Internet Archive Blog: A Calculated Move: Calculators Now Emulated at Internet Archive. “While we have an excellent family of emulators assisting MAME in making programs work in the browser, the vast majority of the items in our Internet Arcade (and Turbo Edition), Console Living Room, and Handheld History collections mostly have MAME to thank. And now another can as well: The Calculator Drawer.”
Gizmodo: Quecto, Ronna: Meet the Newest Metric Prefixes. “Four new metric prefixes got the official stamp of approval last week at the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures held at Versailles, the extravagant palace outside of Paris…. The new prefixes ronna and quetta refer to the largest numbers, while ronto and quecto apply to the smallest. Ronna is a 1 followed by 27 zeroes, and quetta is a 1 followed by 30 zeroes. Ronto is 10^-27, and quecto equates to 10^-30.”
Government Technology: Digitized Kaktovik Numerals Engage Native American Students. “The international encoding standard Unicode has included Kaktovik numerals, designed by Iñupiaq students almost 30 years ago, in its latest version. Teachers in Alaska say it has spurred an interest in math.”
Techdirt: YouTube Streamer Hit With Demonetization Over Copyright Claims To Numbers ’36’ And ’50’. “Now, if you’re wondering who in the world is claiming trademarks on these two random numbers, it appears to be a company in the YouTube content creation business as well. Why they think they own the copyright on those two numbers and can use them to siphon the income of innocent YouTube streamers is anybody’s guess.”
Lifehacker: Use Wolfram Alpha to Conceptualize Giant Numbers. “Our monkey brains didn’t evolve to understand big numbers without some help. So when you run into an abstract figure, it’s good to have some real-world thing to compare it to. That’s why I memorize a few stats about the U.S. population; that’s why we made a video comparing Jeff Bezos’s money to Beyoncé’s. When you need to visualize a certain number, large or small, search it on Wolfram Alpha, and you’ll get a comparison to some real-world objects.”
Kevin Savetz recently released a site for learning about converting fractions. Now he’s added one for decimals (PRESS RELEASE). “AsDecimal.com lets users type in any percentage or fraction—this includes percentages with decimal places and fractions with any numerator or denominator. The site will instantly convert it to a number with up to five decimal places. A pie chart is also calculated at the bottom of the page as a helpful visual aid. There are also hundreds of example problems provided by the site, including percentages with decimal places and a wide range of numerators and denominators.”
New-to-me, but apparently on the Web for at least ten years: a database/list of movies featuring mathematics or mathematicians. “About ten years ago, on a whim, we began to collect movies containing mathematics. Now, as a consequence of that whim, we own a library of more than 800 movies on DVD, VHS, 16 mm, Laserdisc, and some strange thing called a CED video disc. The movies range from those expressly about mathematicians, to those that, for whatever reason, just happen to have a snippet of humorous mathematical dialogue. Over the years, we have found that it is not only professional mathematicians who find the fun in this cinematic mathematics. Just about everybody is charmed by Meg Ryan explaining Zeno’s paradox in I.Q., Danny Kaye singing about Pythagoras’s theorem in Merry Andrew, Lou Costello explaining to Bud Abbott why 7 x 13 =28 in In the Navy, and so on. Our […]
Okay, it’s not as much fun as a cat riding a Roomba, but I’m excited to hear that researchers have worked out a way to make random numbers even more random. “With an advance that one cryptography expert called a ‘masterpiece,’ University of Texas at Austin computer scientists have developed a new method for producing truly random numbers, a breakthrough that could be used to encrypt data, make electronic voting more secure, conduct statistically significant polls and more accurately simulate complex systems such as Earth’s climate.”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.