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Category Archives: math
Christmas Chaos
This is a creative way to create fractal images using Christmas ornaments. It’s a little easier to see the images of the camera lens in this photo. Look at the three Cantor sets formed by the number of reflections of … Continue reading
Posted in math, photography, science/nature
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Verizon Doesn’t Know Dollars From Cents
This is a disturbingly funny call between George Vaccaro and Verizon, trying to teach them basic math. From Slashdot: Blogger George Vaccaro recently had a problem with his Verizon based on an unfortunate miscommunication of currency. The crux of the … Continue reading
Nullity – the Nonsense Number
Following the astounding claim that a professor has “solved” the problem of division by zero, and inexplicably reported by BBC as seemingly legitimate news (imagine my head exploding at this point), here’s an article describing the obvious problems with the … Continue reading
Posted in math, odd
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A new way to multiply
This may not be that practical, but it is an interesting way to do multiplication visually by using intersecting lines. Video (via reddit)
Posted in math, odd
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Extended Warranties are for Suckers
You would think this is pretty obvious yet people keep throwing their money into these things. Someone’s done the math and my hunch was right. A New York Times article titled The Word on Warranties: Don’t Bother expains why: They’re … Continue reading
Posted in economics, math
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World’s hardest Sudoku puzzle
Supposedly, this is one of the hardest Sudoku puzzles to solve. It’s times like these that the internet makes me most happy. When respectable online publications publish entertaining and interesting stories about the world’s hardest Sudoku puzzle, you’d at least … Continue reading
Posted in games, math, puzzles
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Pathological Programming: The Worlds Smallest Programming Language
If you think the Brainfuck programming language is twisted, how about a language with only two symbols? For todays dose of pathological programming, we’re going to hit the worlds simplest language. A Turing-complete programming language with exactly two characters, no … Continue reading
Posted in math, programming
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The Extreme Sport of Origami
I can’t even imagine how you would design a folding sequence that takes 40 hours to complete. These days patterns requiring more than 100 steps are common. Some of that competitive acceleration is due to Lang, who transformed the art … Continue reading
Posted in math, science/nature
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Never Say Never
Damn Interesting has an entertaining article on how a girl in high-school proved that you can fold a piece of paper in half twelve times. She did it by calculating exactly how much paper she would need, and then tracking … Continue reading
An Algorithm for Compressing Space and Time
This article presents a significant optimization for Conway’s Game of Life. Making a slow program fast can lead to both joy and frustration. Frequently, the best you can do is a low-level trick to double or maybe quadruple the speed … Continue reading
Posted in games, math, programming
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Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes
Freedom to Tinker has an interesting post on how HDCP could be broken. Every new HDCP device is given two things: a secret vector, and an addition rule. The secret vector is a sequence of 40 secret numbers that the … Continue reading
Posted in math, rights, security, technology
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Octomatics – Time to switch to Octal?
Infoverse has an entertaining proposal to replace the decimal numbering system with the octal system. They’ve come up with new set of digits and a new system for time-measurement. do you think our conventional decimal number system is perfect? if … Continue reading
Posted in funny, math
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Minesweeper is NP-complete!
This article argues that Minesweeper belongs to the class of NP-Complete problems (see “Complexity Classes P and NP” in Wikipedia to brush up on P and NP). My result in the Mathematical Intelligencer states that a decision problem which I … Continue reading
Posted in games, math
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Happy Pi Day!
Happy Pi day! “Written in the USA date format, March 14 is an unofficial celebration for Pi Day derived from the common three-digit approximation for the number Ï€: 3.14.” Digg it.
Posted in math
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The Monty Hall Problem
I came across this oddity while reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. From Wikipedia, the problem can be stated as follows: Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind … Continue reading
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Project Euler
Here is another programming challenge site. This one is specifically geared towards mathematical problems. You can use any programming language you like. The problems are rated according to how many people have already solved a particular problem. The more people … Continue reading
Posted in games, math, programming, web
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