CHARLIE and AMITA lecture to a group of STUDENTS. On the
screen are various math problems.

                 CHARLIE
          -- P versus NP, Cellular Automata,
          Diffie-Hellman encryption...

                 AMITA
          Linear Diophantine equations,
          Euclid's Orchard, Bayesian
          priors...

                 CHARLIE
          Math, computer science, applied
          physics, have broken out of the
          classroom and unleashed their wrath
          on the world.

Cellular automata are a central example of Stephen Wolfram's science, and of simple programs in the computational universe. Explore some of their amazingly rich and varied behavior here. See Wolfram's rule 30, and then choose more colors to explore rules that have probably never been seen before.

                 CHARLIE
          If by voodoo you mean Point-Pattern
          Matching and Line Detection, yes.

Pattern recognition algorithms are used to decide, for example, if a certain fish is salmon or sea bass, given the fish's width and lightness (Duda, 2000). Pattern recognition is the process of examining a pattern (e.g., the given width-lightness measurements) and assigning a class (e.g., salmon or sea bass) using a classifier (e.g., a rule based on the location of a graphical representation of the given sample with respect to other samples of the known class).

Larry notices the videotape date stamp. October 30, 1991.

                 LARRY
          This is the date you've been using?

                 CHARLIE
          Yes. Why?

                 LARRY
          You should be calculating for a new
          moon.
            (points to video)
          See the frame? Nothing visible in
          the sky. The date and time stamp on
          the camera were incorrect.

                 CHARLIE
            (realizing)
          Of course... my dad never set the
          clock on his VCR, either. LED
          flashed 12:00 am for five years.
            (then)
          I need to look up --

                 LARRY
          January 15th, February 14th, March
          16th, April 14th, ditto for May,
          June 12th, July 11th, August 10th,
          September 8th, October 7th,
          November and December... the 6th.

                 CHARLIE
          I'm glad you're back, Larry.

The Moon goes through a cycle of phases approximately every 29.5 days. The Moon orbits the Earth about every 27.3 days, but the same relative positions of the Moon, Earth, and Sun occur less often. The reason for the discrepancy is that while the Moon orbits the Earth, the Earth is also moving in its orbit around the Sun.