Tumblr's $1.1 Billion price-tag instinctively seems very high to most of us, but without context, numbers this huge are often
literally unfathomable to the masses. To help readers gain perspective on the huge numbers commonly tossed around by the media, researcher Glen Chiacchieri has
created Dictionary of Numbers, a Google Chrome extension that automatically adds context to huge numbers printed in the web pages that you read.
[more inside]
posted by schmod
on May 20, 2013 -
50 comments
Numberphile is a website containing short videos (approx. 5-10 min.) about numbers and stuff. Mathematicians and physicists play around with the tools of their trade and explain things in simple, clear language. Learn things you didn't know you were interested in! Find out why
493-7775 is a pretty cool phone number! What's the significance of
42, anyway? What the heck is a
vampire number? Why does Pac-Man have only
255 screens?
Suitable for viewing by everyone from intelligent and curious middle-schoolers to math-impaired adults. Browse their YouTube channel
here. (
Via)
posted by BitterOldPunk
on Dec 29, 2012 -
20 comments
The world record for
Flash Anzan was broken this year at the 2012 All Japan Soroban [abacus] Championship. Competitors in Flash Anzan sum up 15 3-digit numbers that are displayed in turn within a set time. The record is now 1.70 seconds, which means that each number is displayed for just over 0.1s. Here is a video of a "slow"
1.85 seconds seconds where the numbers are barely readable.
[more inside]
posted by milkb0at
on Nov 2, 2012 -
31 comments
What is the smallest prime? "It seems that the number two should be the obvious answer, and today it is, but it was not always so. There were times when and mathematicians for whom the numbers one and three were acceptable answers. To find the first prime, we must also know what the first positive integer is. Surprisingly, with the definitions used at various times throughout history, one was often not the first positive integer (some started with two, and a few with three). In this article, we survey the history of the primality of one, from the ancient Greeks to modern times. We will discuss some of the reasons definitions changed, and provide several examples. We will also discuss the last significant mathematicians to list the number one as prime."
posted by escabeche
on Sep 18, 2012 -
61 comments
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
