I can’t solve the Rubik’s Cube. All the spinning I do, all the rejiggering I try, all I end up with is a mess of colors with no idea how I got there. It’s okay though! I can now fake it like I know how. Matt Parker has figured out a way to cheat and make it look like you can solve the Rubik’s Cube—even though you have no freaking clue. More »
Every building material has a theoretical limit which it can’t be used beyond: at some point, the weight of material above is enough to crush what’s below. Now, a team of engineers has worked out that limit for Lego—and it’s surprisingly high. More »
Theresa Christy, a mathematician who works for Otis Elevator Co (they probably power your building), told the WSJ that once you press a button and wait for the elevator, it takes about 20 seconds before you start getting impatient and annoyed. More »
Twenty-seven years after introducing the world’s first graphing calculator, Casio has developed its most sophisticated educational Game Boy ever. Indeed, the new Casio fx-CP400’s 320 x 528 resolution screen isn’t just color—it’s a freaking touchscreen that flips from vertical to horizontal. That’s a far cry from the drab 94 x 64 display on the the Casio fx-7000G from 1985. More »
It might be the preserve of fantastical action movies, but we’ve probably all wondered at some point or other if it’s actually possible to fly through the air by firing bullets down at the ground. More »
If you think music repeats itself and that some songs sound exactly the freaking same, there could be a reason for that (well, other than piss poor artists being gobbled up by the machine): there’s a finite limitation on how different songs can be. There is? Yep, says MATH. More »
Boarding a plane is like joining an assault course that demands you trample old people and bat small children out of the way you with your bare fists. Possibly. But perhaps not for much longer, because a Chinese mathematician claims to have found a far more efficient way to board an airplane. More »
Predicting the future of Twitter‘s trending topics is, as of right now, an impossibility. But two folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have cracked the code with an algorithm they’re saying predicts — with 95 percent accuracy — the topics that will trend in the next hour and a half. The prediction has even been calculated as high as four to five hours ahead of time with the same level of accuracy. Not too bad!
Of course, beyond impressing friends with the predictions, the algorithm has direct implications for the likes of Twitter itself — being able to sell ads against trending topics could benefit the social media company enormously in its ongoing quest to monetize. At any rate, it’s distinctly less dangerous sounding than the last idea we heard involving Twitter and predictions. The algorithm will be presented next week at MIT’s Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks, should you wish to dig into the nitty gritty of the math behind the madness.
Filed under: Misc, Science, Software, Alt
MIT prof and student discover algorithm for predicting trending Twitter topics originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Nov 2012 10:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A team of researchers promises it can increase wireless bandwidth by an order or magnitude, without any new hardware whatsoever. All that’s required, it claims, is a little extra math. More »
You probably don’t know much about quantum physics beyond the fact that it’s really complicated. Allow us to add to your pseudo-knowledge a little more; this is what it looks like to learn it. More »
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