Archive for September, 2006
Sunday, September 24th, 2006
The Ising model is a simple model used to describe a magnet: It consists of a grid of spins. Each spin can be thought of as a tiny magnet, and can have the value +1 or -1 (called 'up' and 'down'). Two neighboring spins interact, having positive energy if they ...
Posted in Mathematics | No Comments »
Thursday, September 14th, 2006
Benford discovered that in many sets of data, the leading digit is much more likely to be '1' than any other digit. Take, for example, the population counts of nations. The most significat digit probabilities there are as follows:
MSDProbability
10.26
20.20
30.10
40.13
50.07
60.08
70.07
80.05
90.04
The MathWorld article offers an explanation in terms of distributions that are ...
Posted in Mathematics | No Comments »
Monday, September 4th, 2006
How much light to polarizing sunglasses block? To answer this, a couple of things need to be clarified. First, what is meant by 'how much light', and second, how polarization works.
To answer the first question, it seems best to measure the power that the sunglasses absorb, i.e. the energy-per-time. Light ...
Posted in Physics | No Comments »
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