M of the M

Mario of the Month for December. Found: here.

Trapping antimatter

Gizmodo has a report about trapping anti-matter for the first time.

A little bit of history

They are auctioning off a mint Apple I computer, expected to sell for $161,600 - $248,200. This machine came out in 1976, with 8K of RAM and a computer that ran at 1 Mhz. The computer I wrote this on has a million times more RAM and has two processors that run over 2500 times faster.

M of the M

Mario of the Month for November. Found: here.

M of the M

Mario of the Month for October. Via: here.

M of the M

Mario of the Month for September. View original (and source): here.

Amazing gymnast pulls off an amazing sequence of flips

 It seems they won't let me embed this, but check out this amazing gymnast doing flips.

New bar bet

Image via WikipediaHere's a new bar bet: Ask people to bet what the fifth-most-traded currency in the world is, after the U.S. dollar, the yen, the pound, and the euro.
Answer: Surprisingly (I think) the Australian dollar. I would have gone through China (the one doing the trading), Russia, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and a lot of other countries before I'd have guessed Australia (if I ever would have)....

Italy Soccer "Training"

Title also, for the video I was talking about previously see Double Rainbow.

Gizmodo has an interesting article about how the iPhone (and probably other digital cameras) can distort fast-moving objects, with propellers being the most common example. This iPhone video of a propeller is from the comments; there are lots of other examples in the article. Weird effects happen because "as it turns out, most digital cameras don't actually take a picture the instant you hit the button. What they actually do to capture an image is scan over the frame either vertically or horizontally. So basically, not all parts of an image are recorded at exactly same time (the top right could be a little ahead of the bottom left, etc.). Hence it being called rolling shutter."


It is cool to think that if our eyes had rolling shutters, this is how we might see the world too, with fast moving objects seeming to move in and out of existence or bend in strange ways. It's a great example of how perception is not necessarily reality.

The meaning of Play Station controller symbols.

Image via Wikipedia

This is interesting: Gizmodo has an article on the meaning of the symbols on a PlayStation controller. Teiyu Goto, an engineer involved in designing them, claims that "Other game companies at the time assigned alphabet letters or colors to the buttons. We wanted something simple to remember, which is why we went with icons or symbols, and I came up with the triangle-circle-X-square combination immediately afterward. I gave each symbol a meaning and a color. The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had it represent one's head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents and made it pink. The circle and X represent 'yes' or 'no' decision-making and I made them red and blue respectively. People thought those colors were mixed up, and I had to reinforce to management that that's what I wanted."

Star Wars Uncut

Star Wars Uncut "The Escape" from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

I am hugely impressed by this attempt to re-shoot the entire Star Wars canon by cutting up the films into 15 second pieces and letting fans re-make those 15 seconds however they like. A truly great idea. A small sample is shown above.
Via BoingBoing.net

Know Your (Internet) Meme

For more of these interesting videos visit "Know Your Meme.com".

Even-length palindromic numbers mod 11 = 0

I was surprised to learn from a comment on Project Euler that palindromic numbers are always divisible by 11.

Here's the proof (for six digit numbers):
i.) A palindromic number has the form abccba [By definition]
ii.) abccba = 100000a + 10000b +  1000c + 100c + 10b + a [Expansion in Base 10]
iii.) abccba = (100000a + a) + (10000b + 10b) + (1000c + 100c) [Re-organizing ii.)]
iv.) abccba = 100001a + 10010b + 1100c [Re-organizing iii.)]
v.) abccba = 11 (9091a + 910b + 100c) [Factor out 11 from iv.)]
QED [= Proved, since we have factored 11 out.]


I think this always holds for palindromes (of any length) with an even number of characters, but it does not necessarily hold if you are allowed to include an 'odd' digit in the centre. (I know it sometimes holds because 121 = 11 x 11, but I don't know if 121 is a special case.)

M of the M

This is a photo taken out of a larger album (composed of 505 photos to be exact) solely of Mario and Luigi around North America. This album is found here. Photo credit given to revengingangel. Mario of the Month for August 2010

Tales of Mere Existence

For more of these types of videos see: here.

Venn Diagram

Via: www.spreeblick.com

Trigonometry Visualized

"BP Spills Coffee"

A spoof of the current BP oil spill.

Interesting/ Unique Tees

For a full list visit: T-shirts That Just Made My Day.

Project Euler

Image via Wikipedia

"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."

(Leonard Euler, pictured at left, was a Swiss 18th Century mathematician.)

M of the M

Mario of the month for July.

Photo found: here.

