Sunday, January 24, 2010

This Geek Clock can only be read by rocket scientists

This Geek Clock can only be read by rocket scientists

Well, time to turn in my geek card. I can't make heads or tails of this Geek Clock, which has a crazy equation for every hour of the day. Lucky for us (you're with me on this, right?), the product listing says each clock comes with a cheat sheet.
A Geek Clock can be yours for only $25. Bonus points if you decipher any of the glyphs above (working them out, I mean — obviously all the answers are right there).
UncommonGoods, via GeekSugar

-- from DVICE
Cheat Sheet (included with each clock):
1 - Legendre's constant is a mathematical constant occurring in a formula conjectured by Adrien-Marie Legendre to capture the asymptotic behavior of the prime-counting function. Its value is now known to be exactly 1.
2 - A joke in the math world: An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says, "You're all idiots," and pours two beers.
3 - A unicode character XML "numeric character reference."
4 - Modular arithmetic, also known as clock arithmetic, is a system of arithmetic for integers, where numbers "wrap around" after they reach a certain value. The modular multiplicative inverse of 2 (mod 7) is the integer /a/ such that 2*/a/ is congruent to 1 modulo 7.
5 - The Golden Mean...reworked a little.
6 - Three factorial (3*2*1=6)
7 - A repeating decimal that is proven to be exactly equal to 7 with Cauchy's Convergence Test.
8 - Graphical representation of binary code.
9 - An example of a base-4 number, which uses the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3 to represent any real number.
10 - A Binomial Coefficient, also known as the choose function. 5 choose 2 is equal to 5! divided by (2!*(5-2)!)
11 A hexadecimal, or base-16, number.
12 - a radical

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