A Recovering Physicist (original) (raw)

STEM Grand Slams

2025-05-04

You’ve heard of the EGOT, right? That’s the accomplishment of the Grand Slam of American show business: winning all four of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony award. Twenty-seven people have achieved an EGOT to date.

A Fields Medal and a Nobel Prize medal

I got to wondering whether anyone had ever pulled off a corresponding feat in the sciences: winning, say, a Nobel Prize plus at least one other award from the class of honors sometimes referred to as “the Nobel Prize of {subject}.”

Such as an Abel Prize or a Fields Medal in mathematics, or a Turing Award in computer science.

Turns out: yes.

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history geekery

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A couple [of]

2023-03-01

That “of” is an endangered species.

I don’t know when it began exactly, but in the last handful of years I have seen more and more prose online that drops the preposition in the phrase a couple of. Here are a few examples from professional writers collected within the last few weeks:

I expect that texting on cell phones may be most of the explanation for this shift. (When I tap out “a couple” in a text message on my iPhone, its suggestions for the next word include “people” and “of,” but “people” is the featured continuation.)

Let’s consult Google’s Ngram Viewer. Here is the result from an English language corpus from 2005 to 2019. The phrase whose prevalence I asked Google to graph is “couple _ADP_” — that is, the word “couple” followed by any preposition or postposition. (Did you know about postpositions? I had to look it up. Together, pre- and post- are called “adpositions,” hence Google’s abbreviation for the request.)

couple+_ADP_

You can see that the practice of following “couple” with a preposition begins to fade in popularity around 2014.

[_Note added 2026-02-03_] Robin Sloan, “a writer, printer, and manufacturer,” has a beautiful blog whose colophon page cum style sheet contains a style note sympathetic to the viewpoint of this post:

grammar geekery

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MacOS Mail.app: How to Customize the Column Layout Display

2022-10-26

My wife and I both use Mail.app’s Column Layout on our Macs (Air and Pro). She recently started using flagged messages as an organizing tactic — I have been doing so for some time — and I noticed that her flagged messages weren’t showing up as such in the message summary. The Flags column on her display wasn’t visible like it was for me.

How to customize the columns that appear in Mail.app's Column Layout

I went searching for how to customize the columns that appear when View > Column Layout is chosen. A straight answer did not appear on the first several pages of Google results — including in usually reliable places like Apple forums and Stack Exchange. So I offer this short note to fill that gap.

My hope is that once Google’s ubiquitous spiders have performed their tender ministrations, people will be able to find here the simple answer to their simple question.

I should probably throw in an SEO paragraph or two saying things like “This article will teach you how to customize the columns that appear in Mail.app’s Column Layout,” and “When you have finished reading you will know how to customize the columns that appear in Mail.app’s Column Layout.” But I hate that artificial and sterile verbal logorrhea SEO, whose intended audience is the Googlebot and not the human.

Here’s the secret: right-click (control-click) in the row of column header labels. You will see a popup like the one above. Select the columns you want and you are done.

Well, nearly done. You will probably want to tweak the columns’ appearance. You can grab a column by its header label to rearrange its display order, and you can grab its right-hand border to resize it.

Now you know how to customize the columns that appear in Mail.app’s Column Layout. (Pace, Googlebot, and for you humans: See what I did there? And please forgive me.)

geekery Mac

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Letter Frequency and Wordle

2022-02-09

Many of us like to start the daily Wordle by guessing a word containing the most frequent letters, to maximize the chances of learning some of the letters in the day’s target word.

The traditional list of letters in frequency order as they appear in English words goes something like this:

[ e t a o i n s h r d l c u m w f g y p b v k j x q z ]

The problem with this frequency ordering is that it was arrived at by counting up the letters in a run of English text. However, English text is loaded with words such as the, of, an, and a, which don’t matter to Wordle; this skews the distribution. So what we want is the frequency count in words that might actually show up in the game.

