Factoids: The Heart Shape

Believe it or not, there is a word for the shape that is universally recognized as the symbol of love. I first encountered the word in high school trigonometry, and it was plotted as a result of a polar function. That shape is called cardioid, which literally means heart-shaped, and it’s produced by plotting the function r(θ) = 1 – sin(θ). Technically, it follows the shape of an apple, with its rounded base, rather than the pointed tip with which we usually draw the shape.

The heart symbol can also be typed by pressing Alt+5 [on the numpad, on the right-side of the keyboard], just like this: ♥

As it turns out, there are other ways of plotting the curve, and MathWorld provided several other functions to plot the curve and achieve the perfect shape, using either rectangular, polar or parametric functions. (Source)

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More factoids:

What’s the point of screen savers?

The story behind the most popular wallpaper.

Why Google is named … Google?

Why the letters on the keyboard is arranged as such?

Factoids: QWERTY

Qwerty (which is a valid dictionary word BTW ) refers to the most popular layout of letters and characters on a keyboard. It was called such in reference to the first six letters on the first row of letters.

It was patented by Christopher Sholes and then sold the layout to Remington in 1874, who incorporated the layout in one of their typewriters. The arrangement of the letters were determined by trial and error to avoid “type jams”, which occurs when two neighboring type bars in a type writer were hit at the same time.

Eventually, the qwerty layout became the standard, mostly because of the failure of some alternatives to show any significant advantages. The closest thing to an alternative is the Dvorak keyboard layout, which claims to uses less finger motion, increases typing rate, and reduces errors compared to the QWERTY arrangement. Many modern OS’s support this layout.

You can impress people by typing in the lengthy word TYPEWRITER using only the first row.

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Have you checked out the other factoids yet?

 

Factoids: Google

Google started as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both Ph.D. students at Stanford in 1996. The idea behind the proposed search engine is to analyze the relationships between websites in order to provide much better ranking of results, in comparison to existing techniques at the time, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Instead, sites are ranked according to the number of links to the page from other highly relevant web pages.

Google was based on the word googol,  which means the number 10¹⁰⁰, or 1 followed by 100 zeros, in reference to the immense number of information on the Net. The search engine originally goes with that name, but when the founders presented their project to an angel investor and received a check addressed to "Google" the search engine was renamed to its present name.

Because Google had been the most popular search engine for a very long time now, the name had become a word itself. The phrase ‘to google’ means to search for information on the Web regardless of search engine used.

Factoids: Bliss

There is no doubt that the most popular wallpaper out there was Bliss, which was XP’s default wallpaper. The image depicts rolling green hills set against a background of blue sky and a few clouds.

The image was an actual photograph, not a computer rendering, taken on a January day in the late 90s. The image was taken by the professional photographer Charles O’rear, who lives in St. Helena, Napa County and works for the digital-design company High Turn. The image was taken from a hill in Sonoma County, California, which the author always passes on his way to work. The hill was originally a grapevine plantation, but during the previous summer, a great fire burned all of the bushes, turning the fertile ground barren for a while, to be replaced by grass later.

The hill was revisited and rephotographed in 2006. You can see the photo here.