Last week’s guess-the-number contest for my spare copy of Massive by Ian Sample generated over 150 comments. So, who won? Well, I said at the time:
I am thinking of an integer between 0 and 1000 (inclusive). The person who comes closest to guessing the number by midnight Eastern time Friday, November 5 wins a copy of Massive.
The number I was thinking of when I typed that was 137. Which, interestingly, was guess by two nearly simultaneous comments, numbers 10 and 11, by Nathan and Derek R. Clearly, these two know their physicist psychology– 137 is a weirdly important number in physics, as it’s close to one over the fine structure constant, which is the key measure of the strength of the electromagnetic field in QED.
If the two guesses had been spaced more widely, I would be happy to declare one person the winner, and leave it at that. Given that the one-minute discrepancy between the timestamps on those comments is just as likely to be due to the vagaries of the comment system here as an actual difference in posting times, though, I’m less comfortable sending one of them home empty-handed.
I can’t give away both copies of Massive without reading one first, which will take a while, but I can offer a consolation prize, namely one of the several other review copies I have received but will never get around to reading. I’ll provide a list in email to the winner(s) later.
If this contest whetted your appetite for winning fabulous prizes, I would remind you that there’s still a bit more than 24 hours left for you to Tuckerize your pet in the forthcoming sequel to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by donating to one of the worthy projects in my DonorsChoose challenge. At this point, a donation of $400 will claim the top spot, and a donation of any size will get you entered into the random drawing for a signed book and a cameo for the pet of your choice. Just make a donation via my challenge page, and forward the confirmation email to the address in the Contact tab above.