Pipe Logic "Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them..." Modeling transistors and logic gates using Unix pipes.
posted by bitmage
on Jan 23, 2012 -
22 comments
Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S.* is a fictional character in a series of detective short stories and two novels by Jacques Futrelle. Van Dusen was also known as "The Thinking Machine" for his application of logic to any and all situations. Most of
Futrelle's stories are online. Futrelle himself
went down with the Titanic.
posted by twoleftfeet
on Sep 15, 2011 -
20 comments
"Perhaps twenty or thirty people in England may be expected to read this book." G.H. Hardy's review of Whitehead and Russell's
Principia Mathematica, published in the Times Literary Supplement 100 years ago last week. "The time has passed when a philosopher can afford to be ignorant of mathematics, and a little perseverance will be well rewarded. It will be something to learn how many of the spectres that have haunted philosophers modern mathematics has finally laid to rest."
posted by escabeche
on Sep 12, 2011 -
29 comments
Bret Victor on WorryDream The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
When most people speak of Math, what they have in mind is more its mechanism than its essence. This "Math" consists of assigning meaning to a set of symbols, blindly shuffling around these symbols according to arcane rules, and then interpreting a meaning from the shuffled result. The process is not unlike casting lots.
posted by naight
on Jul 24, 2011 -
19 comments
Impasse is a simple flash-based puzzle game that involves getting your object from point A to B.
Notes:
Levels you complete can be scrolled through using "x" to move to the next level and "d" to return the level select button to the first level.
The browser saves your progress, so you can close your tab/browser and return to it later.
posted by lemuring
on Jul 11, 2011 -
19 comments
Interested in teaching yourself some statistics? Here is an excellent online and interactive
statistics textbook developed at UC Berkeley, and also used at CUNY, UCSC, SJSU, and Bard. Here is the
syllabus for the course at Berkeley. And here are some insightful
reflections from the professor on developing Berkeley's first fully approved online course.
posted by AceRock
on Aug 9, 2010 -
18 comments
Since 1980,
Nikoli^ has been in the business of creating
many different variations of logic puzzles (such as the very popular Sudoku and Kakuro). Unfortunately, as they're stationed in Tokyo, their magazine is unavailable to most Americans.
Luckily, over the decades they've inspired quite a few people to make their own puzzles and variants, including:
posted by flatluigi
on Feb 17, 2010 -
12 comments
Apparently there's at least a 51% chance of God's existence. It starts out 50/50, like with pets. You have, say, either a dog or a cat. It's a 50/50 chance that it's one or the other, just like it's 50/50 that there's a God or not. Well, we exist. You exist. The earth exists. That nudges it up to 51%. If I understand this
youtube gentleman. Hilarious exercise in smug delivery of ironclad logic.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders
on Apr 2, 2009 -
126 comments
Friday Flash Fun*:
Конструктор: Engineer of the People, in which you are an engineer working in a top-secret semiconductor facility called H3, designing top-secret integrated circuits based on specifications provided to you.
*For certain values of 'fun'
posted by daniel_charms
on Mar 27, 2009 -
36 comments
In a breathless, passionate, yet level-headed 15 part series, YouTube user, paleontologist, ex-Christian, and potential
Space Coyote impersonator
AronRa presents an uncommonly well-written and presented argument against what he identifies as the 14 "Fundamental Falsehoods of Creationism."
[more inside]
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism
on Jan 13, 2009 -
57 comments
Some are calling it the "Kindle Killer". (Demo launch video
at engadget.) Plastic Logic's new e-reader, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, does promise to offer a lot that Kindle and most other other popular e-readers don't, like a larger display, big enough to provide a newspaper or magazine layout; touch-based markup and annotation; the ability to read standard documents and other file types without conversion; (promised) Wi-Fi connectivity (including the ability to transfer documents between readers); and last but not least,
a screen display that you can hit with a shoe, and isn't that something we've all been waiting for during these tense times?
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Sep 13, 2008 -
85 comments
A mindbending logic puzzle. A thousand people on the island, 900 brown-eyed and 100 blue-eyed; anyone who learns their own eye color must kill themself the next day; a visitor mentions that there is a blue-eyed person on the island; what happens? Nothing, you say, because they already know that? Wrong. Further details at the Terry Tao post linked above, but don't scroll down below the boxed description unless you want hints and/or spoilers.
[more inside]
posted by languagehat
on Feb 15, 2008 -
390 comments
A graphical dissertation of
Mims' "
This Is Why I'm Hot".
Consider the reasoning, first, of just "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly":
Mims is hot because he's fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one's being fly? "You ain't 'cause you not" would seem to clear that up:
It would appear that fly and hot are interchangable. If you are one, you are both; if you aren't at least one, you are neither.
posted by four panels
on Apr 23, 2007 -
33 comments
The
Einstein Puzzle by Flowix Games is based on an old DOS game called Sherlock, which, in turn, was based on
Einstein's (Supposed) Puzzle (
Previously). No, it's not Friday yet, and no, it's not Flash. It's a really logical game, and it's really damn hard. I've only won once, and that was within the first few times of playing. If you find it hard to figure out what's going on, read
THIS... It helped me to figure out EXACTLY what the hell was going on. The authors are Russian, and the help in the game may only serve to confuse you. ;) It's free, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I'm hooked on it, Dammit. :D
posted by Vamier
on Mar 22, 2007 -
32 comments
"In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began
a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system - called the
“Logic Alphabet” - in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be
manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic."
posted by vacapinta
on Apr 17, 2006 -
30 comments
