Some people love numbers. And some find them odious and evil. And others manage to embrace both positive and negative sentiments at the same time. Take for example, mathematicians Jean-Paul Allouche, Benoit Cloitre and Vladimir Shevelev who have authored a paper with a distinctively Nietzschean title : ‘Beyond odious and evil’ in: arXiv:1405.6214v1 [math.NT] 23 […]
Tag: numbers
Biological guestimates: Microbes, humans, and ants
Two questions that are easy to answer, unless you care whether the answer is accurate: 1. Is your body mostly microbes? Actually, we have no idea. By Peter Andrey Smith, in the Boston Globe. 2. Are all the ants as heavy as all the humans? By Hannah Moore, for BBC News.
Numbers Stations – an anachronism ahead of their time?
It’s 1963, the height of the Cold War. Safely out of sight and earshot, an international espionage agent sits furtively huddled over a short-wave radio, listening intently for strings of seemingly random numbers. Despite the high levels of static interference, they’re painstakingly written down, one by one, and later tabulated against a ‘one time pad‘ […]
Panting by Numbers for Super-Scholars
Do you pant with excitement to learn which scholar is the most very smartest and/or most very most influential? If you do, then try using the Scholarometer. An article in Nature magazine describes the excitement that drives the people who wrote the software that delivers the numbers: Who is the best scientist of them all? Is theoretical […]