Theory
A Fibonacci Cèilidh
by Nick Glossop on April 5, 2013
The mathusiasts at Numberphile go all Braveheart with a Fibonacci sequence tartan and accompanying skirl.
Dance (wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous) critters!
Fun fact: At the Battle of Stirling Bridge, William Wallace arranged his defensive shiltrons in Fibonacci sequence. The numerous but innumerate English invaders were baffled as well as defeated there. …
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Folding And Cutting The Space-Time Continuum (with things you probably have around the house)
by Nick Glossop on February 11, 2013
With paper, felt pens, scissors and some unspecified power tools, the charming mathemusician, Vihart, plays Grinderman with the fabric of reality. Dance, critters!
via Open Culture…
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 293 – Marking Music Matriculation
by Marty Schwartz on October 21, 2012
When the crosshairs of impending budget cuts find their way to a school board, one of the first programs to catch a bullet is inevitably the arts. Drama classrooms get re-tiled for use as math rooms, easels get boxed up and shipped to more affluent schools, and band instruments get hocked for extra spending cash and/or textbooks that don’t describe the Korean War as “our nation’s next big challenge.” Music …
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TEDx Summit 2012 On Now, In Doha
by Lorelei Loveridge on April 17, 2012
I am. Emerging from this overwhelming sense that there is nothing else to talk about in the Middle East but Syria, which frankly nauseates me and is more than I can handle at present (I mean…insert expletive three letter acronym with exclamation and question mark). Yeah, I went into hiding, I know, sigh, again. I just could not find the words, though surely someone else has been talking about …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 95 – Who Do Jamu? Do You?
by Marty Schwartz on April 10, 2012
It’s only a matter of time before we’re all hopped up on jamu.
My Indonesian fanbase (and according to the figures before me, you all constitute a whopping 0.37% of my adoring millions) will no doubt agree with this. Jamu is old-school medicine, once (and still) sold by the Indonesian equivalent of shamans and witch-doctors and road-side Nerve Tonic scam-artists.
It’s mainly an herbal medicine, cultivated from various …
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Artificial Trees As Wind And Solar Harvesters
by Nick Glossop on January 30, 2012
Do androids dream under electric trees?
A london-based company is conspiring to stick a power plant right in your back yard (and your front yard too).
SolarBotanic will introduce artificial trees that make use of renewable energy from the sun and wind, they are an efficient clean and environmentally sound means of collecting solar radiation and wind energy.
In this biomimicry concept our trees are fitted with Nanoleaves, a
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Astro-Time Is So Analog
by Nick Glossop on January 19, 2012
Horologists split on the Leap Second
The earth’s movement is slowing down by two thousandths of a second each day, which means astronomical time is out of sync with atomic time.
To reconcile this difference we have leap seconds, extra seconds which we add to time measurements every few years.
If we abandon leap seconds, and rely only on atomic clocks, time measurements will start to deviate from the position
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Logical And Linguistic Wrinkles And Factoids
by Nick Glossop on November 29, 2011
This dizzying tour of some of the more notable paradoxical wrinkles and woolly conundra complicating our reality comes to us from the Open University, the same folks who brought us a hugely entertaining history of the English language (after the break). Both series seem tailor-made for clever people like me who talk loudly in restaurants. Enjoy.
Adventures in thought
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The Entropy Clock
by Nick Glossop on November 14, 2011
This week’s Minute Physics lasts a minute and 50 seconds and features a different narrator (CalTech physicist Sean Carroll) – entropy up to its old increasing tricks?
After the break: Trust general relativity to navigate your car.…
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The Uncertainty LOL
by Nick Glossop on September 26, 2011
The sound of hydrogen and other minutephysics.…
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Calm Down. Here’s Some Meat.
by Craig Elliott on September 15, 2011
Experimental psychology rules! Frank Kachanoff, a researcher at McGill University wanted to test out a theory he had about aggression, so he designed a study in which his subjects were put in charge of doling out punishment to a script reader whenever the reader made a mistake in sorting some photographs. Some of the photographs were neutral, some of the photographs were of meat.
Kachanoff posited that the pictures of meat would prime his subjects …
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University Of Road Runner And Coyote 2
by Craig Elliott on September 9, 2011
In Tuesday’s class, Bill Benzon from The Valve identified the Coyote as a stand-in for human desire, while the Road Runner represented the world at large and, of course, its indifference to human desire.
Today, we take up part two of Mr. Benzon’s treatise, entitled Reason Harnesses the Social Mind: Road Runner II. It’s an explanation of what makes Road Runner cartoons funny and meta commentary on Road …
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