More than 1000 shots fired in happiness in Birmingham, AL
One of the things I loved about the two years I lived in Birmingham, AL: Being in a place where people openly and un-ironically fired guns into the air in order to celebrate things. This was something...
View ArticleAnother prime number down, infinity to go
There are 17 million digits in the largest prime number we know of, so far. Its discovery is part of an ongoing distributed computing project aimed at exposing the existence of ever larger prime...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dictionary of Numbers: browser extension humanizes the numbers on the Web
Dictionary of Numbers is a Chrome extension that watches your browsing activity for mentions of large numerical measurements and automatically inserts equivalences in real-world terms that are meant...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Museum of Four in the Morning
"Four in the morning" appears with strange frequency in movies, TV, art, and culture. The Museum of Four In The Morning collects such references. Submit yours!
View ArticleLargest-ever damages sought
Anton Purisma has launched a civil rights suit against an airport Au Bon Pain restaurant; he's asking for $2,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That would be two undecillion dollars.
View ArticleClik here to view.
Watch debt grow in real time at the US Debt Clock
The politics escape me, but I'm fascinated by the US Debt Clock, a website covered in real-time tickers and counters purporting to show all of the unpleasant statistics piling up in America. They also...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Numberphile looks at mathematics' undecidable statements
The average person probably assumes that mathematics is a complete system in which all mathematical statements can be proved or disproved. The fine folks at Numberphile are ready to disabuse folks of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Escaping Twitter's numbers game with the Twitter Demetricator
Everyone knows about the trolls and nazis, but The New Yorker's David Zweig wrestles with the other strange pallor that descends on Twitter: the feeling that every moment is a self-conscious baring of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Watch why bees can understand zero, but young children can't
The concept of "nothing" is easy to grasp for most humans, but the concept of zero as a number is much harder. Recent research shows that bees can be taught that zero is a number which is less than...
View ArticleCan you figure out what number comes next?
Take a look at the sequence. What number comes next? The answer is a no brainer – once you know the answer, that is. Neil Sloane, founder of the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, starts...
View ArticleUK unemployment soars during pandemic
Unemployment claims in the UK stand at 2.1m after rising 856k in April and 637k in the first quarter before that. The official total is not as proportionally bad as the US's 36m claimants, but a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A befuddled Hannity thinks Biden's been president for a week, but Twitter...
Trump sycophant Sean Hannity revealed his trouble with numbers when he confused 30 hours with 168 hours. Or 1 day with 1 week. This was last night, when he summed up Biden's "first week" as...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Entertaining phone numbers to call
The spirit of phreaking is still alive! Bill Wear offers a collection of numbers you can call "to be suitably entertained." [via Hacker News, where more phone-in delights are posted such as a live...
View ArticleClik here to view.
"Vinyl outselling CDs" is the new "Voyager has left the solar system"
In 2020, David Pescovitz blogged that the RIAA claimed that vinyl records were outselling CDs for the first time since the 1980s. But now the BBC reports that the RIAA is now claiming that last year,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
300m copies of Minecraft sold
Minecraft is the most successful game of all time, and it's "not even close," reports Zack Zweiden. The blocky build-n-survive masterpiece recently sold its 300,000,000th copy. To put that massive...
View Article
