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Stephen Hawking 'very ill'
- delano 18y agoHawking was born on what turned out to be an auspicious date: January 8, 1942 -- the 300th anniversary of the death of astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei. It didn't "turn out" to be an auspicious date. They'd already known the date Galileo died. That it even makes the date "auspicious" is debatable. There are only 365ish days to be born on. Repeats aren't a surprise.
- mrduncan 18y agoI think the surprise here isn't just that he was born on January 8th, but also that he was born in 1942 which made it exactly 300 years to the day. With that said, I still don't find it to be a big deal that the date lined up with Galileo's death.
- nopassrecover 18y agoNumber of famous scientists/thinkers * at least 2 (birthday, day of death, could probably include other significant days in their lives) leaves an awfully high probability that most days line up with someone famous. Divide that by the number of years people take as significant (probably any mulitple of 50) and the number is reduced somewhat but still for someone so rational it seems odd to always bring this up.
- pierrefar 18y agoVery true. In a group of 23 randomly selected people, there is just over 50% chance that two share the same birthday. Two great articles about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.birthdayprob.html http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.birthdayprob.html Don't tell that to astrologers, otherwise they might make Mars align with Jupiter and that will crash your code with an unknown exception.
- delano 18y agoAn astrologer may also tell you the moon is in void of course and to wait until tomorrow to make your release :]
- param 18y agoThe funniest example of how that's just probability was when this problem was discussed in my bachelor's class of about 60 people, and the prof confidently starts asking us for our dates of birth, and there was not even 1 matching pair. The probability is apparently around .01%
- swillden 18y ago365! / ((365-60)! 365^60) = 0.0059 So it's about 1%, assuming uniform distribution of birthdays. Since they're not quite uniformly distributed, the actual odds of 60 people with no common birthdays is a little lower than that. However, given the thousands of people reading HN who experienced such a classroom exercise, the odds are very good that someone like you will pipe up ;-)
- jonknee 18y agoWe discussed this in an Algebra class during highschool--she actually sat us by birthdate. Turns out two people shared my birthday and she made us take out our IDs because she thought it was some sort of ruse. 10% of the class with the same birthday is a bit odd, but we all had fun calculating the actual odds.
- paulgb 18y agoOut of curiosity, how did the class determine whether anyone shared a birthday? The best way I can think of is lining up by order and then seeing if your neighbors share your birthday. Is that how you did it? Is there a better way to do it?
- param 18y agoeveryone says out their birthday in order of seating(randomly seated). If someone hears their birthday, they shout out of turn. I guess you were expecting an algorithm faster than O(n)? That was the best we could do, given n processors with O(1) space each :-D
- Deestan 18y agoIt is also highly auspicious that if you sum all the letters in "stephen hawking" you get 160, which is also the sum of all letters in "extra potatoe". Coincidence? I think not. I tried to alert CNN.com to this, but they are apparently hushing it up.
- delano 18y agoDan?
- Allocator2008 18y agoWhoever down voted this clearly does not recall Vice-President Quayle's faux paux to which this comment refers.
- pietro 18y agoI don't. What was it?
- william42 18y agohttp://www.capitalcentury.com/1992.html http://www.capitalcentury.com/1992.html
- lucumo 18y agoI like the ending. "Now, fast forward five years to 1997, when The Trentonian decided to look up William Figueroa to see how he was doing after his hour of fame. By then, he was a 17-year-old high school dropout who had fathered a child and was working a low-paying job at an auto showroom." Yeah, don't call anybody an idiot for a small error...
- jacoblyles 18y agoI got the reference, I just don't find 'references' funny. I don't see it's a joke (or otherwise interesting) for a commenter to remind us, that like the parent commenter, former Vice President Dan Quayle also mispelled "potato" in 1992.
- jganetsk 18y agoIt "turned out" to be auspicious because Stephen Hawking wasn't born a physicist. When he became one, then his January 8 birthday "turned out" to be auspicious.