We can start by downloading a complete list of Scrabble-legal words (the list I found has n=178,694 words) and extracting from that all 5-letter words (n=8,938). I found the most frequent letters in this corpus and, taking doubled letters into account, came up with the following frequency ordering:

[ s e a o r i l t n u d c p y m h g b k f w v z x j q ]

We can actually get more exact than that. In various dark corners of the web, people have extracted from Wordle’s source code the actual list of words used by the game. This list has n=2,316. (Josh Wardle selected only reasonably common 5-letter words.) Using the process above, I found the following frequency ordering in Wordle’s target data:

[ e a r o l t s i n u c y d h p g m b f k w v x z q j ]

Now let’s find what 5-letter words in the Scrabble-legal list are made up of 5 unique letters from the initial 7 (earolts) in the above distribution. Here they are (n=61):

alert lares orals roast sorel taels toeas aloes laser orate roles sorta taler tolar alter later orles roset stale tales tolas altos lears rales rotas stare tares toles arles least ratel rotes steal taros toras arose lores rates rotls stela teals tores artel loser ratos setal stoae tears torse aster lotas reals slate stole telos earls oater resat solar store tesla

Any of these words should be a productive first guess in your daily Wordle. Especially if it’s a common word.

Should you wish to spend a second turn pinning down more letters, you might try these pairs of words that use all of the letters in the top 10 (h/t to Gary Stock [RIP] for finding them):

alien – tours altos – urine arose – until
nails – route noise – ultra snail – outer
train – louse

Note added 2024-04-06:

In the more than two years since this post went live, the daily Wordles have con­sumed over 700 of the available target words — among them eight of the words from our starter pairs, above. The used words are now shown with grey strike­through. You can still use the affected pairs to cover all 10 commonest letters, but your chances of hitting a 1 or 2 Wordle score will be reduced.

I redid the letter frequency analysis using as a corpus the ~ 1,300 as-yet unused target words. The top 10 letters did not change, though they shuffled in a few spots. Here is the new frequency order:

[ e a r l o s i t n u c y d p h m g b f w k v z j x q ]

Note added 2024-05-04:

The original corpus of target words selected by Josh Wardle had 2,315 entries. As of today, 1,041 have been consumed as targets and 1,274 remain.

Lately I've modulated my starting words strategy after noticing that a good percentage of the remaining words end in e — 16.4% of them at present.

Which pairs of letter-plus-position are most common in the list of remaining words? Words ending in y (17.7%) will give you the biggest starter bang for the buck. In second place are words beginning with s (17.1%). Words ending in e round out the top three. Here are the first 10 such patterns:

17.7% ....y 17.1% s.... 16.4% ....e 14.7% ...e. 13.7% .a... 12.1% ..a.. 11.4% .r... 11.4% ..i.. 11.1% .e... 10.8% .o...

geekery

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Making Unreadable Sites Readable, Part 2

2021-12-02

In an earlier post I presented a bookmarklet that regularizes the color scheme of a visited site. The bookmarklet below solves a different, and growing, readability prob­lem: the habit of sites to encroach on the material you came to read — intruding from the bottom, sides, and top of the screen. And to pop up / pop over obscuring cruft that offers a subscription or a coupon or an auto-playing video that you had the temerity to scroll away from without clicking.

I use the bookmarklet below every time the visited page has a Cookie Notice at the bottom or social media widgets obscuring the text to one side or a banner covering the top that appears if you scroll back up the page.

It simply removes the cruft.

Drag the link to your bookmarks bar and when prompted, give it a name. I have named mine “-sticky.”

-sticky

geekery

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Ceremonies to Anchor Trust

2020-02-14

one-kilo-coin

Through this intriguing Register report I learned about the DNSSEC root-signing ceremony. It happens quarterly in alternating fashion on the east and west coasts of the US. The carefully scripted ceremony, lasting over two hours, is meant to anchor the web of trust in the DNS, the Internet’s domain name system. To this end it is streamed live and archived for posterity.

