The long con has worked. Now that he has access to her Etsy account, expect every cozy imaginable to show up at her door.
If you don’t know the chapter is on Bayes’ Theorem, you can use Bayes’ Theorem to determine the probability of that being the case, given the observation of a bunch of questions about false positives.
Well, given a suitable prior, at least.
Surely, the North Pole thing couldn’t lead to more than one day of ambiguity, and Leap Year one more than that…
But if the plane circled the pole a number of times, they could have gone into the past/future by many years…
The Bureau people are just being cautious. I mean, they enjoy digging into the details of a problem, but at some point, they just have to throw up their hands, and give the guy cake.
Some countries were very late in switching from the Julian to Gregorian calendars, though I don’t believe any did the switchover before regular international polar flights. That could lead to another ~2 weeks of ambiguity, though.
I think you mean “after” there.
The most recent Julian-Gregorian switchover I know of was Greece in 1923, but that’s way too early for polar flights. Perhaps one of the countries was still using a non-Roman based calendar – Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew or some such.
ETA: Oh, I know, someone (BHG probably) was using the French Revolutionary Calendar.
Now that you mention it, if Emily was born in 1900 (and hence the flight was a zeppelin or something), then the Julian calendar being involved would also mean we could have disagreement about whether it was a leap day or not.
Yes, but the leap days involved were separated by 14 days, so it couldn’t have contributed to the uncertainty in the time of her birth.
Ah, right. The way you’d get the most mileage (er, dayage) out of the disagreement over leap years would be to look at the cumulative effect of many disputed leap years… which is of course the net discrepancy between the two calendars. So the best you can do amounts to just “any time after 1900, when both calendars were still in use”.
The most-discrepant calendar would be the Islamic one, which is purely lunar with always 12 lunar months per “lunar year”, which thus has a discrepancy from the tropical year (what most other calendars are based on) of nearly 11 days per year, cumulative (The Chinese and Jewish calendars are also lunar, but with “leap months” inserted every so often to reset to matching the tropical year). And I think that there are still some countries where that’s the official calendar.
Each one contains a chocolate shaped like a famous spacecraft and, for the later numbers, a pamphlet on managing anxiety
And since there are probably a lot of folks who don’t get it: The James Webb Space Telescope, formerly the Next Generation Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble, has a very large mirror made up of a number of smaller mirrors (it’s difficult to make a mirror that large all in one piece, and even more difficult to launch it into space). Presumably, the sub-mirrors are numbered as in the picture. As for the mouseover, scientists are always anxious whenever a mission is launched, because a rocket is basically a giant pile of explosives, and it’s all too common for one to explode in the wrong way and ruin a decade or more of work.