7 billion people. What number are you?

7 billion people. What number are you?

"By the time Christopher Columbus died, there were only 500 million people on Earth. By 2050, the U.N. expects that number to swell to 9.3 billion. That said, I am the also the 4,985,259,234th person to be alive on this planet.

The BBC has a tool to figure out your birth order (and we're not talking about siblings and whether Judy was the favorite) among the people currently alive today. They'll also stack you up against your country of residence and gender, and how you compare against the 908 bajillion* people currently breathing in oxygen at this very moment.

It's no doubt the statistics are a bit staggering, but it's estimated that the 7 billionth baby will be born on October 31 in India. It's a sobering fact that in about 40 years, we can expect to share that space with 2 billion more people with, hopefully, a clearer answer on how to give everyone else a piece of the resource pie."

in Time

Ler Mais

Monkeys recreating Shakespeare

Monkeys recreating Shakespeare

At Last, Monkeys Are Recreating Shakespeare

"A programmer has finally found a way to answer the age-old question: would an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters be able to produce Shakespeare's works? The answer: yes, as long as they're virtual monkeys.

Jesse Anderson is a computer programmer who has created a system of computer programs -- i.e. virtual monkeys -- that continually create random sequences of text. The sequences are all nine characters long and once they're created they're checked against Shakespeare's canon. If the text hasn't appeared somewhere in Shakespeare's  work, it's discarded. If it has appeared, it's added to a collection that is quickly becoming a recreation of Shakespeare's entire body of work.

OK, but isn't using a computer program, the so-called virtual monkeys, to recreate Shakespeare kind of cheating? Not really, according to the BBC. Even though the random generation is being performed by a machine, it's still an extraordinary task. The BBC reports:

"To get a sense of the scale of the project, there are about 5.5 trillion different combinations of any nine characters from the English alphabet. Mr Anderson's monkeys are generating random nine-character strings to try to produce all these strings and thereby find those that appear in Shakespeare's works."

Mathematicians have said that Anderson's project, which he began on August 21, wouldn't have a chance of being completed within his lifetime, if he hadn't put effective constraints on the results, such as keeping the correct sequences. As it is, however, calculations are showing that the recreation is "99.990% complete."

in Time

Ler Mais