Category Archives: Mathematics

Bernard Beard

Some of you may recall numerous comments on statistics and physics here by commenter “bbbeard.” Sadly, I just received notification that he died over the weekend:

Where: Memphis Botanical Gardens (in the Japanese Garden)
750 Cherry Road

Memphis, TN 38117
Phone: 901.636.4106

Date: Saturday, April 21, 2012

Time: Gathering at 10:00am with Service to begin at 10:30am. Lunch to follow, ending at 1:30pm

Donations can be made to either of the following:

Keystone School
119 E. Craig Place
San Antonio, TX 78212
Phone: 210.735.4022

Donations Link: https://websvr.keystoneschool.org/cc/misc_fund.asp

Or

MIT Department of Physics
77 Massachusetts Ave., Bldg. 4-309
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
Phone: 617.452.2807
Donations Link: https://giving.mit.edu/givenow/browse-designations.dyn?categoryId=DP,DPPH

He was a former colleague of mine at the ARES Corporation (though I never worked with him). The comments section here (as well, of course, as his friends and family) will miss him.

A New Theory About Primes

But it seems misleading to me. The title implies that an odd number could be the sum of two, three, four or five primes, but two and four are excluded because they will generate an even number, so isn’t it really saying that it can be expressed as the sum of either three or five primes? Anyway, nice proof.

[Via Geek Press]

[Update a while later]

D’oh! As the commenter notes, I’d forgotten that two is prime, and unique in it being an even prime.

NASA’s Irrational Approach To Risk

Bob Zubrin asks how much an astronaut is worth. I don’t think that this is historically accurate, though:

The attempted Hubble desertion demonstrates how a refusal to accept human risk has led to irresponsible conduct on the part of NASA’s leadership. The affair was such a wild dereliction of duty, in fact, that O’Keefe was eventually forced out and the shuttle mission completed by his replacement.

That’s not how I remember it. I recall at the time that I thought, and even advocated, that O’Keefe step down, because he had demonstrated himself unable to do the job, being traumatized by having to tell the Columbia families and friends on the tarmac at KSC that their loved ones weren’t coming home, which is probably what caused his timidity about Hubble. But I’m aware of no evidence that he was “forced out” over the decision. I thought that he simply wanted out of the job and took the best offer that came along. The administration would have been loath to remove an administrator, knowing how hard it is to find a good one. Someone should write a letter to the Reason editor on this. Bob either needs to substantiate this with a credible citation, or the magazine should run a correction. Because I think it’s wishful thinking on his part.

[Update a few minutes later]

Bad link, it’s fixed now, sorry.

[Mid-afternoon update]

While I criticized O’Keefe at the time, I didn’t actually disagree with the Hubble decision at the time. The problem that I saw with it was that it was based on irrational criteria. All the focus was on astronaut safety, and no one seemed to be considering how disastrous it would be if we lost another orbiter. NASA had no shortage of astronauts, but there were only three birds left in the fleet, and we would have had to complete ISS with only two, if the program survived at all. Add to that the fact that we probably could have launched an improved Hubble replacement for the cost of the repair mission, and the decision to do it was irrational in its own way, driven by an emotional attachment to the telescope that had shown so many wonders over the past decade.