Tag: math
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Numerical Tic-Tac-Toe
Here’s a cool spin on a game you probably haven’t played since you solved it in elementary school. You and another player take turns naming numbers one through nine. Each number may only be used once. The player who collects any three numbers that add up to 15 wins. If all numbers are used up…
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The Politics of Fear VS Mathematical Perspective
In 1964 Lyndon Johnson’s campaign ran the following ad scaring Americans in to voting for him with the idea that Barry Goldwater would start a nuclear war if elected: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/OKs-bTL-pRg] Hillary Clinton’s campaign is spinning their recent primary wins as attributable to their “3a.m. Phone Call” ad, which uses a similar tactic against Obama: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/M70emIFxETs]…
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The Digital Big-Bang
One Gigabyte 20 Years Ago (left) One Gigabyte Today (Right) source Bill Gates is often misquoted as having said, “no one will ever need more than 640K of memory,” in the 1980s. 24 years ago, my Commodore 64 personal computer ran games like “Mail-Order Monsters” and “Archon” on a mere 64 kilobytes of memory. This…
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Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”
A New Kind of Science Many books I like to read with a yellow highlighter, reading Stephen Wolfram’s ANKOS I was compelled to whip out a red pen. While his 1,000-plus page field-guide to cellular automata and complexity theory is brimming with fantastic examples of all shapes, sizes, and dimensions, Wolfram’s writing and failure to…
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A Tale of Two Flatland Movies
Flatland the Movie VS Flatland the Film I really enjoyed and appreciated Edwin Abott’s 1884 classic book Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions, which tells the story of Square, a lawyer living in Flatland, a two-dimensional world that has height and width, but not length. It’s in the public domain and free to download at…
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Futurama Fans Rejoice!
All Hail Hypnotoad! I finally got to pick up a copy of the First Carbon Neutral DVD from FOX, Futurama: Bender’s Big Score, this weekend, and I’m very much enjoying my geek-humor fix. Some big brains go into making Futurama. Executive Producer David X. Cohen has a master’s degree in computer science from UC Berkeley.…