Calculus and “The Method”
Two of the texts hiding in the prayer book have not appeared in any other copy of Archimedes’s work, so no one but Heiberg had studied them until now. One of them, titled The Method, has special historical significance. It could be considered the earliest known work on calculus.
Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s.
A Conversation with Len Fisher
Applying game theory to the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, and to other, less important aspects of life.
Chances are you’ve played Rock, Paper, Scissors, but how do you calculate your strategy, if you have one at all?
In Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, physicist Len Fisher points out that putting yourself in your opponent’s mindset is a key to success in the game.
It’s all part of game theory, which has to do with everyday strategies and commonplace interactions — and not just those designed for winning at Monopoly or trapping wild elk, as it may sound. Fisher, a visiting research fellow in physics at the University of Bristol and author of several science books for lay audiences, argues that a teaspoon of this sort of thinking can illuminate a range of human behaviors. Not to mention that game theory offers a handy explanation of why all those teaspoons keep disappearing from the communal lunchroom at work. (Individuals think it won’t hurt the collective if they take “just one” spoon, but, voilà, in no time, there are very few, if any, left for the collective to use.)
ask a silly question… at Abstruse Goose.
The Pulp Fiction reference reminds me, peripherally, of the time I spent living in Vancouver, Canada. Do you know what they call a Quarter-Pounder with cheese in Vancouver?
Möbius transformations.
via Ovablastic
I had a vague notion of the quandry, and now know that it has a name: the Napoleon Dynamite problem, and it’s throwing a monkey wrench into a Netflix competition to improve their recommendation engine, i.e. the algorithm that tells you if you likes movie X, then you should check out movie Y
“Napoleon Dynamite” is very weird and very polarizing. It contains a lot of arch, ironic humor, including a famously kooky dance performed by the titular teenage character to help his hapless friend win a student-council election. It’s the type of quirky entertainment that tends to be either loved or despised. The movie has been rated more than two million times in the Netflix database, and the ratings are disproportionately one or five stars.
Which means that there aren’t really reliable indicators to tell anyone of they’ll like the movie. I wonder if anyone has applied chaos theory to explain the bifurcation. Or maybe it’s just acausal.
(I couldn’t get through more than 15 minutes of N D — it’s not my brand of stupidfunny, or maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood)
via kottke
A look at Benford’s Law.
In certain numerical data sets, the leading digit is most likely to be a “1,” with each succeeding number being less likely. It can be used to see if someone unaware of this has manufactured data.
Pictures of Numbers is a book-project-in-progress, consisting of practical tips and techniques for busy researchers on improving their data presentation, and is updated in intermittent bursts of regularity
In particular, there are
A good rule when making graphs is to remove needless impediments. Every extra act of interpretation we ask of the reader is a chance for them to misunderstand, be baffled, or get frustrated and move on. There should be as little standing between the reader and the data as possible. One level of interpretation all readers have to grapple with is the humble axis
Fixing Excel’s Charts, which need fixing, and
Reflections on the Planets, which improves a plot of the albedo of the solar system’s planets
via Kottke
Mathematician Cracks Mystery Beatles Chord
The opening chord to A Hard Day’s Night is also famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula.
Using Where-On-Earth geotagged photos uploaded to Flickr, one is often able to reverse-engineer maps, sometimes even at the neighborhood level.
Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can.
via Kottke