Numberphile is a great youtube channel about maths. They invited me and Matt Parker on to fight about the circle constant. Here it is:
You can also follow Matt on twitter. And catch us both live in Festival Of The Spoken Nerd.
maths
20
Jan 13
Talking about Benford’s Law for Numberphile
Numberphile is a great youtube channel about maths. They invited me on to talk about Benford's Law. Here it is:
Here's my earlier post about Benford's Law.
5
Aug 11
Make your socks last longer with a Euclidean rubber glove switch
Your left hand and right hand are mirror images of each other. There's no way you can position your left hand so that it looks like a right hand. It will only look like a right hand if you look at it in a mirror.
There are molecules like this in chemistry. Molecules that can't be positioned in such a way as to look exactly like their own mirror image. These are called chiral molecules. We talk about them having a handedness because they share this property with our hands. Continue reading →
3
Mar 10
Interesting freecycle freebiejeebies scam and a dubious experiment
I love scams. They're often ingenious and involve a good bit of psychology. It's great fun figuring out how they work.
I saw an interesting misuse of freecycle recently which was a scam of sorts. I'll tell you how it worked then introduce my own dubious experiment. Continue reading →
19
Feb 10
The Droste effect – image recursion
I love recursion. There's something about the way it invokes infinity that makes my head spin. Droste effect images are recursive images that got their name from a Dutch company that makes chocolates and cocoa and things like that. Continue reading →
15
Feb 10
Shapes of constant width – coins from around the world
In a previous post I talked about shapes of constant width. I didn't know of any other coins besides the UK 50p and 20p that had the property of being the same width all the way round without being circular.
Well I was recently given this coin instead of 20p:
15
Jan 10
How 3D cinema works
I recently saw Avatar in 3D and 'forgot' to hand my glasses back in at the end. I thought I knew how this technology worked so I was very surprised when I started doing some experiments.
I saw Avatar at a Vue cinema that recently had 3D installed and the way it works is quite different to the IMAX. Continue reading →
8
Nov 09
How to cheat with Frank Benford
Pick a number at random from the universe. Not just from inside your head. Open a page of the financial times or look up the size of a planet; convert you height to cubits or measure the weight of your favourite book. Something like that.
Don't actually do it, it's hypothetical. But ask yourself a question. What are the chances of that number starting with a 1? Continue reading →
29
Sep 09
Venn Vs Euler: The Diagrams
I know what you're thinking: what's the difference between a Venn diagram and an Euler diagram? Good question. The following diagram should clear things up:
Just to clarify, Venn diagrams have regions for all possible combinations of groups whether there are things in those regions or not. Continue reading →
26
Sep 09
Bryan Adams Diagrams
I've been wanting to make one of those diagrams that describes a song. In the end I did a few for Bryan Adams. Here they are:
