Acetio | Blogma

This is one of those things that's both awesome and awful.

intrade is an Irish betting site where you can wager on anything and everything, such as "Rahm Emanuel to depart as White House Chief of Staff before end of first term" [50|37] or "The US Economy will go into Recession during 2010" [18.9|15] or "Number of US troops in Iraq on 30 June 2010 if a Democrat is elected president in 2008" [43.8|41.3]

The focus seems to be on political/financial (what's the difference?) issues, but extends to American Idol and New York City snowfall and other uncertain situations.

It's pretty heavy stuff, actually, given the Wisdom of Crowds and given that intrade numbers are able to accurately predict many events.

The site Radical Cartography is worth browsing if you have any interest in geography or maps. However, be aware that they use humongous (more than 1MB each) images on their pages which can take minutes to load.

One thing they got their hands on are the charts from the 1870 census, only the 9^th American census conducted after the first such counting of population in 1790, when the U.S. population was 3.9 million.

The 1870 census was the first to count those who had been slaves prior to abolition. It was less than 70 years after the Louisiana Purchase and the population was still very much centered in the Northeast part of the country.

Many of the charts are difficult to read, but what is more interesting to me is that they counted so many things at all. It's easy to believe that before desktop computers and the Internet that people's sense of measurement and statistical methods was very poor, yet here is ample evidence that that is not true.

Through transferring data on computers more than anything else, we have learned prefixes such as "kilo", "mega", and "giga" meaning "thousand of", "million of", and "billion of" (or "milliard of" if you're an old-timey Englishman)

Similarly, as metric measurements creep into our collective consciousness, we have become aware of the prefixes that denote small fractions such as "milli", "micro", and "nano" meaning "thousandth of a", "millionth of a", and "billionth of a"

What strikes me is that the prefixes seem to enter common parlance in symmetry. People began using "mega" (million) in casual conversation when I was a kid to mean something really big or striking e.g. "mega-awesome" and at the same time began using "micro" (millionth) to refer to something really fast e.g. "micro-second". And perhaps ten years ago the terms "giga" (billion) and "nano" (billionth) became more widely used particularly because of familiarity with gigabytes and nanotechnology. (most of us first heard the prefix "giga" when Doc Brown screeched about the "one point twenty-one gigawatts" needed to power the flux capacitor, back in 1985, during the brief period when "giga" was pronounced with a soft "g")

For eons, people have enjoyed mapping the musical scale to the color spectrum.

Despite knowing that music is waves in air and light is waves in electromagnetic fields, I decided to do a little research and math.

The color spectrum ranges from 384 to 769THz (terahertz)


By repeatedly doubling a note (say A, at 440Hz) we can find where it would actually fall in the electromagnetic spectrum.