Slightly In Love With Wolfram
If you’re a huge nerd, you’ve probably at least seen Wolfram Alpha. At least once a week or so I stop to play with it to see if I can get it to do anything cool. So it can tell you where most of the worlds Portuguese speakers live and give you a side-by-side comparison of the population, land area, and GDP of South Africa and Lesotho. Both of those are extremely cool, but this morning I found a new one. Just in case you ever wanted to know what would happen if you rolled two 12-sided dice (since 3rd Ed. D&D will probably never give you the opportunity) it will now give you the mean value and a histogram! It works for an number of dice with any number of sides. Even the mysteriously fair 5-sider. There seems to have been a large gaming-related “expansion” or something to the site, because it will also tell you the probability of a full house.
This kind of thing could probably entertain me for hours.
Tags: games, links, statistics