Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Power Winners!

Sorry, my vast blogging audience, for my involuntary hiatus. I had intended to announce the winners of the contest on the 8th (=23) but then my life and my job got in the way. So I decided that the 16th, which is two squared, squared, was a good alternative date. I'm future-posting this at 2:32 am, just to get a few extra powers of two in there. I may be awake at that time, but doing all the work I'm supposed to be doing rather than writing this post.

Anyhow, there were some terrific entries in the contest, and it was hard to decide who should win. In keeping with the theme, I will announce them in terms of powers of two.

22 place: A tie between Lost Clown and Rico, who describe their geektastic obsessions with cyclic groups and sums of 1/2N, respectively. You are my kind of people! When I get around to it, I will post pictures of my powers of two cake, which illustrates concretely (actually, chocolately) the fact that the sum of 1/2N is finite.

2
2-1 place: Rachel, with the bimetalic Toonie, her favorite coin. If you bring those coins south of the border, they'll be worth more than $2. Heck, at the rate the dollar's plummeting, they might be worth $22 American sometime soon!

2
1st place: Laura, who shared a favorite song featuring the powers of two. See, math and music share a special relationship!

and...

20th place: Pete, whose father, mother, and he are each twins. 'Cause that's just cool.

All those of you who are not my family members or colleagues have won a very exciting prize: your choice of a Tennessee ball cap or t-shirt.

Why? Because a) I live in Tennessee, and you don't, and b) Tennessee is a power-of-two themed state name. It has four (=22) unique letters, each of which appears in it a power-of-two times (T -- once; e -- four times; n and s -- twice each). And, depending on where in the state you live, it is pronounced with either two or four syllables (TEN-see or TEN-uh-say-ee).

If you want to collect your prize, simply leave a comment with your choice, the size (if applicable), and a mailing address to which I can send your prize. The comments are moderated, and I promise not to publish your contact information. If you don't feel comfortable claiming your prize, don't worry about it; that's less work for me.

3 comments:

Madeleine said...

Clap, clap, clap!

Excellent entries and an excellent awards ceremony, too!

Please do post the cake pics. I love your cake pics. Mmmmmm. Chocolate cake.

Madeleine said...

This is off-topic for this post, but I found a neat web page you might like, if you don't already know about it:

Computer Arithmetic Tragedies page of Kees Vuik
http://ta.twi.tudelft.nl/users/vuik/wi211/disasters.html

Rebecca said...

Madeleine, I promise I'll get those cake pictures up sometime this week. As for the web page, I had seen some of those computer arithmetic errors before but not all of them. Very interesting!