The Reg article linked above recounts the foofaraw surrounding the most recent such signing ceremony, slated for February 12, 2020. Participants from around the world had arrived in El Segundo, CA. The ceremony did not come off on that date because its host, IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Agency of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), could not open one of two physical safes that hold the essential raw materials for the occasion.

Reading about this modern ceremony, performed quarterly for 10 years now, immediately put me in mind of a similar ritual, the Trial of the Pyx, staged in London for 738 years, for a substantially similar purpose: anchoring trust in the English currency.

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history geekery

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A Subjective Rating of OSX / MacOS Versions

2019-02-21

happy-sad-mac

This is a text file I have maintained locally on my Mac desktop and/or laptop over a number of years. It encapsulates my bottom-line evaluation of the quality and user experience provided by Apple’s OS versions since I moved to OS X in 2002.

For my money the pinnacle of OS X quality occurred with Snow Leopard. It’s noteworthy that at this time Microsoft was floundering in the self-made morass of Windows Vista, and Apple perceived itself as so far ahead in the OS sweepstakes that it took an entire release off from adding any new features — a 2-year hiatus — and simply improved the speed, fit & finish, and polish of its OS.

In my view quality took a huge hit when Apple began folding iOS features into its desktop / laptop OS — a hit from which it has taken the company 5 years and 5 releases to recover. However, the most recent two releases have seen quality slip again.

rating, 1-10 ▼ vers. name rel. date ---- ------------- ----------

Mac geekery

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An Odyssey of Mac Recovery

2018-09-30

sad-mac

Tl;dr — MacBook Pro broke, wouldn’t boot; fully restored 30+ hours later. Some may be interested in a record of the steps to recovery and the (to me surprising) extent and depth of Apple’s recovery tools. This was the first occasion I had had to follow that road right to the end.

So this happened. Woke up Wednesday morning the 21st of September, 2016, to a query on my 2011 MacBook Pro as to whether OSX should install the update that had been downloaded overnight.

Said yes without even checking what kind of update it was. To date, my experience overall with updates and even upgrades of OSX had been benign. (I later learned that the update consisted of Safari version 10 only.)

Machine wouldn’t boot thereafter.

Here’s the behavior: OSX collects password to unlock FileVault, goes into boot sequence, gets as far as Apple logo on white screen with progress bar (about 75%), and screen goes black. 10 seconds go by before a quick flash of logo on white; 10 more seconds; flash; rinse repeat forever.

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Mac geekery

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Primorial

2018-05-30

tl;dr: This morning I tweeted:

Of course I have a spreadsheet on my desktop containing the first 10,000 primes. Doesn’t everybody?

— Keith Dawson (@kdawson) May 30, 2018

What occasioned this tweet was exploring a mild curiosity about how a sequence of products of the primes would grow. In my own head I had provisionally dubbed this sequence “Prime Factorial,” because it is the product of all numbers up to a given point, but in this case using as input the primes instead of the natural numbers.

Spoiler: It grows damn fast.

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math geekery

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The Electoral Triumph of “Did Not Vote”

2017-08-13

Perhaps you’ve seen this map that has been floating around social media lately. It was created soon after the 2016 election by Reddit user Taillesskangaru and is posted here.

Let’s pretend that Did Not Vote were a candidate in the 2016 election. The number of eligible voters who did not vote exceeded the vote totals garnered by any living candidate in 42 states.

The dominance of Did Not Vote mostly reflects the relatively low voter turnout, even in presidential election years, in most states. Nationwide, turnout has varied in a range from 50% to just over 60% for the last 40 years. In 2016 it was 59.3%. In some states, in some presidential elections, turnout has been below 40%.

History

I got to wondering how unusual the the 2016 triumph of Did Not Vote was in the context of recent elections. The result:

If Did Not Vote were a candidate, it would have won, handily, every one of the last 10 presidential elections. Full details follow.

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political geekery

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