I’m always eager about finding math mistakes in the news. The Herald reported that a Traffic Warden was incorrectly ticketing cars in a parking lot because of how he was using his calculator. He failed to realize that calculators work in decimals rather than minutes and hours. One car owner saw this and tried to …
WolframAlpha.com is the newest development by Stephen Wolfram. It is an “answer engine” as opposed to a search engine. It’s used to compute answers to questions. Being the idiot that I am, I couldn’t think of anything mathie to type in, so I opted for: “Why did the chicken cross the road?”: In all fairness’s …
It isn’t the first time Google has to take part in a court case, but this time, they might be right. Since any algorithm can be reduced to a mathematical formula, the Linux code involved in Patent 5,893,120 isn’t technically patentable. For obvious reasons, the judge has problems understanding the math behind it, but here …
Google to Pay $5M for infringing Patent 5,893,120 Read More »
So I finally ordered the xkcd volume 0 book after it’s been available for two years and got it in the mail yesterday! Hopefully this will provide the motivation I need to finally create an SM book (volume lwh). The only problem now is to find the time to do it!!
The Google logo for today is: Why you may ask? Well, it’s none other than Pierre de Fermat’s 410th birthday! Pierre de Fermat was born on August 17, 1601 and died at the age of 63 on January 12, 1665.
UPDATE: We moved MathFail.com to Math-Fail.com so please update your bookmarks accordingly. If you are subscribed to the feedburner url, then you don’t have to change anything! Sorry if I messed up your feed (in google reader it showed 99 unread items after moving the feed)! Sorry sorry sorry! I wanted to move the site …
Recently, pi has been under “attack” by a new constant called tau. You can read about it here: The original article Ï€ is wrong written by Bob Palais (published in 2000/2001). The Tau Manifesto written by Michael Hartl (launched on June 28th, 2010). The video Pi is (still) wrong by Vi Hart (uploaded on March …
Today (June 28th) is Tau Day! Make sure you eat twice as much pie today as you did on Pi Day (March 14). Tau is introduced in The Tau Manifesto (by Michael Hartl and motivated by Palais, Robert [“Pi Is Wrong!“, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 23, Number 3, 2001, pp. 7-8.]). It suggests that it …
The FBI has released two notes in code that relate to the murder case of Ricky McCormick from 1999. McCormick had been murdered and his body was dumped in a field. The only clues were the two encrypted notes below that were found in the victim’s pockets. Despite several experts working on the code (including …
The first is xkcd, who is apparently trying to give us all headaches by turning every comic into 3D looking: As you move your mouse around the boxes/perspective changes. Next, Wolfram|Alpha is apparently now Bieber|Beta: