October 27, 2017 at 12:56AM

Today I Learned: 1) In 2004, Equatorial Guinea was ruled by a dictator named Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. As dictators go, he ranks somewhere in the range from "brutal" to "godawful". I don't know a ton of details about Mbasogo's rule, but I *do* know that he a) got into power by killing his Uncle (who, admittedly, was also pretty awful), b) is, officially, the country's god, with a direct permanent line of communication to the Almighty, and is bestowed with the magical ability to kill without going to hell for it, and c) regularly comes up on lists of "worst African dictator". So... not a good guy, not a good government. Anyway, in 2004, a bunch of London financial types with a lot of money decided they'd had enough of Mbasogo... existing. So they hired an army of 64 mercenaries (mostly ex-South-African) and all the equipment they'd need to take out Mbasogo, and asked them to do just that. The... plot? Job? War? Whatever it was, it ended before it really started. There's direct and indirect evidence that the US, UK, and Spanish governments may have known about the planned attack, but it was the *Zimbabwean* government that stopped them by arresting their plane while it was in a Zimbabwean airport. The soldiers were jailed, tortured, and at least one has died. A few of the financiers were fined and jailed for a few years; others have gotten away without a charge sticking. 2) ...how to take jacket measurements. Roughly. Better than I knew before, anyway. 3) Andy Halleran and I were curious about who invented Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), the modern scientist's Favorite Algorithm™, so we looked it up. It looks like MCMC was first published in 1953 out of Los Alamos. The authors are Nicholas Metropolis*, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, Augusta Teller, and Edward Teller, but there are at least a couple of claims that Nicholas and Augusta didn't really do anything on the paper. The more general Monte Carlo class of algorithms seems to have been quietly invented by Enrico Fermi, but he didn't publish it and nobody heard about it. Later on, Stanislaw Ulam (of cellular automaton and thermonuclear bomb fame) and... *sigh*. John von Neumann. Of *course* it was Johnvon Neumann. Anyway, they reinvented Monte Carlo methods while working on neutron penetration of radiation shielding. They turned out to be critical for simulations used to build the bomb, and, later, just about everything. * Of Metropolis-Hastings algorithm fame. Hastings was the first author of the *second* critical paper on MCMC, that generalized the first paper's strategy from one particularly tricky integral to functions-in-general.