Word Play with Mathematica
August 3, 2008 by zero618e
Read what's new today in the Wolfram Blog...
Word Play with Mathematica
by Ed Pegg Jr
Here in Champaign-Urbana, where Roger Ebert was raised, I took notice when Disney announced the end of its long relationship with Ebert & Roeper. Disney also announced the replacement critics, Lyons & Mankiewicz. Was there something intentional in that? A quick run on my Mathematica programs returned this anagram: Lyons + Mankiewicz = Monica Lewinsky + Z Did Disney do this deliberately? Words sometimes have hidden meaning. For over 30 years, I've been sharing puzzles with Will Shortz. Many of these I've found with Mathematica, such as computer user = supreme court, and Will has used them in his weekly NPR puzzle segment. (A quick note on notation: I'm using "==" when the meanings of the two sides of an anagram are roughly equivalent or apposite, "=" when the only relation is the component letters, and "!=" when they are opposites.) Anagrams have of course been popular for many years. A 1936 tour de force by David Shulman is a sonnet where every line uses the letters of "Washington Crossing the Delaware." The National Puzzlers League maintains a list of best anagrams. Also, anagrammy.com regularly ranks new anagrams as they are found. Here are some good ones:
Read the entire entry at:
http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/07/25/word-combinatorics/
To see other posts, visit the Wolfram Blog at:
http://blog.wolfram.com
Best regards,
The Wolfram Blog Team
wolframblog@wolfram.com
Printer-friendly versionAbout us
Science Blog was started in August 2002. It lives, breathes and eats press releases from research organizations around the globe. Most of what you read here are press releases from the outfits named in the stories themselves. Got a news story you think belongs here? Let's talk. The other half of the equation is blog posts from readers like you. So if you have an interest in science, please register and join others like you in an ongoing, vibrant dialog about what makes the world tick. Meantime, please take a minute to read our Privacy Policy and Site Disclaimer.Recommended
Andrew Sullivan Dan Sullivan Doug Arellanes Emmanuelle Richard Faith Sullivan Fred Bortz Heather Havrilesky Henry Copeland Kate Sullivan Ken Layne lagreenbean.com LAist.com Maggie Sullivan Matt Welch NewYorkology Opinion L.A. Ron Kaye Slashdot Steve Elzer & Family TheNewsroom.org Thor Garcia Tony Pierce Wonkette OlderThanks CNET for naming Science Blog one of your Blog 100!
Comments
dark energy
August 3, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 16 weeks ago
Comment: 31357
I've always been very suspicious of 'dark energy'. How can a source of energy be associated with nothingness rather than something. It seems that energy would much more likely be correlated with matter. I have kind of a unique idea. If matter were all getting smaller, at the same rate, it would give the appearance that all matter was accelerating away from each other. If the earth and moon both reduced their size by half, and all the people on earth were halved, and what we use to measure a standard mile was halved, than the distance to the moon would appear to double. Distances to stars and other galaxies would also appear to double, however, if a million miles of space became two million, and a billion miles of space became two billion, it would appear that objects further away were accelerating away faster than things closer. I'm not saying there is no expansion, but when two speeds are combined, they can easily be misinterpreted as one acceleration. This explains dark energy, and if it can be shown that the stars in galaxies were closer together when they were bigger, and that galaxies are in fact blowing apart, we may not need the crutch of dark matter either. This slow shrinking or collapsing of matter at the atomic level may even explain what gravity is. It may sound crazy, but I think this hypothesis stands on equal footing as 'dark energy', which is even crazier in my opinion.