Today is a big day for lovers of the number 12, and no one loves 12s more than the members of the Dozenal Society. The Dozenal Society advocates for ditching the base-10 system we use for counting in favor of a base-12 system. Because 12 is cleanly divisible by more factors than 10 is (1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12 vs. 1, 2, 5 and 10), such a system would neaten up our mathematical lives in various ways. But a dozenal system would require us to change our number words so that, for example, what we know as 20 would... READ ON

Kryptos photo via Wikimedia Commons Kryptos is an encrypted sculpture installed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It's a set of huge copper plates with enciphered text carved into them -- for example, one segment reads TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP, though it looks a lot nicer in context. Although the sculpture was installed in 1990, it took until 1999 for someone to actually decrypt part of the message: of the four segments of text, three were decrypted (complete with intentional... READ ON

When I want to add two numbers, I use a calculator. Made of metal. But if you're the awesome woodworker Matthias Wandel, you build a binary adding machine out of wood, then drop marbles into it in order to get your result. BEHOLD, THE WOODEN ADDING MACHINE: My favorite part is when he gets to the bit representing the number 64 -- the machine's registers literally overflow, resetting the machine's state. You guys, all those years of computer science classes suddenly make sense now. Wandel has... READ ON