This week’s look into my del.icio.us bookmarks brings us to…
I think I remember seeing this when I was a kid. It’s a fascinating visualization of the differences between different powers of ten. The video starts with a viewpoint one meter above a family at a picnic, then zooms out to 10 meters, then to 100, then to 1000, then… all the way to 1025 meters, and then back to 1 meter and down to 10-15. See for yourself here at YouTube. (Hmm… I tried to embed the video directly but it screwed up the site. Is there something special I have to do to make it appear?)
I only wish they did one like this using powers of 2, for use in my cryptology teaching materials. I have the hardest time convincing students that a 32-bit key is not just twice as secure as a 16-bit key, but 216 times more secure.
Filed under: Crypto, Geekhood, Math, Weekly features
embedding…i don’t fully understand how this sort of thing works but i’ll
tell you what happened to me.
i found that the old WP version at AO will allow me to simply paste the code
into the edit w/o problem. the new version of WP at my edublogs.org page would
not. i couldn’t get it to display at all.
it could be something about this most recent version of WP…but i wouldn’t be
able to say a) if it is a WP problem or b) what that problem is exactly.
not much help huh?