Corduroian :: Music and Phlog » mathematics

Wolfram Tones

Kevin Marx — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:21:54 +0000

From the math jerks at Wolfram, here’s WolframTones. It’s pretty neat — you choose a music genre and it creates a unique song based on it. Here’s my best work. The music it outputs is hardly that impressive, but for being a piece of software, it’s really interesting. Too bad they implemented it using midi.

Straight to China? I’m afraid not

Kevin Marx — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:05:30 +0000

Find out what’s on the exact opposite of side of the world at Antipodes Map. Yep, some 12,742km directly beneath you, something is upside down, and it’s not even weird. Really, it could be anything! (But if you live in the North Hemisphere, or anywhere, really, it’s probably water.)

Weird science, Benford’s law

Kevin Marx — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:09:01 +0000

Benford’s law is one of those weird natural mathematical occurrences that seems too counter-intuitive to be true. Basically, it breaks down like this: Take almost any naturally occurring number set. It could be anything like U.S. Census information, lengths of rivers, stock market prices, heights of buildings, heights of mountains, company payrolls, etc. Now, putting all that numerical information in a list, what do you think the most common leading digit would be? What do you think the chances are that the leading digit is 1? I would think that, since there are 9 possible digits, the chances would be 1 in 9. But! then I’d be wrong. The chances that 1 is the leading digit is actually 30.1%. In fact, the most common leading digit is 1, followed by 2, then 3, and so on. That’s amazing!