Jon Cog writes, “For Christmas, mathematician Donald Knuth shared some great geeky fun. He revealed how for the last 57 years, he’s been incorporating the digits of pi into the exercises of his computer programming books — a whopping 1,700 times. And before long his annual ‘Christmas Tree’ lecture ‘had turned into a kind of intellectual funhouse,’ sharing other mind-boggling pi-related miscellanies.”
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Tag: math
I made Wil Wheaton recite the digits of Pi for four minutes, then a fan set it to music
There’s a scene in my novel Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) in which the first 1,000 digits of Pi are featured; when it came time to produce the audiobook edition, poor Wil Wheaton — the narrator — ended up reading out Pi for four solid minutes, with some entirely understandable difficulties. Nick Land set the reading to music, creating quite a delightful little tune!
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Visualizing what happens when you shuffle a deck of cards
Nathan Davis writes, “When you shuffle a deck, it rearranges the order of the cards and I got wondering what that looked like. Continue reading “Visualizing what happens when you shuffle a deck of cards”
Make: a solar hot-dog oven (then learn the science)
Making a solar hot-dog oven is a science fair standby, but JohnW539’s CNC-milled Sundogger Instructable really digs into the classroom portion, drawing on the creator’s experience as a physics/astronomy/computer science prof at Middle Tennessee State University.
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Zero Sum Game: action-packed sf thriller about a ninja hero whose superpower is her incredible math ability
SL Huang got a degree in math from MIT, then became a martial artist, stuntwoman and weapons expert; her debut novel, Zero Sum Game, features an ass-kicking action hero called Cas Russell, who combines all of Huang’s areas of expertise: Russell is a ninja-grade assassination/extraction contractor whose incredible math skills let her calculate the precise angles needed to shoot the bolts out of an armored window as she leaps towards it from an adjacent roof; to time a kick so that it breaks her opponent’s jaw without breaking his neck, or to trace back the path of a sniper’s bullet with eerie accuracy and return fire.
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Mechanical calculators have the BEST divide-by-zero errors
In a delightful short video, Klara Sjöberg demonstrates the extreme and alarming freakout that you can trigger in a mechanical calculator by trying to divide a number by zero; in a followup, Lynn Grant tweets “That is why the old Friden calculators had a ‘Divide Stop’ key.”
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MIT has an open course in winning at Texas Hold ‘Em
MIT’s How to Win at Texas Hold ‘Em is a CC-licensed open course taught by Will Ma in 2016 and now free to watch online; the game is the perfect combination of psych and stats, and learning to play is a great way to improve your basic reasoning skills. (via Kottke)
Astounding t-shirt art, created by marker-wielding open source hardware plotters
Evil Mad Scientist Labs sell a bunch of cool open source hardware kits for making plotters — basically, a very precise robot arm that draws with whatever pen or marker you screw into its grip. There’s the Eggbot (for drawing on curved surfaces like eggs, balloons and balls), but there’s also the Axidraw, which works on flat surfaces.
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Even if governments backdoor crypto, they still won’t be able to spy on terrorists
In a paper published by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, a group of Harvard and MIT cryptographers demonstrate that even if the government were to backdoor encryption and lock up anyone who used non-backdoored systems, people could still hide undetectable, secure, private messages within the messages sent over the compromised systems.
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