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
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
