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Numbers

How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know?

October 17, 2010

Here is an interesting piece on how two statisticians estimated how many words William Shakespeare may have known.

This argument was repeated with a third, fourth, fifth sample, and so on. Each sample corresponds to discovering a new and different complete works of Shakespeare. For each sample, it is possible to estimate the number of new words that appear that have not appeared before. With each new sample, the number of new words decreases, but the total number of words used increases. Eventually, given enough samples, the number of new words approaches about 35,000. This means that in addition the 31,534 words that Shakespeare knew and used, there were approximately 35,000 words that he knew but didn’t use. Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words.

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BBC News – One in 13 people on the planet now use Facebook

July 21, 2010

Social network giant Facebook has announced that it has registered its 500 millionth member – one in 13 of the entire global population.

The site, which launched in 2004, has gained around 100 million new users in the last six months alone. Facebook said the number was “an important milestone” and added that it was “humbled and inspired” by the stories of its users.

BBC News – One in 13 people on the planet now use Facebook.

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Global Mobile Phone Usage. How Many Phones Are There?

Interesting information from a UN report done last year about the use of cellular phones around the world. By the end of last year there were an estimated 4.1bn mobile subscriptions, up from 1bn in 2002. That represents six in 10 of the world’s population, although it is hard to make a precise calculation about [...]

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1.2 Billion YouTube Videos a Day

From TechCrunch But the real number of streams/day, we’ve now confirmed with a source at Google, is above 1.2 billion/day worldwide. That matches what we’ve heard from other sources. That pretty much means everyone on the Internet, on average, is watching one YouTube video per day.

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How Many Active Facebook Users?

Facebook updated their public statistics with the number of active users on the site now over 130 million. The company also updated their advertising estimates provided to advertisers when creating an ad and the total number of users there adds up to more than 133 million users. Also of interest is that Facebook has grown [...]

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How the Telephone Keypad Came About

Here is an interesting article about how the telephone companies came about choosing the keypad configuration for dialing numbers. Ever wonder who came up with the order of numbers on a telephone? Ever wonder why it isn’t the same as those on a calculator, or a keyboard, ascending from lowest to highest? After all, adding [...]

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Undulating Numbers

An undulating number is any number that has the form ababab… when in the base 10 number system. It is only considered after at least three digits, because otherwise all numbers below 100 would be undulating. The first 20 such numbers are: 101, 111, 121, 131, 141, 151, 161, 171, 181, 191, 202, 212, 222, [...]

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The First Automatic Calculator

“Wilhelm Schickard built the first automatic calculator called the “Calculating Clock” in 1623. Some 20 years later, in 1645, French philosopher Blaise Pascal invented the calculation device later known as Pascal’s calculator, which was used for taxes in France until 1799. The German philosopher G.W.v.Leibniz also produced a calculating machine.” [wikipedia]

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