Reality tunnels » amusements

The Mathematical Cartoons of Larry Gonick

jmbr — Sat, 19 May 2007 22:59:42 +0000

xkcd‘s latest comic strip reminded me of this page where you can read some of Larry Gonick’s mathematics-centered comics. I discovered this artist through his book The Cartoon Guide to Statistics which might not be the most thorough text on the subject but it surely is the funniest.

Rotation matrix

jmbr — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:31:53 +0000

Lost integer sequence

jmbr — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 21:30:48 +0000

4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. These numbers are becoming more important in each episode of Lost and Marcus Dicander has submitted them to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

I don’t know (yet) what those numbers are supposed to mean in the show but it seems to me that the last two of them are a tribute to William Burrough’s 23 enigma and Douglas Adams’ answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe, and Everything respectively.

Time oddity

jmbr — Sat, 27 Nov 2004 20:16:12 +0000

I just read the presentation by Klein, D. V.; “Flying Linux” Keynote speech at the 2004 Copenhagen LinuxForum, and invited talk at the 2004 USENIX LISA Conference, Atlanta GA. And found there the following amusement:

$ cal 9 1752

September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

So I googled for an explanation and came up with this and also this. I must say I find the second version more entertaining:

The guy that originally wrote the “cal” command on some old Version 7 machine had an off-by-one error in his code. This showed up as some erroneous output when a malloc’d variable overwrote 12 extra bytes with zeroes, thus leading to the strange calendar output seen above.

Guerrilla SMS projector

jmbr — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 05:35:18 +0000

I wonder what the Billboard Liberation Front thinks about this device. It came via popcorn and Smart Mobs.

Home made HERF guns

jmbr — Mon, 24 May 2004 08:02:36 +0000

A blog article reflecting on HERF guns has just been published on John Robbs’ Global Guerrillas web log.

For those of you who don’t know what a HERF gun is here I reproduce an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

HERF or High Energy Radio Frequency weapons, also known as HPRF or High Power Radio Frequency weapons are weapons designed to use high intensity radio waves to disrupt electronics. They operate in a similar way to EMP devices, by inducing destructive voltage within the electronic wiring. They are usually directional and can be focused on a specific target.

One of the links from previous posts on this matter leads to an example of a home made HERF gun. The video clips demonstrating the use of the gun against a PC from a distance of 4.5 meters are specially entertaining.