Shuttlecock & ulva

naughty-looking words

Counting Lego towers

From a paper by Bergfinnur Durhuus (I would love to see how Scott Kim might turn that name upside down) & Soren Eilers [link]:

It has long been asserted that the number of ways to combine six 2 x 4 LEGO blocks of the same color is

102981500

This number was computed at LEGO in 1974 ([2]) and has been systematically repeated, for instance in [4, p. 15] and [3]. Consequently, the number can be found in several "fun fact" books and on more than 250 pages on the World Wide Web. However, this number only gives (with a small error, as we shall see) the number of ways to build a tower of LEGO blocks of height six. The total number of configurations is

915103765

as found by independent computer calculations by the second author and by Abrahamsen [1].

via cheesebikini

Content below copied from this link at cheesebikini:

Here's something strange to explore. A guy I know recently stumbled across this. time.nist.gov is a standard NTP server, used to syncrhonize clocks on your computer to the govt's atomic clock.
However, it also seems to have another strange service running in port 78 and 79. Telnet in, and hit enter after connection is established, and you get this:

-------------------------------------------------------
dream% telnet time.nist.gov 78
Trying 192.43.244.18...
Connected to time.nist.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.

P: P: My name is Patsy: and my husband's name is Paul:
We come from Pittsburgh: and we sell Peaches::
880-223-821-266-590-908-785
$ 0 875 3000 8 1 0 0
Connection closed by foreign host.
-------------------------------------------------------

Wi-Fi digital hotspotter

link

[I'm a sucker for special-purpose devices that do what a PC does already, by itself. Yet I will not buy this one, because I don't like to move my laptop.]