When A Leaf Turns » Mathematics

True Odds of Airborne Terror

Venture Free — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:37:51 +0000

Update: I decided to put a link to the graphic instead in the name of fairness (it’s not cool for me to post the image in full). You can find it here: The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart – Odds of Airborne Attacks – Gizmodo.

In the meantime, some numbers to wet your appetite:

Analyzing data from Oct 1999 to Sep 2009
Over 99 Million Flights, traveling over 69 Billion miles.
That’s one attack per 11.5 Billion miles
or one attack per 3,105 years of air time

More Scale

Venture Free — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:42:15 +0000

I’m not sure that this is related the way that I think it might be, but the latest Radio Lab Podcast had a segment on the fact that very young children think of numbers logarithmically. Perhaps our difficulties with scale and magnitude are a reflection of this natural understanding of numbers (rather than our “unnatural” understanding of numbers as serial).

Mandelbrot Zoom (Best I’ve Seen Yet)

Venture Free — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:47:03 +0000

Just For The Fun Of It?!?

Venture Free — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:50:00 +0000

Until now I thought I was the only person who was silly enough to teach myself calculus just for the fun of it. It turns out there is at least one other person as crazy as I am.

Most people who find out that I did such a thing immediately assume that I’m some kind of math whiz, when in fact I did it precisely because I suck so bad at it. In college I took some math classes because I love science and I knew that a good mathematical base could help a whole lot. I got to pre-calculus and scored a hard won D, the lowest score I’ve ever gotten in any class I’ve ever taken in my entire life*. I HAD to take it again, if for no other reason than to erase that blight from my academic record. The second time around, through much hard work and perseverence I was able to raise that D to a D+. Okay, actually it was the same D. I gave up going to math classes, but I never really gave up trying to learn the math. Over the years I’ve built up quite a collection of math books, which I revisit every once in awhile in a renewed attempt to power through my mathematical mental block. It looks like it might be time to add to that collection. The Manga Guide to Calculus sounds interesting.

And by the way I was right. It really has helped me a lot in thinking about and understanding much of science.

* In reality I’ve gotten many D’s and F’s in my academic career. The difference here was that I was actually trying, where all the other bad scores were classes that I didn’t give a damn about.