A Capella Science: Entropic Time (Backwards Billy Joel Parody). And the Making Of.
Tim Blain is the author of many more music and science videos, which you can watch at A Capella Science and A Capella Science 2.
Also on MetaFilter.
Category Archives: Fun
Earworm
Shorewood Lip Dub and how it was filmed.
“You Make My Dreams Come True” by Hall & Oates went through my head all afternoon, and it took me about two hours to figure out where I knew it from. (The lip dub didn’t show up in my search results on YouTube because it was blocked by GEMA.)
Autorotation
Smarter Every Day: Strapped into a falling helicopter.
“Ich habe eine 113 gewürfelt…”
The New Yorker: The Dice You Never Knew You Needed.
“[T]wo scientists from the Dice Lab, Robert Fathauer and Henry Segerman, débuted their newest specimen, fresh from the petri dish. They had invented – or, rather, discovered; no, really they’d just inexplicably gone to the trouble of creating – a die with a hundred and twenty sides. “What do you use it for?“ Fathauer asked the audience. “We have no idea,“ he answered. Futility notwithstanding, the d120 is billed as the “ultimate fair die allowed by Mother Nature (i.e., mathematics!),“ since a die couldn’t, practically speaking, possess more sides or more symmetry, and dice must be symmetrical to be fair.”
Watch the d120 in action on YouTube.
You can susbstitute the d120 for any dn in which n is a proper factor of 120; here’s a handy chart for this use.
Even though I don’t play any games that require more than a d6 or two and even though already own a d8, d12, d24, d30 (alphabet with 4 wildcards) and a d100 that I almost never use, I somehow feel like I need to also have a d120.
Links via MetaFilter: Or, disdyakis triacontahedron.
What’s the largest number you know?
Tim Urban posted some interesting articles on Wait but why that illustrate large numbers:
From 1 to 1 000 000 is the tame beginning, with visualizations of numbers up to a million.
From 1 000 000 to Graham’s Number continues the journey up to Graham’s Number, compared to which a Googol and even a Googolplex is just an epsilon.
In 7.3 Billion People, One Building, he explains how long a chain of all living humans would be, and how big a building would have to be to fit them all in.
These were posted in November 2014 and March 2015, but except for the number of humans on earth (which has been estimated at 7.4 billion in March of 2016) should still be current.