Pendulums are nature’s clocks, and a short Python program makes it fun to calculate some fascinating things with them. — I’ve seen some interesting things by staring out my big window into the dark blue daytime sky above the Denver skyline. Most balloons have been of the small party type, usually accidentally released by a careless youngster somewhere. …

Your birthday party has 23 guests. Two of them probably share a birthday. But wait, there’s a bizarre twist where you might need to let in 25 on average! — How many people need to be at a party on average, so that at least two of them share a birthday? This is the kind of problem that Python shines at when you tackle it with a Monte Carlo simulation. …

They need a calculator. Do them a big favor and get one with Python programming built in. It could be a life changer! Why Python? Recently, Python became the most popular programming language in the world. …

“It was the size of a basketball at arm’s length.” … Seriously???? What is Angular Size? Angular size is the apparent visual size of an object, and it depends both on the actual size and the actual distance of an object from the viewer. For example, the sun and the moon have nearly identical…

A short Python program lets us estimate when the oceans will cover Florida. Seriously. If you know the radius of a sphere, you can easily use Python to calculate the sphere’s volume. Or, if you know a sphere’s volume, you can calculate its radius. …

The 100-Prisoners riddle is ridiculously weird and hard to believe, but with a short Python program we can verify, or dispute, what the experts claim. Imagine a prison with 100 prisoners, each with a number from 1 to 100 printed on their back. A room is set up with 100…

Here’s a short Python function that makes it easy to calculate the shortest distance between any two points on the planet. The distance between two x,y points in a plane is easily found using the Pythagorean theorem. However, the distance between two points on a sphere, such as the earth…

Python makes it simple to calculate just how fast a space station needs to spin to generate one G of artificial gravity. — In the movie Interstellar, Mathew McConaughey and crew start their wheel-shaped station spinning in space in order to generate one G of artificial gravity, or the same acceleration we experience due to gravity here on Earth. …

Sometimes what appears to be a simple calculation turns out to be quite complicated. But Python brings back the simplicity! Latitude and longitude coordinates are most often expressed in either decimal degrees, such as on the girl’s arm in the photo above, or in degrees, minutes, and seconds. In Google…