Archimedes

Modern technology is used to make an overwritten text by Archimedes visible: Gazing Upon an Erased Treasure. (New York Times, free subscription required.) The book has been lost since the 1920, re-appeared in 1998 and was put up for auction by Christie’s: Ancient Archimedes Text Turns Up, and It’s for Sale.

The book is about 1,000 years old and is the oldest known copy of a book by Archimedes, who wrote it 2,300 years ago. Around 200 years after it had been written, it was erased and overwritten by a monk because parchment was so expensive then.

Link via Garret.

Friday the 13th

Last friday I said the 13th is more often a Friday than any other weekday, but I couldn’t find it on the web. The Schockwellenreiter found it for me (see the German quote below):

The weekdays repeat every 400 years because the leap years are the same every 400 years. If you count the weekdays of each 13th of a month, you find that 688 13th are a Friday, while the other weekdays appear only 684 to 687 times.

Guten Morgen…

Owei, ich glaube, ich brauche eine Brille. Schon heute, nur drei Tage zu spät, entdeckte ich beim Schockwellenreiter einen Link, den er am Sonntag für mich gepostet hat…

Und dabei ist das ein cooler Link: Freitag, der 13. aus Sicht der Mathematik. Da steht genau das drin, wonach ich gesucht hatte:

“Nach unserem Kalender folgt auf drei gewöhnliche Jahre von 365 Tagen Länge fast immer ein Schaltjahr mit 366 Tagen. Alle 400 Jahre wiederholt sich die gleiche Anfolge von gewöhnlichen Jahren und Schaltjahren. Hemme zählte deshalb für einen Zeitraum von 400 Jahren nach, wie oft der 13. ein Freitag ist. Dabei ergab sich, dass der 13. insgesamt 688-mal auf einen Freitag fällt, aber nur 684- bis 687-mal auf jeden der anderen Wochentage.”

Vielleicht kann ich den Link am nächsten Freitag, dem 13., recyceln…

Danke, Jörg!

And…

… it was Martin‘s last day at his old job today. It seems he has a few weeks off before starting his new job on November 1st. Yay for Martin!

Manila

The discussion group has – or can have – a new look!

I guess I’ll have to take a closer look at the new prefs page for the discussion group… tomorrow. I’m still busy doing math. Still? Actually, I didn’t really get started until 8 pm today, and now it’s almost 11 pm. Oh well.

Neues vom ‘Traveling salesman’-Problem?!

Näheres in diesem Heise-Newsticker-Artikel: Informatik-Problem P=NP möglicherweise geknackt.

Update: Die NetDyslexen haben dazu einen Kommentar, siehe hier: “Plotnikov writes bullshit!”

A brief history…

… of the internet. I found this on in The future of the internet, also on Discover.Com.

The end…

Discover.Com: 20 ways the world could end. The author, Corey Powell, talks about several natural or human-triggered disasters and even alien invasion! Maybe the author has read too many sci-fi stories…

Link via blackholebrain.

Benjamin Blümchen

I think this is the strangest thing I’ve encountered so far – much better than the weirdest search requests in referrer logs…

A while ago, I said something about Benjamin Blümchen, who is a speaking elephant that is well-known to German kids.

Today, I received a message from a German company via email:

Urgent inquiry for Bejamin Blümchen toys

Dear Sirs,

We are an international trading company, mainly serving the European industry.

The [company name] purchases globally on own account and then resells the products to various clients. Our aim is to source globally and to offer our clients the best prices worldwide.

From one of our own or rented databases we have retrieved your address as potential supplier of the product(s) we would like to purchase this time. If you can promptly give us your very best quote you might be chosen as the supplier we have been looking for as early as next week.

At the moment we are looking for every kind of Benjamin Blümchen articles. […]

And they asked me to let them know if I received the message in error…

Update: Martin got the same email! And why? Because he talked about my posting on his weblog…

Bloghop?

I found this link in my referrals and looked it up to see who had linked to me. Turns out I’m listed at BlogHop. How did I end up there? And even twice?!

Each of my entries got one rating so far. I wonder who rated it…

Oops, I just realized that if you search their blogs for Andrea, you get four results: two links to this blog, one to bleep, and one to a blog I sort of accidently created on Weblogs.com a while ago… So I assume they found at least a large portion of their listed blogs over at Weblogs.Com.

