Archive for the 'math' Category

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

My Dirty Secret - I Am A Six Fiend

I have always loved numbers. My whole life I have manipulated them, caressed them, cared for them.

My friends, I am a six fiend.

And I am not alone. Heck, even among physics gurus I am in pretty good company, including notables such as Paul A.M. Dirac, which, by the way, is his real name and not something he made up just for D&D. That guy lived for number correlations.

Numbers are significant because on a personal and a collective conscious level numbers help us understand the world in a way that letters cannot. I can go anywhere in the world and hold up two fingers and the most illiterate peasant in China knows that means I am with two supermodels. Can I speak Chinese? Well, yeah, Mandarin actually, but you can’t.

Plus, there are 400 dialects in China so I certainly can’t express how many supermodels I am with in any other way and have it be so clear. Numbers are the magical language. I can do music with numbers ( the circle of fifths ), language, art and science. Even when I do TKD I am using a sine wave.

Numbers work for everyone. Numbers have order and meaning. To pseudo-scientists they even have esoteric definitions. Numerologists, for example, claim that 1 is the Yang and 2 is the Yin, staying in our Chinese theme. More on that later.

My favorite? Six.

Six is important. Six is famous. Six was the magical number of ancient Avalon. Christian authorities labeled six “the number of sin” and 666 is certainly a bad thing. One of its Egyptian forms is seshemu (”sexual intercourse” ) ­ shown in hieroglyphics by male and female genitals doing … you know, what I do a lot more of than you … and we still know of it today in the Sufi love-charm designed to open the “cave” of the Goddess: “Open, Sesame.”


6 In Chinese.

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Monday, April 30th, 2007

Music, Math and Models


I’ve said a few times that music is math. I’ve also said a few times that I’m a Chinese jet pilot and that Halle Berry wants to bear my children so it’s probably hard to know when you should take me seriously and when you shouldn’t.

But let’s go back to this “music is math” stuff. On that part I’m not kidding. At the end of the day, a lot of things can be math, including music and supermodels. A few months ago I did an article on how Phi, the famously named Golden Ratio, could even tell us who would be a supermodel. It contained excellent science, humor, Elle MacPherson, Carol Alt and Heidi Klum , yet still left some math questions unanswered.

In that article I mentioned the golden ratio in music, namely that the octave, fifth, and major and minor sixths are ratios of consecutive numbers of the Fibonacci* sequence, making them the closest low integer ratios to the golden ratio. But that doesn’t make a ton of sense until we get a little more basic, mostly because math doesn’t exist in the real world, it isn’t a hard science like physics.

So we’ll figure out how math is music but first we’ll show how music is physics.

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Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

How Math Can Save Your Marriage - An Interview With The Author Of Geek Logik

Ever have someone tell you a certain pesky question can’t be answered scientifically? Garth Sundem is here to help. He’s the author of Geek Logik and it’s his business to help you mathematically solve life’s most pressing problems.

Garth has created plug-in numerical solutions that help you make decisions while completely abdicating accountability for your actions - because you can always claim the numbers said it was the right thing to do. It’s like the Taguchi Method, only with real algebra and a lot funnier. Here are the kinds of life-altering decisions Garth can help you make:

“How many beers should I have at the company picnic?”
“Should I go to the gym?”
“Do I have a snowball’s chance in hell with him/her?”
“What IS a snowball’s chance in hell?”

I first stumbled upon Garth when I read Esquire this past summer and saw he was able to answer the question “Should I apologize to to my girlfriend?” with the following equation:

D[Rp(Ra+P)+D(Ra-Rp)=A

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Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

Science Has Bad News For Goth Chicks - Vampires May Not Be Real

Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires.

Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this:

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So we can’t just let someone claim they have wiped out a millenium of folklore by doing simple ( very simple ) math. First, let’s deal with the premise behind his numbers. Professor Efthimiou’s research assumes that each vampire bite results in another vampire being created. People, if there’s one thing I know, it’s vampires ( and Thai transvestites, but hey, that is a post for another time ) and I need only point you to the definitive work on the matter, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, to state unequivocally that vampires don’t always create more vampires. They only create vampires out of people they really like, or who have waistlines like Vampira:

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Yes, she looks as all women should look; like a sexy, zombie skeleton.

Additionally, back in 2000, in the British series Ultraviolet, it was clarified that vampires wouldn’t feed themselves to extinction any more than we would keep on killing buffalo until they were almost gone.

This was on TV, people. If you can’t believe what you see on TV, I can’t reason with you.

Professor Efthimiou’s simple and surprisingly jingoistic math and logic errors mean that there is still at least some statistical chance that vampires could exist. However, there is also some statistical chance I am a Chinese jet pilot. Yet, since the chance exists that vampires are roaming the earth, it can’t hurt to have a vampire slayer handy.

Everyone goes for Buffy. I’d rather have a little Faith.

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Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

Phi, The Ultimate Supermodel

“What is a supermodel?” People sometimes ask me. It has a few definitions and sometimes people argue over them, much the way Heidi Klum and Elle MacPherson fight over who is called “The Body.” *

If you’re reading this site, you know that a supermodel is an aspect of complexity science that incorporates multiple variables to try and spit out the best solution.

Ha Ha Ha.

Okay, supermodels can also be really hot chicks blessed with the combination of low self-esteem and jaw-droppingly loose morals that allow them to easily be tricked into deviant sex. Just this once we get to discuss both. And by both, I mean just the hot chicks.

So what makes a supermodel super? Like many important things in life, we can look back in time and see if history gives us an answer and saves us some effort. For centuries mathematicans have been intrigued by the “Golden Ratio” because it appears so often in geometry. Is a “golden ratio” something German eurotrash does because they are bored with their sex lives? No, it is a ratio that is the midpoint between asymmetry and symmetry. Defined it is when “the whole is to the larger as the larger is to the smaller”.

In numerical terms, it is 1.618.

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