kmod's blog

My fourth and final Putnam (though according to the MIT math department, my fifth??) was today.  I haven’t done any real math in a while, so one of the questions in the fist half was pretty jarring: Does there exist an abelian group where the product of the orders of the members is 2^2009? I…

DARPA is hosting another crowd-sourcing competition, this time in terms of social networks.  They’re releasing large red weather balloons around the US, and the goal is to spot and report the locations of all 10.  The first team that can do this wins the $40k prize. https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx This seems like a really interesting application of…

I have a blog. It’s set up on a linode.com virtual private server (VPS), which I plan to use for other things as well. My idea is to post random interesting technical things that I run into — we’ll see how this works out.