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

Durango Bill's Home Page. With topics that include: 3D end-to-end tour of the Grand Canyon, the origin and formation of the Colorado River, and examples of river systems that cut through mountain ranges instead of taking easier routes around them in Ancestral Rivers of the World. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Jul 22, 2009 - 5 comments

Happy Odd Day! [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue on May 7, 2009 - 42 comments

Joe Palca, a science correspondent for NPR's Morning Edition, was meditating on the best way to convey the magnitude of the world's largest known prime number, 2^43112609-1. He contacted H&FJ at Typography.com to discuss the implications of typesetting a number with more than twelve million digits. Crunching of numbers and fonts ensued.
posted by netbros on Apr 22, 2009 - 21 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

mySQLgame. Naturally, it's an alpha build. [via]
posted by Smart Dalek on Aug 28, 2008 - 33 comments

Find a short wave radio and before long you should be able to tune into The Lincolnshire Poacher - the station plays an introduction comprising part of the eponymous folk tune followed by a robotic female voice reading strings of numbers: listen! So called Numbers Stations have been a mysterious constant of short wave radio for several decades. The Conet Project [previously 1, 2, 3] has made a collection of the recordings available allowing you to listen to "Ready! Ready! 15728", "The Buzzer" (especially mysterious), "Gong Station Chimes", "Magnetic Fields" and many others.... [more inside]
posted by rongorongo on Jun 30, 2008 - 71 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

100 Movies. 100 Quotes. 100 Numbers. If you've got 10 minutes, see how many you can name. I'm hovering around a sure 52.
posted by Stan Chin on May 17, 2007 - 85 comments

In September 2006 the largest known prime number, a 9.8 million digit number, was discovered. If you find one over ten million digits you can win US$100,000 (of which you get to keep $50,000). No maths is required - just download the software and you're away. Warning: it takes about a month to run one primality check so some patience is required. Look out though Cooper and Boone look like they might beat you to it.
posted by meech on Apr 12, 2007 - 35 comments

Blood, guts, and glory in no holds barred MIT number fight.
posted by Alex404 on Feb 3, 2007 - 14 comments

Mysterious number 6174. An excellent recreational math article.
posted by fatllama on Jan 13, 2007 - 34 comments

Running the numbers on Second Life. With Linden Labs' virtual world being taken seriously by journalists and even banks, it's clear that businesses see profits in virtual worlds. But with over US$800,000 in value changing hands in 24 hours it's becoming hard for even skeptics to deny the profit potential of Second Life. After all it's not just flying penis attacks. Not everyone agrees, however. How many of those residents just log in once, shrug then stay away?
posted by clevershark on Jan 5, 2007 - 52 comments

US Census Bureau Facts & Figures: Holiday Edition says that more than 20 billion letters, packages and cards will be delivered this holiday season and 12 million packages a day through to Christmas Eve. Also check out the Special Edition for comparison data from 1915, 1967 and 2006, the African-American History Month Facts & Features and more data going back to 2000.
posted by fenriq on Dec 15, 2006 - 4 comments

Millions and Millions (Last pixel sold on Sun, 1 Jan 2006) and Millions _(previously) and millions _(previously) and Billions and Billions. How many millions How many Billions? Trillion _(previously). and remember when Google was just a huge number? A Bajillion? And of course a Brazillian.
posted by Monkey0nCrack on Dec 13, 2006 - 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

Roman Numerals and Arithmetic
posted by jack_mo on Aug 19, 2006 - 19 comments

27: About, Conspiracy theories regarding, Photographs of, Weird Al and
posted by Plutor on Apr 18, 2006 - 45 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

Notable properties of specific numbers: From Planck time to milli-millillions and myriads.
posted by Rothko on Feb 5, 2006 - 16 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

Convert the first 10,000 numbers of pi into music. You pick the notes. [via coudal]
posted by btwillig on Jan 4, 2005 - 26 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

What number comes next in the sequence: 10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66, ? How would you do on the GLAT? Page 1, 2, 3 and 4.
posted by limitedpie on Oct 4, 2004 - 28 comments

487 2398 (5617)
(2179 10278 4976)

8823 19 40470
posted by wendell on Jul 25, 2004 - 64 comments

Number Spirals: Coincidences of order. "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."
posted by jjray on Apr 15, 2004 - 16 comments

This post is about nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
posted by moonbird on Sep 29, 2003 - 36 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 (MoTheR ToiLed a PaN 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

The CONET Project. A 4-CD documentary of Shortwave Number Stations, which consist of nothing but an unidentified human voice reciting a long list of seemingly random numbers. Some speculate that these signals are used for espionage by the likes of MOSSAD, the CIA and the former KGB.
There's also a great NPR feature on Number Stations (html page w/links to real audio broadcast)
posted by skwm on Dec 19, 2001 - 18 comments

Never be stuck without numbers ane twa thrie fower fyve sax seiven aicht nyne ten < Count to ten in scottish and over 4000 other languages.
posted by stevridie on Jul 8, 2001 - 8 comments

US Woman Killed in Malaysia "Police believe an American woman whose remains were recently unearthed in Malaysia was used as a human sacrifice in a ritual to obtain lottery numbers from the spirits..." The article didn't say if they won. Not that it matters.
posted by mcsweetie on Jun 26, 2001 - 8 comments

LavaRand ...harnessing the power of Lava Lite® lamps to generate truly random numbers....

That's a bold statement, but who am I to doubt the power of the lava lamp. The mathematical purist may disagree with the "truely random" part, but this geek speak convinced me that LavaRand can handle all my random number needs.
posted by bicyclingfool on Apr 30, 2001 - 1 comment

Mathematician Bums Out Entire Scientific Community His "Omega" number--infinite and incalculable--guts hopes for pure mathematics, physicists' hopes for a Theory of Everything, and is just in general kind of bafflingly cool. Builds on the whole Godel/Turing foundation of hopelessness!
posted by Skot on Mar 15, 2001 - 35 comments

Prime Time. A prime is a whole number divisible only by itself and 1. In Aesthetics of the prime sequence one can hear primes, view primes (here also) and test for primes. Quite interesting and not just for math geeks...
posted by talos on Feb 14, 2001 - 2 comments

Call me Ishmael. Now all I need is a group of blind followers.
posted by alan on Mar 24, 2000 - 0 comments