Alexander Williams

"I was stunned," Schipke says. "It was like finding a picture of Bill Gates in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The colophon [the title page] named the copyist as Udo of Aachen, and I just had to find out more about more...

“100% Kelly strategy marks the boundary between aggressive and insane investing”

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers more...

“ScienceDaily (May 9, 2008) — Gamers have devoted countless years of collective brainpower to rescuing princesses or protecting the planet against alien invasions. This week researchers at the University of Washington will try to harness those finely honed skills to more...

Ok, so here's where I tell all about how I (now we) got to be tied for third place on the netflix prize. And I don't mean a sordid tale of computing in the jungle, but rather the actual math more...

“Today's tax codes are complicated, but the ancient Aztecs likely shared your pain. To measure tracts of taxable land, Aztec mathematicians had to develop their own specialized arithmetic, which has only now been decoded.”

The Bayesian ‘truth serum’ (BTS) is a scoring method that provides truthtelling incentives for respondents answering multiple-choice questions about intrinsically private matters (opinions, tastes, past behavior). The method requires respondents to supply not only personal answers more...

I've never been able to solve a Rubik's Cube. It's a personal failing I chalk up to mild ADD, horrible spatial organization skills, and the desire to not get beaten up in middle school. Somehow, none of that gets in more...

“When British Gas commissioned scientists to create a formula to predict Sod's Law we wanted part of the action. We didn't get it, but we did manage to get hold of the plucky scientists' report. Here it is:”

We start with a square array of 300 by 300 smaller squares, called "sites". Initially, 5% of the sites are chosen at random to be "infected" - these sites are coloured red. The picture then evolves in discrete time steps more...

This is a great visualization that just keeps getting better and better all the way through. The way the demonstration progressively expands your ability to perceive what is happening is fascinating.

PHI ( Φ ) - the Golden Proportion The whole of the Fibonacci series is built on itself. A sequence like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... always needs 1 to increment its last attained number. This 1 is like more...