Category Archives: Math

That's Approximately Good

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The First Excited State takes on approximations with Assume a spherical physicist

Everybody who’s taken any sort of math class knows that a statement like N+1 = N is simply ridiculous. Everyone, that is, except for the physicist. Let’s say that N is a really huge number, like if someone dumped an entire truckload of M&M’s in your driveway. If you turned your back on me to watch the truck drive away, and I threw another M&M in the pile while you weren’t looking, would you really notice? What if I snuck one while you were looking to the sky to thank God for this miracle? No, you’d really have no idea. So in this case, for all practical purposes, N+1 = N-1 = N. We make this approximation all the time in my statistical mechanics class, where N represents some astronomically huge number, like the number of water molecules in your glass.

There’s also the trick of rounding numbers to 1, 2 or 5 in order to get an approximation when a calculator isn’t handy. You can usually get within a factor of 2 and perhaps better, depending on how crudely you round things.

A Demo of Demographics

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Interactive singles map of the US. There are sliders so you can narrow the age range, and choose your span. It does not adjust for singles in relationships. No, it doesn’t go under 18, you perverts.

[T]he only two places with a surplus of women in the 20-29 age bracket are New Orleans, LA and Springfield, MA? Lynchburg, VA pops up, too, if you lower the minimum required population.

Not the Same as Gauche

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Guilloches

Central to banknote designs are Guilloche patterns, which can be created mechanically with a geometric lathe, or more likely these days, mathematically. The mathematical process attracted me immediately as I don’t have a geometric lathe and nor do I have anywhere to put one. I do, however, have a computer, and at the point I first started playing with the designs (mid-2004) Illustrator and Photoshop had gained the ability to be scripted.

via Kottke

Bwahahahaha

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CBS sues NFL Players over fantasy football

CBS has filed a federal lawsuit in Minneapolis to clarify who can use the statistics that underlie fantasy football leagues.

The lawsuit filed earlier this week claims the NFL Players Association has threatened to sue the company if it does not pay licensing fees for the statistics.

CBS Interactive seeks a ruling saying that the players cannot control use of the publicly available numbers and cannot demand that CBS pays for their use.

Baseball has already lost a suit in which they wanted leagues to pay for the right to use players’ names. How freaking greedy can these millionaires get? One can argue that fantasy leagues promote more viewership — especially of otherwise uninteresting games, where you have a stake in the performance of a player or two but care not a whit for either team.