This looks interesting, although I haven’t yet wrapped my brain around it:

Your Task: Start at the Root of an n-dimensional Cube, and try to reach the opposite Side — the red Cube — within shortest Time.

- Link

Law of Optical Volumes: The Math Behind Wired’s New Logo

When the February issue of Wired Magazine debuted with a new logo, we explained inside the magazine that it “obeys the Law of Optical Volumes.” We were being coy –many readers went scurrying to Wikipedia and Google to investigate this curious law, only to find … nothing.

Here’s the skinny: The Law of Optical Volumes is Wired creative director Scott Dadich’s term for a typography rule that governs the spacing of characters within a font. The theory behind it has been evident on newsstands for years now, thanks in part to typography guru Jonathan Hoefler, whose firm Hoefler & Frere-Jones designed Wired’s new typefaces used throughout the magazine. You can also see Hoefler’s work at typography.com – or in The Wall Street Journal, Esquire and Martha Stewart Living.

And here’s a definition: The Law of Optical Volumes states that the area between any two letters in a word must be of equal measure throughout the word, and remain consistent throughout the body of text.

The Law boils down to the science of kerning. In typography jargon, kerning is the act of adjusting the space between two letters to make words and sentences lay out more evenly. For example in the word “VAST,” there is usually reduced space between the V and A, and maybe extra space between the S and T. Otherwise the “VA” would seem too far apart and the “ST” would seem cramped.

[Paul Boutin: wired.com]

Via Slashdot.

A thought for today: Three in the Morning

When we wear out our minds, stubbornly clinging to one partial view of things, refusing to see a deeper agreement between this and its complementary opposite, we have what is called “three in the morning.”

What is this “three in the morning?”

A monkey trainer went to his monkeys and told them: “As regards your chestnuts: you are going to have three measures in the morning and four in the afternoon.

At this they all became angry. So he said: “All right, in that case I will give you four in the morning and three in the afternoon.” This time they were satisfied.

The two arrangements were the same in that the number of chestnuts did not change. But in the one case the animals were displeased, and in the other they were satisfied. The keeper had been willing to change his personal arrangement in order to meet objective conditions. He lost nothing by it!

The truly wise man, considering both sides of the question without partiality, sees them both in the light of Tao.

This is called following two courses at once.

[Thomas Merton: The Way of Chuang Tzu, Shambala Pocket Classics]

Image: THE MONKEY TRAINER
India, Bengala, Region of Chandraketugarh
2nd-1st c. BC
Terracotta, 15.5” by 21”
asianart.com: Link

BoingBoing reports on nontransitive dice: trick dice, weighted not physically but mathematically. Ivars Peterson explains the principle of nontransitive dice in his MathTrek column:

The game involves four specially numbered dice. You let your opponent pick any one of the four dice. You choose one of the remaining three dice. Each player tosses his or her die, and the higher number wins the throw. Amazingly, in a game involving 10 or more throws, you will nearly always have more wins.

Here’s what the dice look like:

Dice numbered in this fashion are known as nontransitive dice. They were designed by Bradley Efron, a statistician at Stanford University, to help illuminate probability paradoxes that involve the violation of a mathematical property called transitivity.
(more…)

“A number is an abstract object, tokens of which are symbols used in counting and measuring. A symbol which represents a number is called a numeral, but in common usage the word number is used for both the abstract object and the symbol.”

- Wikipedia: Link.