[Via MacUpdate]

Instacalc just blows my mind. It's such a simple idea, brilliantly executed: It's sort of like a Web 2.0 mini-Excel, allowing you to quickly create a calculator for anything--body mass, loan repayment, YouTube valuation--with simple or complex calculations, and then share them with your friends, colleagues, or the world. It knows lots of mathematical operations and functions, understands things like "3 billion" or "8 kbps," and even does some basic programming-like operations.

Unlike a full-fledged spreadsheet, Instacalc just has rows, and in each row you can enter a number or bit of math, and the result will be shown at the end of the row as you type. You can refer to values from other rows by their row number (e.g. 5 + R1), or you can give a row a name by putting "rowname =" before it and then refer to it by name (5 + rowname). You can click on the result at the end of a row to hide the row and show only the result, and you can put "//" before a row to make it into a comment, i.e. a text label that doesn't do anything but give information to whoever's using your Instacalc. If you've ever done any programming, all of this is probably sounding pretty familiar, but even if you haven't Instacalc is easy to use. On top of all the various operations, you can also quickly create bar, pie, and line charts, like this country population chart.

But wait, it gets better. Like any good Web 2.0 service, Instacalc lets you embed your calculator in any web page with a snippet of HTML.

Obviously, I'm very impressed by Instacalc and am shuffling it straight into my bookmarks. Head over there and check out some of the sample calculators to quickly get an idea of what it's capable of. Once you've played around a bit, post links to your Instacalcs in the comments.

Fractal flames are a particularly colorful and elegant breed of fractal. We've seen them previously in the beautiful Electric Sheep screensaver, but if you're feeling artsy and mathsy today you can make your own using Apophysis. It's an open source program for Windows that does fractal flames and fractal flames only. Getting started with Apophysis isn't too tough, but MS Paint it ain't. To really use the program to its fullest you're going to have to have to understand what a lot of numbers mean. Fractals are just math, after all. For that, you'll want to head to the Apophsys wiki where there's documentation, scrips and scripting reference, and links to tutorials. If you want to see what Apophysis is really capable of, check out this gorgeous gallery by Roger Johnston. Feel free to post links to your own galleries in the comments.

[Via TechRepublic via Negativesmart]

BusinessWeek is running a story featuring Kevin Rose on the cover, with the headline: "How This Kid made $60 Million In 18 Months." That sounds like a heckuva success story, but not everyone believes the math. Our own CEO Jason Calacanis debunked it himself, but since he owns us and Netscape - a digg competitor - I figured y'all might want to hear it from others in the community too, including Jason Fried at 37signals and Scott Rosenberg - writer, editor and co-founder of Salon.

The debunking more or less centers around figuring out how BW came upon their numbers, since much of the talk in the article is of what Digg is estimated to be worth, and where the company is going to move next - not what Rose presently has in his pocket. Ultimately, it sounds like BW took Digg's $200m estimated worth and divided it by Kevin's roughly 30% ownership to snag that $60m phantom number. Decent math, but shoddy tactics. BW says they got the numbers from 'unnamed sources', but that doesn't get them out of the trouble of slapping it on their front cover.

Check out the debunkings I've linked for more in-depth details on the article and where BW went wrong, as well as some funny parodies that are already arising, including *surprise!* how 9rules has suddenly announced that they themselves have made billions in just 12 months!

Web Math is a site I found when frustrated one evening that I couldn't figure out how to calculate a certain scenario. In hindsight, the scenario was ridiculously simple, so I'd rather not describe it here. In any event, in my Google searches to find a suitable solver for my problem, I found Web Math, which has various solvers for different types of equations. What is so cool about Web Math is that the application will break down your equation and explain to you how to solve it. I love it!

Can computers do a better job than humans at telling authentic works of art from forgeries? Mathematician Dan Rockmore thinks it's possible. At ZDNet's Emerging Technology Trends blog has an interesting article about Rockmore's work at Dartmouth, where he's developed software that makes statistical comparisons of works of art to determine which were painted by the greats and which were not. Rockmore's software can even tell when a particular painting was painted by more than one artist, such as in the case of a master painting the figures and an apprentice finishing the backgrounds.

[Via Slashdot]