February 11, 2008

Food for thought (1)

posted February 11, 2008 08:31 PM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)

November 04, 2007

We're #1

Via Biocurious, Uncertain Principles and originally The World's Fair comes a cute little blog-and-google game. The idea is, you find five queries to google for which your blog is the #1 hit. Here are some for Structure+Strangeness:

posted November 4, 2007 12:05 AM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)

October 26, 2007

Equations as expression

The Edge and the Swiss Serpentine Gallery have posted the results of asking scientists and artists "What is your formula?" The results are various scribblings and typesettings of physical and social relationships, put in the form of a mathematical equation.

There's a wide diversity in the set -- some are kind of banal, some ideas make several appearances, and some are contentious opinions dressed up in math -- but some are both suggestive and interesting. I particularly liked Sean Carroll's hierarchy of fundamental scales in physics, spanning 60 orders of magnitude, David Deutsch's self-consistent time-traveling quantum computer, Lisa Randall's 5-dimensional solution to Einstein's equations for gravity, and Drew Endy's "mutation without representation" .

posted October 26, 2007 07:45 AM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (1)

October 24, 2007

Turning a sphere inside out

If you hang out with math nerds enough, you might eventually hear them talk about crazy things like turning a sphere inside out, without cutting or pinching its surface. In some circles, I think this is the math-nerd equivalent of a pissing contest. Well, I've hung out with them enough to hear it, but never gotten a good answer about how to do it. This very nicely produced little video (complete with Pixar-esque animation and human narration) explains it in a very accessible way.

(Tip to Scott Aaronson.)

posted October 24, 2007 01:13 PM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)