In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, they don’t group numbers by three decimals like we do, but by two. That is, while we have thousand (1,000), million (1,000,000), billion (1,000,000,000), etc., they have lakh (1,00,000), crore (1,00,00,000), etc. Sometimes there are two decimals between each comma, sometimes three. Somebody with 10 million rupees would have …
Tag Archives: math
Links for November 30th
Christian Science Monitor: Way cleared for horse slaughter to resume in US after 5-year banCongress has passed a bill, and the president has signed it into law, that re-legalizes the slaughter of horses for human consumption. Banning that practice was a huge mistake, for reasons that were obvious at the time, but it took a …
Links for July 19th
Sunlight Foundation: Use the Net!Both Sen. Jim Webb and Mark Warner are still filing campaign finance reports with the FEC on paper. They've presumably each got small staffs who do all of their data collection and number crunching on computers, only to them print out their campaign finance reporters, snail-mail them to the FEC, who …
Links for June 15th
Wikipedia: “A” size illustrationThis is a simple chart demonstrating how “A” sizes of paper (e.g., an A1 sheet is similar in size to an 8.5"x11" sheet) are sized, from A0–A8. It's a golden spiral! I'm really impressed by the elegance of this. USPS Postal Addressing StandardsEver wondered what the proper format is for an address …
Links for May 16th
Discovery Channel: Mike Rowe Senate TestimonyThe host of "Dirty Jobs" provided an important argument to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about why our education system needs to emphasize skilled trades. College is not for everybody. Way too many kids are going to college—it doesn't make economic sense, for them or for …
Links for March 21st
Stack Overflow: Regular expression to search for GadaffiHow do you identify "Gadaffi" (and its many, many variants) in an block of text? With this regular expression. \b(Kh?|Gh?|Qu?)[aeu](d['dt]?|t|zz|dhd)h?aff?[iy]\b looks like the winner. Bonus points go to the guy who figured out that it can be matched with Soundex, which is probably a better way to deal …
Links for March 19th
Wolfram MathWorld: Pi DigitsThe first thirty million digits of pi are almost uniformly distributed. That is, 1 occurs with the same frequency as 2, 3, 4, etc. That's consistent with randomness, but hardly evidence of it. Ludolph Van Ceulen’s HeadstoneThis Dutch mathematician devoted his life to calculating pi. By the time of his death, in …