Stories tagged math
Some fingers: Some fingers down, more fingers up.
Courtesy anna_tResearchers from MIT have found that a tribe in remote northwestern Brazil has no words for specific numbers.
The language of the tribe, of which there are only about 300 members, seems to be unique in that it has no numbers. Counting was thought to have been innate in human cognition. Apparently that isn’t totally the case. Specific numbers weren’t useful to this culture, so they never developed them in their language.
Instead of specific numbers, the group, called the Piraha, has a couple of relative terms, translating to something like “some” and “more.” Piraha math classes, I assume, would be awesome.
Some + some = more (obviously)
Nothing + some = some (duh)
Nothing + more = some (interesting!)
More – some = some (probably)
Some – more = your mind blown (Whoa!)
Something very anthropologically and linguistically crazy is going on here. Something about how even though we think our thoughts shape language, language actually ends up shaping our thoughts. So if you come from a culture whose language has no concept of specific numbers, how does that shape your perception of the world?
Oh, if only I had been a better student.
Tags : Author Jim Holt consults Darwin and Copernicus and declares: laughter will be mankind’s most enduring legacy.
It is the season to consider the fine points of our national pastime. Left-handers have the upper hand, in many ways. Here is the story:
Monkey math: Bonzo doesn't find numbers boring or intimdating
We've had our share of controversial math posts here on the Buzz lately. But here's news that rhesus macaques are quicker than humans at doing computer-based math. They must not find it boring like many members of the homo sapien species. And we've documented in the past that chimps have better memories than most people.
My Geo Metro: 47 miles per gallon
Courtesy Art OglesbyGuess the answer to this word problem before doing the math.
- Car A (a compact) gets 34 mpg
- Car B (a hybrid) gets 54 mpg
- Car C (an S.U.V.) gets 18 mpg
- Car D (a sedan) gets 28 mpg
Which would save more gasoline?
- (a)replacing Car A with Car B
- (b)replacing Car C with Car D
- (c)both would save the same
Can you do the math?
I drive my car about 10,000 miles each year. One way to look at this problem would be to calculate how many gallons of gas each of the four cars would use to go 10,000 miles. Can you do the math? If gas costs $4 per gallon what is the cost for each car to go the 10,000 miles?
Show me your answers in the comments
I will do the math for my Geo Metro as an example. It now has over 100,000 miles on it. Until recently it got 50 miles per gallon. Two gallons would take me 100 miles, 20 gallons would take 1000 miles. 100,000 miles would take 2000 gallons. With $4 gas that 2000 gallons would cost $8000.
Save the world's gas
I once owned a Ford pickup truck. If it got 20 mpg and if I drove it 100,000 miles I would need 5000 gallons which would cost me $20,000. By replacing my pickup with the Metro I use less than half the gas and save over $1000 a year. I used to commute to work and put on 30,000 miles per year. That figures out to a $36,000 saving over 10 years.
Swedish cosmologist Max Tegmark thinks so.
A different crop circle: This one was created by confused cattle. Amazing.
Courtesy Alan L. BaughmanWant to blow some minds, Buzzketeers? You’ve got a couple of options.
The first and most obvious route to some serious brain-blasting is to become a motorcycle stunt jumper. I don’t care if you aren’t into engines and broken bones; if you see a man in a cape riding a dirtbike fly over 30 flaming school buses, your brain will ooze out your ear holes (in the most awesome way).
The other option is to learn some math. It doesn’t have to be too much math—a lot of people couldn’t tell trig if it bit them in the calc, and so a little math can go a long way. And if you can combine that math with another skill…minds will be blown.
Take, for example, the latest, greatest crop circle. Now, we all know that crop circles are made by aliens, right? Duh. It’s a case of Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation is the best. So we have unusual patterns battered into fields of crops. What’s the explanation with the fewest assumptions? That beings we have never encountered traveled from a place we know nothing about, and use their very likely highly advanced minds and inter-stellar travel technology to draw circles and things in our food for reasons we can’t fathom.
For the sake of argument and education, however, let’s pretend that crop circles have a much more complex origin—that they come from dudes (and dudettes, undoubtedly) with an artistic bent, and too much time on their hands.
So, back to this particularly mind blowing circle. It appeared on a field near Barbury Castle (which, I’m afraid, isn’t much of a castle), and consists of a ten layered, jagged-looking spiral, with a few circles and dots and things. It looks pretty cool—check out the photograph—but it means nothing to me. Then again, I majored in the liberal arts. When the circle was examined by an astrophysicist (or a “professional cleverboots,” as they are sometimes known), however, something remarkable jumped out of the shape: it’s a mathematical code.
