Wednesday, February 27, 2008
I wonder if they will take back his Oscar?
Or, Global Whawassatagain?
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile—the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
You can see the data for yourself here, but the amount of cooling over the last year has wiped out an entire century’s worth of warming.
You can expect the anti-human types out there to start screaming “OMG we’re gonna freeze to death, the government’s gotta DO SOMETHING!” any second now…
Heads up, y’all
This is your official notification.
I will recap the rules, as well as the general rules of mathematics you’re gonna need.
There will be twenty trivia questions, the answer to which will be a positive integer. That means no negative numbers, decimals or fractions among the answers. Some of the questions are easy, some are tougher. None are impossible. None of them are in the least ambiguous or dependent upon a poll, election, or opinion.
The questions will be numbered with a capital letter from ‘A’ to ‘V’, excepting the letters ‘I’ and ‘O’, since I wished no confusion between those letters and the numbers ‘1’ and ‘0’. This also leaves the letter ‘x’ free to be used as the multiplication indicator. There are going to be no exponents in the equation itself, nor any roots. But you will be using the major four operations (Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division), plus parenthetical expressions.
The letters are then placed as variables into a equation which will be published at the same time as the questions. You must solve the equation and arrive at the correct answer.
Your submission should include all twenty answers, and the answer to the equation. You can either post just the final answer here (if you got the correct answer to that equation, you had to have gotten all of the questions correct as well), or post your attempts to my e-mail address (Dee Are Emm Double-You Ess Tea Are At gmail Dot com) if you aren’t sure and don’t wish to announce that fact to your competitors. This opens up the contest to the lurkers out there, too, hint hint....... 
First correct submission receives $125, second receives $75, and Show pays $50. (No bonus for a perfect score this time, since that’s kind of the point...) If no one has gotten the correct answer, the person with the most correct answers to the trivia questions will win, with second and third determined similarly and any ties broken by earliest submission. Multiple submissions are permitted, but only the entry received last will count.
Contest starts Monday morning at 8 am Pacific and runs until we have three winners or until Monday the 10th, whichever comes first, so vote early and vote often!
Okay, I’ve got it
And yet, at the same time, I’m stumped and looking for suggestions from you folks.
See, I have the questions - twenty of them. I have the formula drawn up, with all the variables in place and I know the answer. I just don’t have a clue how I’m going to post that formula here (or anywhere else on the web) so that the precision needed to get the right answer will come through. (No, it isn’t that complicated, but if it shows up as a ‘C’ instead of a opening parenthesis, you WILL get it wrong.)
I’m halfway tempted to just scrawl it on a sheet of typing paper and post a photograph of it.
But that seems like… cheating, somehow.
Suggestions?
(Once I figure this out, we can get this show on the road and start giving money away again, so don’t be reticent.)
UPDATE: Never mind. I’ve got it.