I recently found the Matasano Crypto Challenges and eagerly set about solving the first one - converting a hex string to base64. My code can be found here.

…And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As mentioned in the About page the name of the blog comes from a passage in The Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

I recently discovered a neat problem while looking at job applications. From the Sparx Deck, the problem is as follows:

A basketball player decides to spend an afternoon practicing free throws and recording her performance. Over the first hour, her scoring percentage is less than 75%, but by the end of the session, her overall scoring percentage for the day is more than 75%. Is it necessarily true that at some moment during the session her scoring percentage was exactly 75%?