NumberADay -
Every working day, we post a number and offer a selection of that number’s properties.
posted by Wolfdog
on Jan 11, 2012 -
30 comments
"
Michel de Montaigne, whose essays transformed Western consciousness and literature, was not capable of solving basic arithmetic problems. And most other people would not be able to do so either, if not for the invention of decimal notation by an unknown mathematician in India 1500 years ago."
The Greatest Mathematical Discovery? (
expanded pdf) a paper written for the US Dept. of Energy makes this assertion based in part on the work of Georges Ifrah. [
via]
[more inside]
posted by jessamyn
on Aug 26, 2010 -
44 comments
Veronique de Rugy, NRO contributor and George Mason fellow, says her
research indicates that stimulus funding was disproportionately directed towards Democratic congressional districts. Nate Silver
begs to disagree. De Rugy responds
here; Silver responds
here. Others say that this is a model "for the quick, effective peer-review that the internet facilitates." Perhaps this is a
new model for peer review?
posted by lalex
on Apr 3, 2010 -
27 comments
Late Thursday Flash Fun:
Dropsum V2 is like a mix of sudoku and tetris and some other kind of block game. Much mindless fun to be had...
posted by schyler523
on Jul 30, 2009 -
11 comments
HotBits is an Internet resource that brings
genuine random numbers,
generated by a process fundamentally governed by the inherent uncertainty in the quantum mechanical laws of nature, directly to your computer in a variety of forms.
HotBits are generated by timing successive pairs of radioactive decays
detected by a Geiger-Müller tube interfaced to a computer. (Warning: random sounds.)
posted by parudox
on Feb 9, 2009 -
41 comments
The day after a senator from Illinois, is elected president, the Pick 3 lottery in Illinois
comes up 666. It's
happened before, notably in Pennsylvania (12 times, including one time as
part of a scam and once earlier this year,
in Maryland. Some are jokingly (I hope) calling him
the antichrist as a result. Others, namely numbers geeks like me, are spending their lunch hours looking up the history of lotteries drawing triple numbers and sharing it with MetaFilter.
posted by sjuhawk31
on Nov 6, 2008 -
70 comments
On May 13, security advisories published by
Debian and
Ubuntu revealed that, for over a year, their OpenSSL libraries have had a major flaw in their
CSPRNG, which is used by
key generation functions in many widely-used applications, which caused the "random" numbers produced to be extremely predictable.
[lolcat summary] [more inside]
posted by finite
on May 16, 2008 -
81 comments
The Prime Game is not really much of a game, but it
is a neat & little-known fact about the decimal representation of prime numbers.
posted by Wolfdog
on Jul 10, 2007 -
24 comments
According to this site - More than 700 Trillion BEEDIES or BIRI are smoked annually
- Indians smoke more than one trillion bidis every year.
- An experienced worker can roll 2,000 a day.
Step inside and learn more about these unrealistic stats!
posted by joelf
on Nov 24, 2006 -
63 comments
You know about numbers, right? Natural numbers, rational numbers, integers, real numbers, complex numbers, prime numbers, funny numbers, illegal numbers. Illegal numbers? Well, there’s the
illegal numbers game. Apparently
69 is illegal in Virginia, among other places. But did you know about
illegal prime numbers? My brain is getting number by the day. (via digg)
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium
on Apr 15, 2006 -
27 comments
Significance of numbers. Not to be confused with the concept of "significant figures," this page lists the significance of numbers 0 through 1000.
See! "2 is the only even prime."
Hear! "24 is the largest number divisible by all numbers less than its square root."
Thrill! "3367 is the smallest number which can be written as the difference of 2 cubes in 3 ways." Whoa!
posted by scarabic
on Nov 11, 2005 -
43 comments
Not Lost After All Given recent posts
proving and
disproving various meanings of the ongoing numbers references on the television program Lost, I figured that some of you would be interested that a person over on Flickr seems to have a much better explanation: they're simply geographic coordinates.
posted by luriete
on Sep 30, 2005 -
67 comments
Gematria! Mentioned in
this post in the context of a "good or evil" algorithm, gematria (גימטריה) is actually Jewish numerology, assigning values to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and establishing mystical correspondences. It's basic to kabbalistic works like the
Zohar, and you can get detailed analysis
here. But we both know what you really want to do is plug words into a text box and get the result instantly, right?
Here you go. And to start you off, METAFILTER = 299 [מטאילטר] according to the traditional system; according to
The Gematria of Nothing, it's 31. Take your pick.
posted by languagehat
on Aug 1, 2005 -
13 comments
More on arithmetic in the Amazon The 10/15 issue of Science has the official publication of Peter Gordon's work on numerical cognition among the Pirahã, and a companion article by Pierre Pica et al. on similar research among another Amazonian tribe, the Mundurukú. What with the U.S. election and the discovery of H. Floresiensis, this is not getting nearly as a much play as the pre-publication back in August of Peter Gordon's work.
