A million dolla?

Would you like a million dollars? Don't want to have to do it by starting your own company or coming up with the next best thing since sliced bread?

Solve this equation (click on the image to go to the Wikipedia article):



You will receive 1 million US dollars if you do. It is the Navier-Stokes Equation and it is used thousands, if not millions, of times a day all over the world to do calculations about the motion of fluids (from cheese production to weather "prediction" to designing supersonic aircraft). The problem is... there is no known solution. Wait, you say... you just said people used it to do things... yes, I respond, we (humans) have figured out some cool ways of approximating answers that tests have proven to be extremely accurate, so we can use the equation as a practical tool, but, even given the values of all of the variables, we cannot solve it for the value of v.

The prize is one of seven "Millennium Prize Problems" put forward by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) and backed up with a 1 million dollar prize each. The page for the Navier-Stokes Equation problem, which will give a link to the rules and stuff, is here.

It's simple as that.

You're welcome ;).

P.S. I needed to do a little bit of work to display that equation image from Wikipedia for this post (a transparent image with black text and anti-aliasing on an unpredictable background), so I thought I should share my solution... both so I can go back to it myself some day, and in case anybody else should have to do such a thing at some point... Because Dreamwidth and Livejournal and their ilk don't like you to define your own styles dynamically, the style specification had to be placed inline:

<img src="http://blah_blah_blah.png" style="border: 5px white solid; background-color: white;"/>

Senate scandal (ongoing)

Even the mighty may some day fall...

"The RCMP has proceeded to charge Mr. Brazeau and Mr. Harb with one count each of breach of trust and fraud under sections 122 and 380 of the Criminal Code". FYI, Brazeau and Harb are disgraced Conservative and Liberal, respectively, senators... the former refused to resign from the senate and now sits as an independent (they were turfed from the Conservative caucus who are trying to distance themselves from the fact that they appointed him to the Senate); the latter, to his credit, at least did step down...

... and ...

Conrad Black removed from Order of Canada

... still, it remains to be seen if it sends a message to anyone or whether they are just seen as edge cases rather than symptomatic of greater and deeper rot.

An excellent case of rot is illustrated here:

Veterans fighting service cuts felt disrespected at Fantino meeting

Fantino is blaming the fact that this has become a big deal on... unions. Unions? Of course it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Fantino is a complete asshole, was an asshole in front of these veterans, is calling the veterans assholes for making an issue out of the shitty way Fantino treated them, and that the Conservative government talks a nice talk but doesn't even begin to walk the walk when it comes to taking care of veterans.

A good op-ed summary of the "event" is given here: Veterans learning what Caledonia residents already know — Julian Fantino is a bully, and more generally here: Ottawa fails veterans with cynical displays of show over substance.

But who am I to disparage such an important public figure? I propose a drinking game!

Read the Wikipedia article on Julian Fantino, and take a shot every time the words "controversy", "corruption", "scandal", "influencing" (as in the illegal influencing of elected officials), or "lawsuit" appears... don't worry, you won't need to do anything more than scroll down and read the headings, you should be blasted out of your mind in about 35 seconds...

Wikipedia: Julian Fantino

The subtext is, of course, that he continues to be elected or appointed to positions of power despite his well-documented history. It does not tell a very positive story about democracy (... ahem ... Rob Ford ... ahem) or public accountability. We can only hope that his day will come too... but he has more lives than an alley cat it seems, so I'll believe it when I see it...