It’s a double-wheeled pizza cutter shaped like the symbol π, and it’s doubly awesome because when you slice up a pizza, you’re literally exploring the relationship between a circle’s circumference and its diameter.
Now, I know it’s too late for Christmas, but maybe that special math geek in your life needs a Valentine’s Day gift?
It’s $18 at Think Geek.
(via Coudal)
Hey kids! Impress your friends! We’re number 1! It’s not just New Year’s Day on Saturday, it’s also a trick of the numbers — look at all those ones!
And guess what? It won’t happen again until — click for more…
Click to continue reading “Fun with numerological illiteracy”
In 1974, an irritated Cleveland Browns fan sent a letter of complaint to the organization, asking them to please quell what he thought was dangerous behaviour on the part of some of their fans. Here’s the letter he sent:
And, here is the response he received:
(from Clevescene, via Coudal)
Brings to mind this classic “Deep Thoughts,” by Jack Handy:
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier as to cut them all down? Well, maybe if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
Amy and I got a Boxee Box earlier this year and we adore it. As a “Merry Christmas Eve,” the Boxee folks highlighted this video. I thought it was perfect for sharing.
Everyone with a cat knows that it is impossible to wrap Christmas presents with one in the house, because they go absolutely nuts for those shiny, coiled ribbons.
And, everyone with a cat probably spends a shameful amount of money on fancy cat-toys that are designed to bounce and squeak and are invariably ignored about three minutes after the first toss, no matter if it’s spiked with catnip or made from real rabbit fur.
So, the obvious solution is to make some sort of cat toy from ribbon, right? I cannot be the first person to think of this, but on the assumption that I am, I hereby release it into the public domain.
Pop your package of beer-making ingredients into this special cask, just add water, and pop it away for a week, then come back to perfectly brewed beer? Sounds awesome.
It’s about $150 and it makes 10 L of beer at a go, so you could get a fast payback, that’s for sure.
Is it too late for Christmas? That’s okay, I’ll forgive you the belated gift.
(thanks, Andrea!)
Astonishing. The puppeteer behind Alf (Paul Fusco) stays in character through the bloopers and is generally pretty funny and quick-witted.
Then, he drops the N-bomb.
Like, a bunch.
Some commenters on BadTVBlog say that he is probably riffing on a contemporary episode of L.A. Law, but it’s still pretty startling thing to hear.
Ah, Alf, I’ll never look at you the same way again. Also, you cannot eat my cat.
(via BadTVBlog)
I love that this white-wine decanter has an ice chamber designed to keep the wine cool without letting melted ice dilute the wine at all. From the looks of it, the melted water won’t spill out when you pour the wine, either, so long as you’re reasonably careful.
Plus, it’s made from recycled windshields, which is why it has that green tint.
It’s $50 on Uncommon Goods, which is a little pricey, but not really that far-out. Unfortunately, it is currently sold out. Must be popular!
I’m not sure if this is a real improvement over the traditional way of doing multiplication by hand — you’re just counting up line intersections instead of adding up columns of numbers — but it sure is pretty!
(via Gizmodo)
If you hate Christmas shopping but love mathematics, you’re in luck. Over at Wired, Garth Sundem has detailed a formula that you can follow so that you spend exactly the right amount of money on each person’s gift. Then you don’t end up buying your brother-in-law a $50 gift and running out of cash before you get anything for your girlfriend.
He says:
1. Define your total budget. Be realistic. For this example, I’m using $500.
2. List everyone for whom you need to buy a gift.
3. Now next to each person’s name, give them an importance rank from 1-10 (10 high).
4. Sum all the people, multiplied by their ranks. It should look something like this 10(wife)+8(kid1)+8(kid2)+3(dad)+3(mom)+1(in-laws)+4(nephew)=37(total)
5. Set your total equal to your budget: 37(total)=$500
6. Solve for (total): total=$13.50
7. Multiply this “total” by each person’s importance to see how much you should spend. In this example, your wife gets 10*13.5=$135, and your kids get 8*13.5=$108.
With only $500 in your pocket, and without time at this point to dilly dally with another shopping trip, you’ll be forced to stick to it.
Of course, this only works if you can follow your budget perfectly. If you instead find the perfect gift for someone but it’s a few bucks higher than you’re “allowed” to spend, it will throw all the other gifts out of whack.
Also, in any realistic universe, finding a gift that is to-the-penny exact on your budget will be much more stressful than shopping in the first place.
I would add some fuzziness. Also, this would be interesting to figure out after Christmas, when you reconcile the receipts, and see how close you come to the ideal budget.
This intrigues me — a hand-saw combined with a table saw, so that you move the wood over the blade, but it’s not powered.
I would have thought it would be too difficult to make extensive cuts, but the video is pretty convincing. Although, they don’t show people ripping eight feet of plywood, so who knows.
At any rate, this looks like it’s more for precision work — and judging from the demo video, you can accomplish some great precision work!
(via Boing Boing)
Who here knows the legend of animals being given the gift of speech at midnight on Christmas Eve — allegedly to reward them for giving up their manger (and the rest of the barn) to the newborn Jesus.
I find it kind of odd that this legend seems to have floated along, under the radar, and isn’t more of a main myth every Christmas. Every child wants to wait up and catch Santa delivering presents, but no one wants to have a chat with Fluffy?
Anyway, this adorable compilation of singing animals was sent to me by Kent. I do not think I can improve on his explanation, which went thus:
Merry Absurd Χριστός-mas, Granty. ooo Kent And Ally. After extensive review, I have found that the x’s might be kisses and the o’s might be hugs. So just hugs to you, or kisses, take it however you like. Also, xxx might have been misleading. So yeah, back to the point, I just showed you why they call it X-mas, in a long winded, roundabout way.
Happy Caturday, Kent and everyone!
Love wine but hate corkscrews? This Bosch power screwdriver comes with a corkscrew attachment so you can power that pesky cork right out of the bottle.
Two thoughts come to mind — first of all, that this would be great not only for manly-men who want a powerdrill-corkscrew, but also for arthritics. And secondly, that this is miles better than my current scheme of sending a drill bit deep into the cork and then smashing the bottle in a rage against the nearest brick wall and slurping the wine out from the shards of glass.
(Amazon, via OhGizmodo and tdw)
