Technology

This is an awesome old-school style video demonstrating how simple cam-based mechanical systems can be implemented to process numbers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F7m02XDfvE

Calculating reciprocals, squares, and tangents using rotating disks:  it’s amazing stuff!  I wish I had seen (and appreciated) something like this as a young student.  It might have made me appreciate engineering a little more.

Be sure to check out the barrel cam at the end that is used to compute gun elevation.  I imagine something like this is at the heart of the mechanical calculators out there.

This story in the New York Times summarizes a recently published study about interconnectedness on Facebook.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.htmlhttp://goo.gl/sqIVT

A computational analysis of the 721 million worldwide Facebook users shows that the average distance between two people is about 4.74 “friends”.   Roughly speaking, given anyone in the world on Facebook, a friend of your friend is likely to be friends with a friend of their friend.

An amazing result!  And a cool application of graph and network theory.  Now the questions becomes “What can we do with this knowledge?”