The universe as rounding error

Image via Wikipedia

I enjoyed this quote: "Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen, the first element and the major constituent of stars. The other 10 percent of all atoms are helium. That's already 100 percent. The rest of the periodic table, Elements 3 through 118, lithium through ununoctium, barely register on a cosmic scale. The rest of the universe, you and I included, is a rounding error."
                       Sam Kean/  Hydrogen: Where It All Started in Slate

Mario projected onto a sidewalk

Super Mario Bros. from Surfap on Vimeo.

Via: Gizmodo

Russian optimism

Image by funkandjazz via Flickr

"Eight percent of Russians believe their national team will win the World Cup, despite the fact that it never qualified for the tournament, an independent poll has showed."

From Reuters via Yahoo News

2010 World Cup is lowest scoring competition ever

"2010 is indisputably the lowest scoring World Cup in history."

 From: http://footballpolemics.wordpress.com/ via: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/

The man who sold a $22 billion share in Apple for $800

Ron Wayne co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. At the beginning he owned 10% of the company. Today that 10% would be worth $22 billion. Alas, Wayne sold his 10% back for $800 before Apple succeeded. A rough investment decision! More details at CNN here.
With a tip'o'the hat to Uncle Eric.

OnLive gaming service comes to the Mac

Image via Wikipedia

These are good times for gaming on the Mac: Following Steam's recent arrival, OnLive has now arrived for the Mac. From the site's own description: "The OnLive® Game Service is a revolutionary, on-demand video game platform that delivers the latest and most advanced games instantly over a broadband connection on virtually any PC or Mac®, via a small browser download, or HDTV, via OnLive's MicroConsole™ TV Adapter (coming soon). OnLive enables an entirely new way to discover, explore, purchase and experience the hottest video games from the world's leading publishers."

Shortest possible game of Monopoly

"we started to wonder about what the shortest THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE game of Monopoly would be. That is, if everything went just the right way, with just the right sequence of rolls, Chance and Community Chest cards, and so on, what is the quickest way one player could go bankrupt? After working on the problem for a while, we boiled it down to a 4-turn (2 per player), 9 roll (including doubles) game. Detail on each move given below. If executed quickly enough, this theoretical game can be played in 21 seconds"
Text and video taken from (and further discussion at)  scatter.wordpress.com, via BoingBoing.

Lego robot chess

More info here.
Via Gizmodo.

FIFA US VS England Highlights- In LEGO

Final score: 1-1, even if England was, in my opinion, dominating the game.

Stop motion Super Mario

Pretty impressive.
As usual, via BoingBoing

The Khan Academy

I love what this guy is doing: Salman Khan has recorded over a thousand ten-minute lectures on every topic in the K-12 curriculum (and quite a bit beyond that), and they are all free. There are tons of math lectures. He is doing it primarily as labor of love, not for profit. I hope he gets very rich off it anyway; he deserves it.  Amazing and inspiring to see. Check out the Khan Academy. 
Via: BoingBoingth

M of the M

Mario of the month for July. Based on the game
Mario vs. Donkey Kong series. Via Flcikr.

Coke and Mentos Car

Via Epic Win FTW

The Art of Money

There is a great web page on art made from money here at the Brain Pickings website.
Image shows a hand-made work by American artist Mark Wagner.

With a tip'o'the hat to www.marginalrevolution.com

Lego printer

Via: BoingBoing

My desk is 8-bit

MY DESK IS 8-BIT from alex varanese on Vimeo.
Via: BoingBoing

Useless math fact

"These and other remarkable formulas are the basis of modern computations of : you might ask how does one find such formulas? I have no idea".
                          From: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com

Steam for Mac is now available.

"Steam for Mac is officially available, along with a sizeable trove of games—including Portal, which is now free for everybody."

Gizmodo's headline says it all: "Real Gaming for Macs Is Finally Here". (I stole the line above from Gizmodo too.) Steam is an online gaming platform that has heretofore been limited to Windows.

Hitler at the Robotics Championship

This will probably get taken down soon; the owners of the movie don't like 'Downfall' parodies (though the rest of us do!)

Science Conspiracies

Lots of people believe, that the "Large Hadron Collider", will destroy the world, similarly to making a wee version of a sun using 192 uber powerful lasers (see the article for more information) by 2022.

Also, an extremely popular video explaining in vague details what the LHC does can be found here.

A pretty good video proving the LHC conspiracy is "Science!" (though it goes off topic quite a bit).

Distribution of stock ownership in the USA: Note that 50.9% [Owned by top 1% of population] + 39.4% [Owned by next 2% of population] = 90.3% of all stocks are owned by just 3% of the population!
Graph from: http://donklephant.com