It’s Garret‘s birthday today. Happy Birthday Garret!!!

And get well soon! Tell the hedgehog to go hibernate…

Pokémon

Unglaublich… In der letzten Wetten dass..?-Sendung ist der siebenjährige Benedict Bier Wettkönig geworden. Er hat gewettet, daß er alle Pokémon-Karten auswendig kann, d.h. er kennt anhand der offiziellen Numerierung alle 151 Pokémons, und zwar nicht nur deren Namen, sondern auch deren Typ, Größe, Gewicht, Eigenschaft und Entwicklungsstufe.  

Gerade habe ich ein kurzes Interview mit ihm im Radio gehört. Er war heute wieder normal in der Schule, aber noch ganz fertig von der Wetten dass..?-Party am Samstag. Benedict plant schon die nächste Wette: Dann will er alles über Formel 1 auswendig lernen, “Statistiken und so”.

Das seltsame ist, daß sein älterer Bruder 1997 auch schon bei Wetten dass..? mitgemacht hat. Da fragt man sich doch, ob das alles auf dem Mist der Kinder gewachsen ist, oder ob die Eltern da ihre Finger im Spiel haben…

German and the developing mind

A couple of days ago, I received an email from Terry Henert, a reader of my blog, on German and the developing mind. I asked him to post it on the discussion group, so you can all share your opinion. Besides, I’m not really an expert on brain development, so I thought the discussion would be a better place to talk about this that private email.

“Here’s something I’ve been wondering about for a long time and it deals with German as a language and it’s effect on the developing mind, mainly of children. It may seem pretty “off-the-wall” but there might be something we can learn here. Besides, I think it is more fun to try to find things to discover when we don’t know if there is anything to discover.”

Please have a look at his thoughts and share your opinion! Are any of the experts here? Frauke? Scott?

Famous?!

I’ve submitted a photo from the Expo to Friends of Jezebel’s mirror. If you’d like to see it, it’s here. (This is the URL of the frame with my photo; your browser should load the complete set of frames after a second or two.)

Mathematics again!

Craig once again has so many interesting links: More from Flatland.

• Time Travel in Flatland
• Beyond Flatland: Geometry for the 21st century
• From Flatland to Hypergraphics: Interacting with higher Dimensions
• A Cube Passes Through Flatland.

He’s got the flu

Garret says he’s ill and feels small. Get well soon, Garret!

Manila

Yay, the Home Page Template for Manila is here! Now your homepage can have a different template than the other pages. I just changed my template. The ‘old’ template is now the template of the home page, and I removed all the weblogs links and the Weblogs.Com banner ad from the template for the rest of my site, so the other pages, including the discussion, should load faster now.

André uses the new feature to display a random photo from our trip to the US on his home page. He had taken them down for the Behind the Curtain project so the pictures wouldn’t slow down our gallery.

More mathematics…

Craig had a link to Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott, and Jörg says it’s a classical popular-science math book. So I guess I have to check it out!

Physics

And another link from Garret – the Economist: New realities? – The ‘standard model’ of the way the universe works is just about complete. Time to start looking for a new one.

That reminds me that Garret pointed to another article about the Higgs boson a few days ago: God Particle Discovered.

Mathematica

Garret points out Leibniz, a mathematical word processor that works with Mathematica. Thanks, I’ll surely try it out!

Harry Potter

Harry Potter IV is being sold in Germany since midnight… Der Schockwellenreiter went to a Harry Potter Party yesterday.

Na Jörg, wie war’s? Hast Du die ganze Nacht gelesen?

Update: Jörg berichtet:

“Ich habe noch nie vorher gesehen, daß Bücher wie Ramschware palettenweise verkauft werden.”

Unglaublich! Ich ärgere mich schon, daß ich nicht aus Spaß auch hingegangen bin… aber ich weiß nicht mal, ob Bouvier eine Harry-Potter-Party gemacht hat. Nein, soweit ich das auf der Website herausfinden konnte, haben sie ab sechs Uhr heute früh in Köln und ab acht in Bonn und den anderen Filialen Harry Potter verkauft. How lame…