randomwisdom.com

I've invited Chao to post some of his photos from his travels in China, so hopefully these pages will become a bit more interesting in the next few days!

Sorry, but my spam filter was being a bit overzealous again with comments. You should be able to post now-- please re-post any comments that didn't show up.

Update: For those of you who had a comment eaten up as spam before, check again. It should be back now.

I've seen computers built from steel, aluminum, cardboard, various plastics, and even foam insulation. But this one rules them all.

http://www.zaverio.net/laptop/legnatile/index-en.html

I hope you can get the joke:

http://www.huhcorp.com/

I finally decided to get off my duff and upgrade to Wordpress 1.5 (which I had been eagerly awaiting for quite some time). We shall see if I decide to change the look of things at all over the next few days....

Update: Comments were broken for a bit there. They should work again, I think. If you have any problems, fire an email off to jeff at randomwisdom dot com.

Here are some savory flavors that are older than your grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe. Take a look at these recipes from ancient Rome:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/233472.html

Here's a problem for the more math-inclined among you.

There's a party downtown, and all the city's richest and snobbiest people are there. Being fashionably minded, they all have unique hats, but since they are all lazy and don't want to carry them around, they leave them at the door with the attendant. A certain number of people show up at this party, let's say a nice round number like n. But being rich and snobby, none of them leave a tip with the attendant.

So the party starts to come to a close, and all the guests start to leave. Each one goes to pick up his or her hat on the way out. But since they were all such lousy tippers, the attendant, in a fit of pique, decides to hand each guest a hat at random and shove that guest out the door.

The question is this: on average, how many people from the party got their own hats back? (In other words, if you were to do this experiment a hundred times, or a thousand, what's the average number of people who would get their own hats back?)

Hints to come later, solutions after that...