelin, but I had heard Robert Plant, so that doesn’t really count. You might also discount the Sex Pistols and Mission UK, since I had heard PIL and Sisters of Mercy, but I guessed those two bands WITHOUT knowing they had members in the other bands that i had heard!
A while ago there was a news story with a picture of a purple polar bear. The story said it was in a zoo and was suffering from a fungal infection. There was no mention of exactly how the bear became purple. I posted a thread about it here. Some people thought it was a hoax and the picture had been Photoshopped. I mentioned gentian violet, sometimes used to treat skin conditions, so I thought the story could be true. Sometime later, sailor posted a link to this story on a Spanish news site which said the bear was in fact being treated with gentian violet.
Call me dense, but I’m still amazed that when you look at a star, your looking at something that existed thousands of years ago, so really it might not even be there anymore.
So, my mind twists this idea around and, if I were somewhere else in the galaxy, I would be looking back at earth, but I would be seeing a couple thousand years ago, depending on how far away I was.
So, if I was say, way closer, and with a really good telescope I could see me last year, or last month or last week, depending again on my position away from the earth. In each of those times it would be “now”
So now my mind gets really twisted up and I think, okay, that means everything is “now”… Just about there, my mind gets all twisted up with different theories and falls over itself…