Sometimes it’s hard to put things like the speed of light into perspective: it’s a number so large that it’s tough to make sense of. Which is why this visualization, which compares the speed of things you can (kinda) more easily visualize, is massively helpful.
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It’s a tale as old as time: College co-eds get together on a Saturday night. Drinks are flowing. Hearts beat fast with excitement. The wall starts pounding with the steady thump-thump-thump of passion. You know, because some masters and doctoral students decided to see what happens when you toss a bunch of Lego bricks into a washing machine.
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Math, it’s so boring. Said everyone anytime anyone ever asked them to do basic arithmetic. But it doesn’t have to be! Yann Pineill & Nicolas Lefaucheux of Parachutes.tv has dispelled the notion that math is boring by making it look beautiful. Yes, beautiful. And a little bit like seeing The Matrix.
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Despite all the talk of the paperless office, for some reason most of us still seem to drown under piles of dead tree. But while we’re all intimately familiar with the stuff, understanding where those weird sizing conventions came from never seems to get any easier.
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You might not have realized it, but The Simpsons is crammed with math. In this video, Simon Singh explains how Pi and algorithms crop up in the show—and why the characters work in a decimal world, despite only having eight fingers.
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Currently, there aren’t many dead people on Facebook, which is largely because its user base is so young. But time marches on and death is inevitable, so will there ever be more dead than live people on the social network?
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While Apple definitely made it easier to access the calculator in iOS7, you still might find yourself without a way to do math on your smartphone. Maybe the battery ran out, or maybe you’ve found a way to make the Calculator app crash. Either way, you need a “Plan B” for your maths. I present the solution to this challenging equation – the Abacus iPhone case.
This 3D printed case designed by Joaquin Baldwin provides a fully-functional abacus on the back of your iPhone, letting you work math problems without even slightly draining your battery. And as an added bonus, you’ll get tiny Apple logos in place of traditional abacus beads.
The Abacus case is available in iPhone 5/5S and 4/4S variants over on Shapeways for $24(USD). While I’ll have to dust off my abacus-using skills, I guess it beats using Chisanbop.
The beauty of math and numbers and formulas and equations and so forth is that they can work without you ever understanding how the hell they work. What seems like complete randomness is actually just a math problem! Like this slick trick with a deck of cards. Take twenty or so cards and flip over five cards face side up and randomly insert them back into the rest of the deck. Shuffle it up all you want, split the deck in two and you can get the same exact amount of face up cards in each card pile.
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You’ve heard plenty of people by now—including us—banging on about quantum computers, and how they’re the future of high-performance computing. Quantum computing, we’re meant to understand, is set to change the world. But despite its promise, it’s neither widely available nor particularly useful yet. Here’s why not.
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How do people manage to write the neatest, most compact code to make programs super-small and lightweight? Well, there are many ways—but one of the most common is to use trees. Upside down trees, to be precise.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
