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CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. - The official countdown for Saturday's scheduled launch of the space shuttle Discovery got under way Wednesday amid forecasts of threatening weather that could cause a delay.
The shuttle, which will carry seven astronauts for a 12-day mission to the international space station, is scheduled to blast off at 2:48 p.m Saturday, the first day of a launch window that extends through July 19.
At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.
At a morning press conference, Attorney general John Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.
"Al-gebra is a fearsome cult,", Ashcroft said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like "x" and "y" and refer to themselves as "unknowns", but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country.
"As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every triangle," Ashcroft declared.
When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.
"I am gratified that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. Murky statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence," the President said, adding: "Under the circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make our point, and draw the line."
President Bush warned, "These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex."
Attorney General Ashcroft said, "As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is uncertainty of: though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks."
The theoretical statistical community has long been aware of the many problems associated with the concept of maximum ljkelihood estimation. In fact, Sir Ronald Fisher's 1922 revival of the maximum likelihood method is seen by many to have been a historical retrogression since the method had been considered and rejected years earlier by none other than Carl Friedrich Gauss. The popularity of maximum likelihood estimation today is due primarily, in the view of Le Cam, to Fisher's "propaganda." In fact, Le Cam states that "In view of Fisher's vast influence, it is perhaps not surprising that the presumed superiority of the method is still for many an article of faith promoted with religious fervor. This state of affairs remains, in spite of a long accumulation of evidence to the effect that maximum likelihood estimators are often useless, or grossly misleading." It is precisely this evidence with which this paper is concerned, since, judging by its popularity, many of the problems associated with the maximum likelihood method appear to have been overlooked by many in the area of information sciences and systems. We begin with a definition of the maximum likelihood method. More...
is a four-dimensional Rubik's cube. It is an exact analogy in four dimensions to the original plastic three dimensional puzzle. A five dimensional version is available . These are Rubik's cubes of the form 3^d, with the original popular puzzle being 3^3. We label the puzzles like this because they are a d-dimensional cube broken into 3^d smaller pieces or "cubies" of the same dimension. For example, the 3D cube has 3^3 or 27 total 3-dimensional cubies. Each of the d-dimensional cubies could be considered to have its faces covered by stickers of one smaller (d-1) dimension. But each cubie also only exposes a subset of its stickers to the "outside", meaning these are the stickers you could see if you lived and operated in d dimensions. We can use the number of exposed stickers as a classification of cubie types. For the 3D case, the 27 cubies are broken into 4 types, those that expose 0 stickers, 1 sticker ("centers"), 2 stickers ("edges"), or 3 stickers ("corners"). Each sticker on a given cubie has its own color, so we could also call these 1-colored, 2-colored, etc. pieces.
