Thursday 11 August 2011

Leaving Blogger.

But don't worry, you'll be redirected to the new site.

Check out my math blog.

Thursday 28 July 2011

Return?

Hello there, anyone who might still be around!

Here's a big number for you, the number of days it has been since my last post, 50!

Not exactly a great number for a blog that was originally updated daily. But this post is to let you all know that I am coming back to blogging!

I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep updating daily, but I'll definitely be posting more frequently than once every 50 days.

Come back tomorrow for your first fix of big number analysis in way too long.

Tuesday 7 June 2011

Hair

People have a lot of hair.
The average human head has around 100 thousand hairs.
Hair doesn't seem to grow very fast though. Head hair grows on average half an inch per month.
But that builds up. Half an inch per month, twelve months a year, 100 thousand hairs per head.
Every year, the average human head grows almost ten miles of hair.
That means in an average life time, a person will grow well over 600 miles of it.
If you laid it out and started walking, it would take 8 and a half days of non stop walking to get to the other end.

Monday 6 June 2011

This Blog; by the Numbers

Hello friends and followers.
Today's post won't be like the normal posts.
Today, I want to say thank you.
Let's look at the numbers I'm thanking you for.
This blog has 177 followers.
The posts on this blog have received 885 comments.
This blog has been shared on facebook and twitter.
And finally, this blog has been viewed 4,521 times.
Thank you.

Sunday 5 June 2011

Four-year-old Painter

Aelita Andre is having her premier art show in New York today. She is four years old.
Her paintings are selling at around 10 thousand dollars a piece.
That's pretty good money for a four year old.
If she can make a new abstract painting everyday for the next 60 years she will have earned almost a quarter billion dollars.
Unfortunately that probably won't happen, because almost every child prodigy grows up to be an almost regular adult.

Saturday 4 June 2011

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga, among other things, is the most followed person on twitter, with more than 10 million followers.
What if these people where actually following her, like walking behind her in a single file line?
Assuming that these people didn't want to invade each other's personal space, that line would be almost 6000 miles long.
If you wanted to drive the fastest car on the planet, one that goes 258 miles per hour, past this entire line, it would take you almost an entire day.

Friday 3 June 2011

Proof

In mathematics, it is really hard to prove things.
Almost 75 years ago, a mathematician name Collatz made a conjecture,  that seem pretty simple.
He said take any number. If it's even, divide it by two. If it's odd, multiply it by three and add one. Then repeat. He said no matter what number you started with, you'd end up at 1 eventually.
As it turns out, no one has been able to prove it.
But it has been tested a lot. In fact, it's been tested for almost 6 billion billion different numbers, and it's worked for every one of them.
That's a lot of tests.
If everyone on the planet tested one of these every second, it would take 27 years for us to test that many.
Funny thing is, mathematicians don't really care how many tests you've run.
They want proof.