M of the M: December

It's Mario of the Month for December, Super Santa Mario! Photo was found: here.

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!

Visual Recursion

I like this recursion toy.

Nothing can possibly go wrong

http://www.nothingcanpossiblygowrong.com/ hosts an on-line graphic novel about a high school robotics team. Thanks (as usual) to: BoingBoing

Amazing Lego Machine!

M of the M: September 2012

Mario of the Month for September, a Mario mirror.

M of the M: August 2012

Mario of the Month slightly late for August.

Books of Bokonon

Some has posted all of the texts from the 'Book of Bokonon', the founding text of Kurt Vonnegut's artificial religion, as described in his novel, 'Cat's Cradle'. I notice that there is also a Wikipedia page on the religion.

Tupper's self-referential formula

The Tupper formula is an amazing inequality, that looks like this:

The reason it is amazing is that, when given a particular set of input values, it produces the following graph as output:

More details in Wikipedia here.

Play with the Drake Equation

The BBC has a nice interactive model of the Drake Equation, used to calculate the probability of intelligence life in the universe. Link thanks to BoingBoing.

Perseid Meteor Showers Prime Time

Tomorrow and the next day, August 11/12, 2012, are the best days to view the Perseid Meteor Showers.

Image from the Wikipedia article on the Perseids.

pi = 3

Just discovered that this is in the Bible (I Kings 7:23-26) "He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it." Since the diameter ("from rim to rim") is 10 cubits, and the circumference ("a line of thirty cubits") is 30 cubits, this implies that pi = 3. A good one for Bible literalists!

Via: http://home.eyesonff.com/archive/t-106596.html

John Conway's Game of Life

A nuclear-powered car is due to land on Mars tomorrow

NASA's Curiosity Rover (basically, a nuclear-powered car) is due to land this Sunday night, August 5th, 2012. It's a bold and amazing project.

Parenting

Best or most evil parenting trick?

Playing fastball

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

Meet the numbers

From: www.incidentalcomics.com

Inverse Graphing Calculator

This inverse graphing calculator is kinda cool!

M of the M: July 2012

Mario of the Month for July 2012.

Higgs Boson explained by theoretical physicist John Ellis

The Standard Model

Thanks to @christianbok on Twitter, who linked to this on http://openstudy.com/.

Higg's Boson Announcement Today (or tomorrow)

Apparently there is going to be an announcement about the Higg's Boson today tomorrow (maybe or maybe not: as usual it's complicated; see details here)...Meanwhile, here's a video about this elusive particle...

Plural of Octopus= Octopuses, Octopi, or Octopodes?

This video answers the common misconceptions about the plural of this bizarre english word (among others ending with "us").

Lego Turing Machine

A Turing machine made out of Lego! Link via the inimitable BoingBoing. Image via the inimitable xkcd, wonder cartoon of the Geeks.

IBM Sequoia Tops the Supercomputer Top500 List

The Top500 fastest computers, a list released today, offically announces the new fastest supercomputer: IBM Sequoia. This supercomputer is capable of 16.325 petaflops or 16 325 000 000 000 000 (1.6325*10^16) FLOPS (floating-point calculations)-- every second. Image found: here.

10 000 Interesting Numbers & Graham's Number

Most numbers have some special characteristic, there is a list of one interesting fact for the numbers additive identity of 0 to the Kaprekar number 9999. This list can be found at What's Special About This Number?. On a vaguely related topic, the largest finite integer used for a mathematical solution is Graham's Number-- a number that makes a Googolplex seem like a single quark in the greatness of the Universe, no joke.

M of the M

Mario of the Month for the month of June 2012. Photo found: here.

Flerovium and Livermorium

Elements #114 and #116 have been officially named Flerovium and Livermorium, respectively by the IUPAC. These elements are both superheavy (on an atomic scale) and both synthetic-- they are not known to exist in the natural world. For more information consulte the press release from IUPAC. Photo found: here.

The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences

I am not sure if I already blogged this but it's good enough to blog again: The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. I randomly entered '1,8,14,21' and found that it belongs to the sequence: "Numbers n with property that 9*n is a sum of two distinct positive cubes". Good to know! [Slightly irrelevant image from one of my favorite blogs, Futility Closet. Highly recommended!]

Cool JavaScript Demos

http://www.dhteumeuleu.com/ has a bunch of interesting JavaScript demos and toys. I like this one and this one, but I think there are more that are worth a look.

Greydon Square: The Compton Effect

M of the M

Mario of the Month for May (1 day early). Photo found here.

M of the M

Mario of the Month for April. Found here.

Imagining 10 dimensions

The Most Astounding Fact (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

Vsauce: English & Psychology

A particularly interesting episode of vsauce outlining some of the abnormalities of the English languages as well as weird facts including that "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence (see the Wikipedia article for more info).

M of the M

Mario of the Month for March. Found: here.

M of the M

Mario of the Month for February.

Restart Page & Robot Hand

Two completely unrelated internet finds, one about a nice robotics feat and a restart page with all the major operating system, a bit weird but cool nonetheless!

From: http://www.socialsignal.com/image/short-and-sweet

M of the M

Mario of the Month for January. Found here.