MetaFilter posts tagged with numbers

It's dressed to the nines!

schyler523 — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:54:03 -0800

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...

3D Mapping

netbros — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:44:55 -0800

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. But if geology and 3D mapping isn't your thing, Bill also entertains and informs with his evaluations of creationism and religious cultists, an energy/oil analysis, gaming probability analysis, graph and number theories and applied mathematics. Durango Bill is a busy dude.

Beware of Oddity

Potomac Avenue — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:00:50 -0800

Happy Odd Day! Join the facebook group, win 575 dollars! Previously

The H&FJ Institute for Unapplied Mathematics

netbros — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:27:28 -0800

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.

Genuine random numbers, generated by radioactive decay

parudox — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:46:51 -0800

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.)

Illinois Lottery Draws 666 on Heels of Obama Victory

sjuhawk31 — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:59:15 -0800

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.

Finally, there's a game that just is a database!

Smart Dalek — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:44:05 -0800

mySQLgame. Naturally, it's an alpha build. [via]

¡Atención!", "1234567890"

rongorongo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:31:28 -0800

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.... Nobody will admit to owning or running these stations - but, since the 70s, a small community of followers has been gathering information on them in sites like Spynumbers, in books like Simon Mason's "Secret Signals" and as samples that have made their way into tracks like "Gyroscope" from the Boards of Canada. NPR recorded the spooky "Shortwave Numbers Mystery" and The Washington Post profiled Londoner Akin Fernandez who was behind the Conet CDs. The most credible theory is that the stations are for the benefit of spies (for MI6 in the case of the Lincolnshire Poacher) and that they are broadcasting messages for use with one time pads. In the UK, by the way, you are breaking the law by listening to these transmissions - and, as a spokesperson from the British ministry of defence said (quoted by Wired), "These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are - people shouldn't be mystified by them. They're not, shall we say, for public consumption." That's OK then. Message ends.

15 bits of crypto should be enough for anybody

finite — Fri, 16 May 2008 22:01:42 -0800

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] How bad is it? It's pretty bad. Understand that these keys are used not only for encryption, but also for authentication. The keyspace has been reduced to a mere 32,768 possibilities, and you can already download them all, along with tools to use them. Worse still, in the days before the issue became publicly known, there was a noticeable spike in the number of brute-force attacks on SSH servers, indicating that there has already been significant exploitation of this vulnerability. Partial timeline of events: In May 2006, a bug led to a question which led to the fateful patch being applied to md_rand.c (in Debian's "unstable" development branch). In April 2007, Debian 4.0 "etch" and Ubuntu 7.04 were both released, which was the beginning of the inclusion of the buggy version of OpenSSL in officially-released distributions. The bug remained unfixed through the releases of Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04. On May 7, 2008, the patch to fix the problem was committed to Debian's source repository, and on May 13 the issue was officially disclosed and updated packages were made available to users. (The patch's availability days before public disclosure of the bug appears to be a violation of Debian's policy.) Here are some responses from Debian blogs, and two from an OpenSSL developer.

3 is an odd prime, 5 is an odd prime, 7 is an odd prime, 9 is a very odd prime...

Wolfdog — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 06:34:53 -0800

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.

100 Movies. 100 Quotes. 100 Numbers.

Stan Chin — Thu, 17 May 2007 13:47:20 -0800

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.

Prime Prize

meech — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:57:14 -0800

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.

I wonder if it's in NP?

Alex404 — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 07:43:52 -0800

Blood, guts, and glory in no holds barred MIT number fight.

Operation Kaprekar

fatllama — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 22:19:42 -0800

Mysterious number 6174. An excellent recreational math article.

It may be just a game, but it's serious business.

clevershark — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 20:05:08 -0800

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?

Numbers Give Me A Geek Woody

fenriq — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 11:44:51 -0800

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.

Some Big Numbers

Monkey0nCrack — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:57:18 -0800

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.

Smokin!

joelf — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 21:20:19 -0800

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!

Let's Party Like It's MCMXCIX

jack_mo — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 04:30:40 -0800

Roman Numerals and Arithmetic

XXVII

Plutor — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 08:16:05 -0800

27: About, Conspiracy theories regarding, Photographs of, Weird Al and

You have the right to remain innumerate...

weapons-grade pandemonium — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 12:18:40 -0800

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)

It's all a numbers game...

Rothko — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 14:50:05 -0800

Notable properties of specific numbers: From Planck time to milli-millillions and myriads.

Significant numbers

scarabic — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 14:09:41 -0800

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!

Lost and Found

luriete — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 10:42:29 -0800

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.

Gematria!

languagehat — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 17:57:42 -0800

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.