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....
posted on Jun 30, 2008 - View this thread

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]
posted on May 16, 2008 - View this thread

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 on Jul 10, 2007 - View this thread

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 on May 17, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Apr 12, 2007 - View this thread

Blood, guts, and glory in no holds barred MIT number fight.
posted on Feb 3, 2007 - View this thread

Mysterious number 6174. An excellent recreational math article.
posted on Jan 13, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Jan 5, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Dec 15, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Dec 13, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Nov 24, 2006 - View this thread

Roman Numerals and Arithmetic
posted on Aug 19, 2006 - View this thread

27: About, Conspiracy theories regarding, Photographs of, Weird Al and
posted on Apr 18, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Apr 15, 2006 - View this thread

Notable properties of specific numbers: From Planck time to milli-millillions and myriads.
posted on Feb 5, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Nov 11, 2005 - View this thread

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 on Sep 30, 2005 - View this thread

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 on Aug 1, 2005 - View this thread

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

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 on Oct 31, 2004 - View this thread

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 on Oct 4, 2004 - View this thread

487 2398 (5617)
(2179 10278 4976)

8823 19 40470
posted on Jul 25, 2004 - View this thread

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

This post is about nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
posted on Sep 29, 2003 - View this thread

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 on May 13, 2003 - View this thread

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 on Apr 30, 2003 - View this thread

"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 on Apr 15, 2003 - View this thread

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 on Nov 22, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Jul 16, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Apr 25, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Apr 15, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Feb 11, 2002 - View this thread

555-LIST Insane Collection of 555 phone numbers from TV-Movies-cartoons. 555-6542 Rev. Lovejoy The Simpsons 555-4044 Tanners residence ALF
posted on Jan 12, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Dec 19, 2001 - View this thread

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 on Jul 8, 2001 - View this thread

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 on Jun 26, 2001 - View this thread

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 on Apr 30, 2001 - View this thread

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 on Mar 15, 2001 - View this thread

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 on Feb 14, 2001 - View this thread

Call me Ishmael. Now all I need is a group of blind followers.
posted on Mar 24, 2000 - View this thread