I bet that the most prevalent type of lightning in a thunderstorm is a property of the relative charges within the stormclouds themselves, rather than independent phenomena! This would make particular storms more likely to carry cloud-to-ground lightning than others.
My intuition is introverted, but every so often I do manage to pull something from the external environment, rather than my own mind. This is one of those times.
If taking many photos of the same scene, for example, it would be a good idea to compress these photos in terms of each other, using something like differential encoding (though probably more sophisticated; maybe building an LZW dictionary on one file then applying it to all files?). Domain-specific methods could be used as well. The files would necessarily be paired (don’t even think about changing one without altering the other as well), but it would offer significant savings over solely file-by-file compression.
Something like ZIP or TAR+GZIP may already do this. I’ll have to check the specifics of the algorithms employed. Regardless, I think I see a new coding opportunity coming my way.
Edit: Zip does not compress files together, but this approach is more or less exactly what tar+gzip does (including the idea of using a common LZW dictionary).
Not two weeks after coming up with it, my idea was just scooped by Microsoft.
Ah, well; I couldn’t build it anyway.
Inductors under the road can be used to detect traffic at an intersection. Consequently, it should be possible to use machine learning techniques to optimize a strategy to minimize traffic at a particular intersection (and especially to avoid buildup beyond the intersection due to poor timing).
I hypothesize that both small and large-scale sociological behavior (that is, the behavior of individuals and of organizations; the connection being formalized through my 9th psychological postulate: the “linking principle”) are governed by a sort of circadian rhythm, by which various relationships will form and various behaviors will manifest at specific times each year. For example, this is the fourth May in a row that freelance work has begun streaming in (I should note that I no longer actively search for work of any type; the process is entirely passive and yet I’m still being found), yet it’s usually fairly quiet during the rest of the year.
One of my friends brought up a very interesting point: this may be the result of prior conditioning; after all, this is about the time that the school year traditionally ends. I suppose the question is then whether this sort of behavior manifests in response to the targets (in the case of freelance work, the workers) or conditioning of the sources (the clients).
…Or both.
I wonder if Benford’s Law exists for colors or other non-numeric concepts. They can, after all, be mapped to numbers.
Chessboard, CAT5 cable, moving pieces. Need I say more?
Maybe I’ll try to actually build this. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with electronics on that level, but it seems feasible.
A recent discussion with a friend reminded me of an idea I had in high school: in order to encourage students to focus on course subject and content rather than difficulty and to reduce the variability in the grading system based on instructor, the current letter grading system should be replaced with Z scores: (numeric score or GPA – mean) / standard deviation, where the mean and std. dev. are grouped by course and professor (but cumulative over semester). Consequently, lower scores in more difficult courses would be competitive with higher scores in less difficult ones. Additionally, as I’ve seen twice, there are professors (and they were algorithmists both times) who simply do not give out “A” grades. Thus, under the current system, achieving a perfect GPA is as much a matter of avoiding these professors’ courses as it is a matter of performance. Under a system that takes the mean grade of the professor into account, however, they could not harm students GPAs in this way, as their means would be lower than other professors’.
Do hayfever sufferers have a tendency to enjoy nature less?
More generally, do people tend to follow the path of least resistance? That is, do they truly do what is easiest for them?
On an unrelated note, I also suspect that mathematical ability is inversely correlated with the ability to recognize and remember facial features.
What if many universes with distinct physical laws exist and selective pressure is exerted on a universe for a certain property?
For example, if gravity were too strong or too weak, the universe as we know it would not exist; it would fall apart very shortly after its birth. If an equal amount of matter and antimatter existed, the universe may have completely annihilated itself. This didn’t happen, but in an infinitude of universes, it certainly has in the majority of them.
Or, even more tantalizingly, what if this universe was selected for its ability to support intelligent life? Maybe there’s something to the strong anthropic principle? Could the universe we live in be subject to the same laws that dominate life within it?