{"id":5190,"date":"2009-08-03T07:43:06","date_gmt":"2009-08-03T12:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/?p=5190"},"modified":"2009-08-03T07:43:06","modified_gmt":"2009-08-03T12:43:06","slug":"news_you_can_use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2009\/08\/news_you_can_use.html","title":{"rendered":"News You Can Use!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers at NYU devise system to count gumballs<\/a>. Good for state fairs and third grade science class but, sadly, computer not included:<\/p>\n

“It’s a mathematical problem, it’s a geometric problem, and it’s a real physical problem as well,” said Professor Jasna Brujic, a physicist who led the team that solved the query.<\/p>\n

Johannes Kepler, the 17th-century scientist, had originally come up with a conjecture to solve the problem based on the gumballs being perfectly round, of equal size, and packed as tightly as physically possible.<\/p>\n

Only in the last decade had scientists shown Kepler’s 400-year-old conjecture was probably right — using calculations that required high-speed computers.<\/p>\n

Now, Brujic’s team, in a paper just published in the science journal Nature, takes things a step further — by giving a way to calculate the number of gumballs in a jar if they are of varying sizes.<\/p>\n

The complicated formula boils down to this: It’s easiest to figure the answer if you start from the perspective of one gumball and check how many other gumballs touch it.<\/p>\n

The team concluded that if you know the proportion of gumballs of each different size, you can figure out statistically how many are in the jar.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Researchers at NYU devise system to count gumballs. Good for state fairs and third grade science class but, sadly, computer not included: “It’s a mathematical problem, it’s a geometric problem, and it’s a real physical problem as well,” said Professor Jasna Brujic, a physicist who led the team that solved the query. Johannes Kepler, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-need_to_know"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5191,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5190\/revisions\/5191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}