- ErrantX 18y agoI guess auspicious in terms of he turned out to be a great physicist - and therefore the date became pertinent. Had he been, for example, a ballet dancer it wouldnt have been quite so interesting. Also, whilst there are 365 days to be born on how many great physicists are there? And how many are born on the centenary of a previous great physicists death? The odds for that is a lot higher than 1/365 :)
- trickjarrett 18y agoHow very sad, he was an icon I looked up to as a child. I still remember first reading his 'Brief History of Time.'
- a-priori 18y agoIt's a little early to refer to him in the past tense.
- jodrellblank 18y agoMaybe the past tense refers to trickjarrett's childhood.
- trickjarrett 18y agoThat was my intended use of it. My apologies for not writing more clearly.
- sown 18y ago:(
- elidourado 18y agoMy first reaction upon seeing the headline was, "duh!" http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ill http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ill
- k0n2ad 18y agoI actually thought that was kind of funny. He's pretty dope too.
- lesterbuck 18y agoDuring the 1973-74 academic year, Hawking was a visiting professor at Caltech, and I was a junior in the physics program. The first signs something was up were the wheelchair ramps that appeared around Bridge Laboratory, the older physics building. Hawking made his debut by giving the weekly physics colloquium talk in the large lecture room. At that time, he could still speak well enough to give a lecture in his own voice (with a microphone), and he started into some brand new, mind boggling stuff about black holes evaporating. The entire physics faculty was there, and I sensed he had zoomed over most their heads. Most, but not all. Feynman was sitting in the front row, and half way through, he asks a question. It was the kind of question that reveals he was following along just fine. The two titans proceeded to have a back and forth exchange for a few minutes in front of the assembled masses, and then Hawking continued with his talk. It was awesome and humbling to witness that, and my friends and I, sitting way up in the back rows, just shook our heads.
- ErrantX 18y agoI am jealous. That must have been a fantastic exchange to witness! I have always enjoyed the ease with which Hawking talks about these complex theories - he does it so well.
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y agoWho do I need to listen to, and where do I need to be, to have this sort of story 30 years from now?
- Allocator2008 18y agoTry MIT. Alan Guth and Max Tegmark are both there. Guth being the father of inflationary cosmology, and Tegmark a noted cosmologist in his own right but also known for his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH).
- carterschonwald 18y agoI've been told by some folks who've interacted with Tegmark that some of those papers are really just elaborate pranks on his part to create radically implausible but logically consistent models, or something to that extent
- ErrantX 18y agoUgh, just seen this on Twitter. http://twitter.com/SaveTheGuns/status/1567102622 http://twitter.com/SaveTheGuns/status/1567102622 I dont see why people feel they have to get their shots in when someone is too ill to respond :( (not that it would affect him anyway - but the principle! the principle!)
- teej 18y agoI would hope that Stephen Hawking would have better things to do than respond on Twitter.
- k0n2ad 18y agoDon't let it get to you man :)
- ErrantX 18y agohehe I know :P
- sho 18y agoWhat do you expect from someone called "SaveTheGuns" ...
- bena 18y agoThe 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with someone's feelings on Stephen Hawking's illness. So the fact that this guy is very pro-gun says nothing to this apparent dislike of Stephen Hawking. Now, if his username was "GodHatesPhysicists", then his statement would be totally expected.
- william42 18y agoThe very pro-gun attitude taken by the twitterer is correlated with other conservative attitudes, such as anti-science religiousity.
- sho 18y agoNot directly, no, but the union between "People who are obssessed with guns to the extent they create twitter accounts and websites called Save The Guns" and "Science-hating right-wing Christian fundamentalist rednecks" seems to be about 99%, so it's a reasonable assumption to make.
- k0n2ad 18y agoWhat a great man. He survived 40+ years with a supposedly terminal condition... here's hoping that he can pull through again.
- erlanger 18y agoWhat else is new? Commence the downvoting.
- adrianwaj 18y agoOur family's pet dog died today.
- bianco 18y agoI would really be interested in his first experience after death... Will he be able to find a way to communicate to us? That would be really ingenious, because all of the rest is only opinion, and opinions are all and always questionable...
- gfrison 18y agohang in there Stephen!!
- bhellman1 18y agoSad story. Here is hoping Hawking gets better.