Friday, November 18, 2005

Friday Trivia

Electrum is a rather interesting metal. It is a gold, silver, and copper alloy (though, perhaps solely gold and silver alloys could also go by the same name). Primarily used as a currency by ancient Greece, Byzantium, and Egypt (through trade with the first two nations), it was popular because it was harder than gold and more valuable by weight than silver. It eventually fell into disuse in favor of silver since silver represented a better known value to foreign merchants selling goods across different markets. Since electrum could be made with different percentages of gold vs. silver, it worked in local markets where these percentages were consistent, however Athenian electrum might be much heavier with gold than Spartan electrum.

Raul

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Conventional wisdom defenistrated.

Do you remember when you were first learning some advanced math? I'm thinking in particular about a lesson in progressions, in which the teacher was trying to describe arithmetric and geometric progressions, where the latter was demonstrated by giving each student a piece of paper and asked to fold it as many times as possible. If you remember this, you probably also remember that no matter what you did, you could only fold that paper 6 or 7 times. In fact, in my case the teacher actually came out and said that no matter what you did, you could only manage 8 times. I don't even remember the exact reasoning, because invariably, kids around the classroom quickly tired of the lesson once they (or maybe only I) realized that there wasn't some way I could be smart and manage to actually do it despite how simple it seemed. What if you used thin paper? Wetting the paper wouldn't do it, using bigger paper just didn't really seem to make much of a difference. Anyway... so it turns out that the premise was actually false; yeah, add this to another of the lies your teacher told you.

In 2002, a girl by the name of Britney Gallivan first demonstrated with a piece of gold foil (taking the thinner approach) that she could in fact fold it 12 times! Then she did the same for a piece of paper. This is important, because if previous reports are accurate, she broke previous records 3 more times in the process through folds 9, 10, 11 folds on the way to 12. Yeah, she completely blew the conventional wisdom out of the water.

Even more importantly, she identified the limit through a slowly developed mathematically derived limit formula, which, out of respect for national copyright (aka legal sycophancy, I will link to, instead of posting on my page. Clearly a mathematical formula cannot be copyrighted, you might ask. To which I'd say, "I don't actually know, though it wouldn't surprise me." HOWEVER, since the formula was rendered into a picture on both linked pages, which are most certainly copyrightable and I don't feel like digging around in math programs to recreate said image, I give you Wolfram's explanation of this interesting discovery.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

NSFW video

It's visually clean, but the audio isn't what I'd call "worksafe"... Moving on, I give you a high quality (meaning that it's well edited) fan made music video for Nas - Rewind starring... some white guy. This made me laugh so hard and I honestly don't know why.

Raul

Sunday, November 13, 2005

How much is my blog worth?