And what secret equation or figure is hidden in this alien thought bubble?
Pi.
“The code is based on 10 angular segments with the radial jumps being the indicator of each segment,” says the astrophysicist on-call. “Starting at the centre and counting the number of one-tenth segments in each section contained by the change in radius clearly shows the values of the first 10 digits in the value of pi (3.141592654). The tenth digit has even been correctly rounded up. The little dot near the centre is the decimal point.”
How about that? I wouldn’t have noticed, but now that I’ve been told, my mind is hissing and steaming out of my tear ducts. Or are those just tears of happiness?
Very clever, crop circle-person, very clever. Consider all minds blown. And you couldn’t have done it without your old pals math and geometry.
Check out this page for ten of the most impressive crop circles to be seen on Google Earth (the new one isn’t on there yet
Another dismal post about the dismal science.
Today, we look at The Copenhagen Consensus. A group of economists are presented with a thought experiment: let’s say you had $75 billion to spend on solving one of the world’s problems – how would you allocate your funds?
Economists, being the dismal people that they are, take no account of what is “moral” or “right” or what “ought” to be done. They just try to figure out where you get the biggest bang for your buck. Their answer? Micronutirents for kids. Providing vitamin A and zinc to 80 percent of the 140 million children who lack them would provide almost $17 in health benefits for every dollar invested.
Other items in the top ten:
- Micronutirents for kids
- Expanding free trade
- Fortifying foods with iron and salt
- Expanding immunization coverage of children
- Biofortification
- Deworming
- Lowering the price of schooling
- Increasing girls' schooling
- Community-based nutrition promotion
- Support for women's reproductive roles
The majority of the most-efficient solutions deal with health, thus proving the old saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The least-efficient proposal was a plan to mitigate global warming. Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling noted that that spending $75 billion on cutting greenhouses gases would achieve almost nothing. In fact, the climate change analysis presented to the panel found that spending $800 billion until 2100 would yield just $685 billion in climate change benefits.
Economist Richard Nordhaus, in his book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, draws a similar conclusion. Projects to massively reduce greenhouse gases end up costing more than they deliver—in some cases, many trillions of dollars more. OTOH, investing in alternative energy (wind, solar, etc.) and bio-engineering can produce great results for the amount spent on them.
The economists at Copenhagen felt funding research and development of low-carbon energy technologies was worthwhile, and ranked it 14th out of the 30 proposals they considered.
Other items at the bottom of the priorities list are proposals to reduce air pollution by cutting emissions from diesel vehicles; a tobacco tax; improved stoves to reduce indoor air pollution; and extending microfinance. These are not necessarily bad ideas. It’s just that other proposals provide more bang for the 75 billion bucks.
Babs may have been on to something: It's not that girls can't do math--they just don't want to.
Courtesy CherrySoda!
Remember a few years ago, when Mattell got in trouble because a talking Barbie said Math is hard? Reinforced negative sterotypes. And then, a few years later, Harvard president Larry Summers noticed that there were more men than women in advanced mathematics, and speculated on a number of reasons, including culture and genetics. He got in trouble, too.
Well, a new study shows that a large part of a reason there are so few women pursuing careers in mathematics is because … they don’t want to. Given the choice, most girls choose not to pursue math. Not because it’s hard. Not because they can’t do the work. Just because they don’t want to.
This, in an odd way, feeds into our earlier conversation about the relative happiness of liberals vs. conservatives. Most conservatives value free markets, where millions of individuals make their own choices. Conservatives of a libertarian stripe place great emphasis on individual autonomy and responsibility. Liberals (not all, but many) have a tendency to see societal forces having a greater impact on human behavior, oftentimes determining it. Thus the impulse to place society under central control.
Here’s an example of a case where the “social forces” explanation for why girls don’t pursue math (“they are discriminated against!” “society teaches them not to!”) is outweighed by the “individual autonomy” explanation (“I don’t wanna—I think it’s boring”).
Fair and balanced: Or leaning to the left, as it often does. Journalism often presents science in less-than-accurate ways.
Courtesy nick farnhill
You'll never find any of that here! ;-) But the American Association for the Advancement of Science recently discussed how the public receives and understands science news. The situation is discouraging – there’s a lot of bad information out there, much of it the result of sloppy reporting. One of the big culprits was a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of statistics.
Meanwhile, biochemist Michael White complains about how the human desire to tell a good story often misrepresents how science really works.
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