Brian Butterworth has an
piece in the Guardian about both articles, and I've put some links, quotes and diagrams
here.
Compared to the reports on the Pirahã, the Mundurukú people, language, and experiments are all somewhat different, although the conclusions are broadly similar.
posted by myl
on Oct 31, 2004 -
19 comments
Top Ten Favorite Numbers Conceptual artist
Claude Closky's most recent smart art. Vote for your favorite numbers and, based on popularity, 4 becomes number 1, 7 becomes number 2, etc. They change all the time. Closky did another great piece, published by a book (available from
Printed Matter) whereby he simply organized numbers 1-100 alphabetically, thereby changing their value.
posted by ubueditor
on May 13, 2003 -
27 comments
MeTaFiLTeR = 318514 The Phonetic Numerals system provides a convenient way to remember long strings of numbers. It's really simple: the system replaces the numbers 0-9 with the symbols
S,
T,
N,
M,
R,
L,
J,
K,
F and
P (the strikethoughs indicate the difference between the symbol and the letter that it takes the place of). Take a long number (3.1415926, for example), convert it into
Phonetic Numerals (
MTRTLPNJ), then come up with a phrase using those letters (
Mo
The
R Toi
Led a
Pa
N Job.) See? Easy!
posted by me3dia
on Apr 30, 2003 -
21 comments
"Modern scientists have known about
synesthesia since 1880, when
Francis Galton, a cousin of
Charles Darwin, published a paper in Nature on the phenomenon. But most have brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (
LSD and
mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity. About four years ago, however, we and others began to uncover brain processes that could account for synesthesia. "
This article from Scientific American seems to be turning heads around the Psychology Department at U of M [Michigan]. It's got me going too.
I've seen real connections between color and sound before, stone sober. Could there be something to all this?
posted by phylum sinter
on Apr 15, 2003 -
23 comments
Counting in base-14. "Just because
we use a decimal system doesn't mean everyone does. "The teseradecimal lifestyle is thus not just a way of life. It is not only a method of regulating marriage, birth, succession, and other aspects of village life. It is also a theory of history where genesis, finality, and apocalypse are laid out on the space between the pinky and the nose."
Alex Golub illuminates the counting system of the Ipili tribe of Papua New Guinea, in response to much
discussion of the ethnomathmatics at Leuschke.org. [more inside]
posted by me3dia
on Nov 22, 2002 -
21 comments
Cheney in Numbers. It's hard to spin hard cold numbers. Here's a few:
*Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635
Increase in government contracts while Cheney led Halliburton: 91%
*Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One hundred MILLION dollars)
*Number of the seven official US "State Sponsors of Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7
*Pages of Energy Plan documents Cheney refused to give congressional investigators: 13,500
*Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney presidential campaign: $1,800,000
I
also loved this quote:
"Cheney and Bush want privacy for their conversations, but not for anyone else's." --Tony Mauro in USA Today, Feb. 27, 2002
posted by nofundy
on Jul 16, 2002 -
25 comments
ð = "moderately pinocle mollify backup ammonium freshen chromium famine."
Or 3.141592653589793238462643383279...whichever is easier for you to remember.
Mnemesis tries to make it easier for you to memorize numbers by having you memorize words instead.
posted by Su
on Apr 25, 2002 -
11 comments
Can you stump the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences? Every identifiable sequence known to man, including:
Name: Busy Beaver problem: maximal number of steps that an n-state Turing machine can make on an initially blank tape before eventually halting.
Comment: The sequence grows faster than any computable function of n, and so is non-computable.
Keywords: hard,huge,nice,nonn,bref
If your sequence does not appear there, you might want to try the
Super Seeker.
posted by vacapinta
on Apr 15, 2002 -
9 comments
The Secret Lives of Numbers A couple of programmers took it upon themselves to use "a popular search engine"(just say it: Google) to determine the relative popularity of every integer up to one million. Even if you just take it as a big case of overthink, it's kind of fun to play with the Java-based visual representation, which provides some of the terms associated with the numbers as you click on them.
[Short warning inside; read before visiting.]
posted by Su
on Feb 11, 2002 -
20 comments
555-LIST Insane Collection of 555 phone numbers from TV-Movies-cartoons.
555-6542 Rev. Lovejoy The Simpsons
555-4044 Tanners residence ALF
posted by Niahmas
on Jan 12, 2002 -
4 comments
