'Mathlete' Smashes Human Calculation Record

The world's fastest human calculator on Tuesday broke his own record for working out a 200-digit number using nothing but brain power to produce the answer in just over 70 seconds.

Alexis Lemaire, a 27-year-old Frenchman, correctly calculated the 13th root of a random 200-digit number from a possible 393 trillion answers.

Click here for more information.

Voyager 2 Probe Reaches Solar System Boundary

The Voyager 2 spacecraft has crossed an important space frontier called the termination shock, and in a few years may become the first object made by humans to travel outside the solar system.

Click here for more information.

VisIt

VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms. Users can quickly generate visualizations from their data, animate them through time, manipulate them, and save the resulting images for presentations. VisIt contains a rich set of visualization features so that you can view your data in a variety of ways. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range.

Polyhedra.org

Polyhedra.org is a collection of interactive models based on the canvas element.

The Universal Digital Library

The mission is to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24×7, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.

Also see my previous post on the World Digital Library.

Sliding Block Puzzles

Very challenging sliding-block puzzles at PuzzleBeast.

A Visual Dictionary of Special Plane Curves

The name says it all. Also check out the main page.

The Descartes Circle Theorem

When Kissing Involves Trigonometry is a very interesting article on the Descartes Circle Theorem.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a sequel to the popular freeware game Crayon Physics. Or you can think of it as the game I would have created if I would have had more than 7 days to do it. Way more than 7 days. More like 7 months or 17 months.

Anyway Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D physics puzzle game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics.