A dreadful hoax

Crash Course: World History

Crash Course: World History has completed its 42nd and final episode earlier today. A good end to an excellent series on the major events of human history. The series included 2000 years of chinese history in 12 minutes presented in a humorous, entraining, but educational manner (embedded above).

M of the M: November 2012

Mario of the Month for November. Picture found: here.

M of the M: October 2012

Mario of the Month for October. Found: here.

BoingBoing recently had an interesting post on the history of Monopoly and how it came from a socialist background.

Factorization visualized

I love this animated look at factorization. Let it get to the triple digits at least to see the real action. Shown above: 108 = 3 x 3 x 3 x 2 x 2

No victory without war

"...those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war." - William S. Burroughs

We are specks in the vasty deep

http://htwins.net/scale2 is an excellent tool for exploring the scale of the universe. I think we may have blogged an earlier version on this blog. I love that here are many stars out there whose diameter is (much) bigger than the distance from the earth to the sun. Puts things into some kind of weird perspective.

Euler's Samba

Music based directly on the famous Euler equation. The original poster's notes follow:

"The Magic 5 Constants: Pi = bass; e = piano; i, for 'practical' reasons the square root of 2 for this sonification, = trumpet and sax; 1 & 0 = metal mallets; 1 = whistle and, of course, 0 = the cuica.

There's a part of me that says this video is too full of gratuitous graphics and it tips the sound/visual balance too much to the visual. I mean, dancing fonts? On the other hand, Euler wrote over 500 books in his lifetime (yes, 500!) and his work touches on nearly everything modern, e.g., electronics, hydrodynamics, elasticity, radio transmission, networks, etc. So, I picked the fonts and their movement with that happy thought in mind."

Rose’s Law for Quantum Computers

Rose’s Law for Quantum Computers, originally uploaded by jurvetson.

" the very near future should be the watershed moment, where quantum computers surpass conventional computers and never look back. Moore’s Law cannot catch up." The amazing scaling of quantum computing!