The inventor of safety glass

Edouard Benedictus (1879-1930)

Edouard Benedictus was a historical French badass whose name I did not know until recently. Given that he was skilled as a chemist and painter as well as a bookbinder and fabric designer (interesting), I think he qualifies as a polymath. If your method of discovering the world is through Google, you would have likely seen no association with M. Benedictus apart from his paintings and design of patterns.

However, Benedictus was the accidental inventor of laminated glass in 1903. He dropped a flask whose interior had been stained with cellulose nitrate. When it fell to the floor, the flask did shatter, but it retained its structure because of the support provided from the plastic material. He was inspired by this incident to create a composite glass material in 1909, chiefly for safer automobiles. Its first widespread use was in goggles of gas masks during WWI, and it became widely adopted on automobiles in the 1930s. The design principle is a layer of plastic between two separate layers of glass, and some sort of heat treating.

It's not such a bad thing that today he is only known for his art, because it's not altogether unattractive. I am as far from an artist as any man but I do like his paintings. They have some kind of heady, idealized Art Deco style about them. I like that. I also like liberal use of warm colors and sharp contrasts that came in the 20th century; to me Impressionist art looks like someone's dunked it in a pond for a few hours. In the latter half of the 20th century art no longer seems approachable or digestible; artists are vain and seem unconcerned with how everyday people can understand their work.

Oh, sorry for the tangent. I found out about this man in searching online for who was responsible for the invention of laminated glass. Laminated glass saved my life earlier this year when driving a rental Hyundai Sonata in Tennessee. I was witness to spontaneous disintegration of an eighteen wheeler's tire, a piece of which bounced off the road surface and struck my windshield dead center. It punched a long slit-shaped hole into it, but I was hit with nothing but loose glass. My terrified dog, in a carrier on the passenger seat, escaped with some glass debris in his fur. The windshield shattered in the area of the impact, but because of the modern design of laminated glass, it buckled inwards noticeably because of the plastic sandwich construction. It's just conjecture, and maybe the size of the hole doesn't reflect it, but it was quite a big chunk of rubber that impacted the Hyundai, and I think it would have caused mortal injury if it had passed through the glass unmolested.

The ending was incredibly fortuitous, since the truck driver accepted responsibility and put me up for the night in a local hotel; his wife actually lived 30 miles away (how many truckers are ever in this situation) and she picked him up so he got to spend the night at home with his kids. I spoke with an insurance adjuster the next morning, but I lost no sleep over the crash since I had purchased Hertz's damage waiver and the issue was therefore between that company and the insurance company. Hertz dropped off another car the same morning and I was on the road with barely any time lost. Lovely! Thank you, Edouard Benedictus.

What the hell do Jains eat?

Adherents of Jainism subscribe to a principle of non-violence so open-ended that I am struggling to think of any carbon-based life that is available for their consumption. Jains, for example, refuse to consume beer or yogurt on the basis of the microorganisms that inhabit it, or eat food stored overnight, to avoid harming the bacteria that have grown in it. The general trend of the Jain diet is lacto-vegetarianism, but with some strange prohibitions on many vegetables, and with the community divided on the acceptability of dairy products.

The following is an incomplete list of foods that Jains cannot consume:

1. Meat
2. Eggs
3. Cabbage, because it is a root plant which is killed by uprooting it
4. Potatoes, for the same reason
5. Yeast
6. Beer
7. Wine
8. Vinegar
9. Gelatin
10. Garlic
11. Mushrooms
12. Fruits that bleed a milky sap when cut
13. Beansprouts
14. Carrots
15. Turnips
16. Any food item that has been prepared the previous day (it must be thrown out)
17. Onions (Oh my God no)
18. Water that has not been filtered in a traditional way
19. Rennet (used in the production of some cheeses)
20. Honey, on the basis that it involves violence towards bees to collect (????)
21. Food cooked at night because it must be done by artificial light, which attracts and may kill insects (?!?!). Jains take a vow to never cook food after sundown for this reason.

Some (but not all) Jains follow even stricter observations, in addition to strict veganism, and abstain from the following:

1. All cheeses
2. Milk
3. Vegetable greens, on the basis of pain to the plant when plucking the leaves
4. Fruit which is bright red, giving the appearance of meat, like apples, tomatoes, and watermelon

Holy fricking God. No meat or booze or potatoes. Not even onions or apples or honey. This is way beyond vegetarianism or veganism. This is like an intentional abstinence from everything that has flavor. If I end up in Hell, it will be something like this. I'd jump in front of a bus if I felt like I had to live that way.

How can you get an average of numbers which are secret?

This is one of the more "blue sky" questions posed in the Gamesman section of IEEE Potentials, Vol. 31, No. 4 for August 2012. I like this little magazine very much and it comes free with membership in the IEEE, at least for students. All EE students should join IEEE as soon as possible.

Seven employees are in a meeting room and the topic of conversation turns to salaries. Each employee would like to know how his/her salary compares to the average but, at the same time, does not want to violate the company policy that prohibits disclosing salaries. What strategy can the employees use to get the information they want?

I did not think at length although it seemed interesting to me. My initial theory was that it could be done by some form of obfuscation with multipliers. Each employee could pick a different random number, say 65 or 213, by which to multiply their salary and then write it down as an unmanageable fractional representation that could not be estimated off the top of the head by anyone present. Then one of them could feed the sum of the fractional quantities inline into his or her TI-89 and without reducing the fractions (since this is the data to be obscured), calculate the average of them and record it. The original fractional values on a piece of paper can be shredded. The security of this comes in the fact that the calculator is the only thing that will consider the un-obscured salary figures, since none of the employees will see the numbers long enough to reduce it in their heads.

The magazine's solution might be more secure than mine: The first employee can add his salary to an arbitrary number, then whisper the sum to the second employee. The second can then add her salary and whisper it to the third employee, and so on. At the end, the seventh employee can whisper the total to the first employee, who can then subtract the arbitrary number he chose initially and divide by seven to obtain an average.