Saturday, October 13, 2007

Ig, Excel and Ricoh

The Ig nobel prize is out again. (So it's another year already!) Bizzare things seem to happen more often around this time, from Excel believing 65535 = 100000 to quantum mechanics in a printer ad...

The Excel issue is rather puzzling to me. We all know about 65535 but why would it become a nice number in base 10? Btw, you would expect people who post on the MSDN blog know what they are saying, but there are a few who apparently do not know what floating point numbers are...

The quantum mechanics ad is even more weird. Ok you like some deep-science-sounding stuff, but that particular quotation, or anything remotely similar to it, is not something you can find in a common quantum mechanics textbook. Do the ad producers actually know about Scott Aaronson and his lectures?

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