tempus fugit

From our faithful chronicler we are introduced to the Weber-Fechner law, a pair of complementary psychophysical hypotheses that account for the common experience of the accelerated passage of time as we grow older. Named for Ernst Heinrich Weber (Gustav Theodore Fechner described it mathematically), the phenomenon suggests that we perceive ratios and given a sufficiently larger sample size—smaller contrast, we begin to gauge change in logarithmically rather than linearly. More at the link above, including a video presentation by Dr Hanna Fry of The Curious Cases podcast with co-host Dr Adam Rutherford.

from inca to excel

Via Æon, we quite enjoyed this introduction to the system of knotted fibres called khipu (see also) as an accounting and record-keeping tool of the Wari peoples and spread across the Andean region some fourteen-hundred years ago. Decoded by specially-trained khipukamayuqs, these mobile ledgers were periodically recalled to court authorities to lodge tax-compliance, census numbers, commerce, genealogy and inheritance—and with only a small proportion of museum-holdings deciphered, some holdout the possibility that these data-points were a means to encode the fulness of language.

eeny, meeny, miney milliters

Via our peripatetic friend, Messy Nessy Chic, we are enjoying this 1978 Schoolhouse Rock! style campaign (from the same creative team) to bring the metric system to United States of America (see also) whose success and legacy presently is dubious at best.

10^

Courtesy of the always engrossing Kottke, we are directed to an updated version of the Ames’ classic Powers of Ten from the BBC science desk, Open University and presenter and particle physicist Brian Cox that updates the scale to bring in up to par with our current observational powers—about a thousand fold more of the Cosmos than were capable of some forty-five years ago when the original short film was made.

6x6

level 5—the scent represents a fully personal experience with some unrelated property. the experience itself has no aroma or shared understanding: Yankee Candle’s Stages of Abstraction—via Waxy  

pine-eleven: conservative pundits suggest arson attack on network’s Christmas tree a ‘hate crime’ and an assault on religious freedoms  

by-line: Bloomberg’s annual jealousy list of articles they wish they’d written—via Kottke  

a new system of arithmetic and metrology: Johan Nyström’s hexadecimal tonal and temporal notation (1863)  

alpine exports: Little Switzerlands abroad—see also here and here  

you buy—i die: Indian handicraft as indictment against thoughtless consumption

6x6

recursive: Ghislaine Maxwell sketches the courtroom artist sketching her 

temporal distortion: an xkcd comic that references every ambiguous birthday scenario 

check out those gams: a pair of pageants with a narrower focus on beauty—via Nag on the Lake 

menty-b: Macquarie Dictionary’s short-list for Word of the Year  

qed: an overview of maths in film and television 

hungry eyes: the canon of Western art as viewed through the lens of food

r*

In the moments before beginning his informal gathering of searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence in late November 1961, host astronomer Frank Drake, who had convened the conference to promote his programme Project Ozma that monitored a pair of nearby, sun-like stars for radio signals, dashed off his probabilistic conjecture, the eponymous equation proposed to estimate the number of communicative civilisations in the galaxy.  While subject to criticism for the speculative and unknowable nature of many of the factors, it is nonetheless a useful heuristic from the individual whom would go on to champion the conversion of the Arecibo site to a radio telescope and entrench SETI in the popular imagination: Whereas N is the number of alien civilisations within our current light cone derived from the rate of stellar formation multipled by the fraction hosting exoplanets, by the average in the Goldie Locks Zone, times the fraction that develop and sustain life long enough to develop a technology detectable by other distant civilisations and finally the length of time such civilisations stick around.  Through research and observation, the incidence of some factors can be arrived at, but other parameters are very much androcentric and do not account for colonization and the rise and fall of successive dominant life forms. 

effective calculability

With its roots in the Latinisation of the Persian mathematician Muhammad bin Musa Al-Khwārizmī as algorimus, we were quite pleased to learn about the education, contributions and legacy of the scholar of Baghdad’s House of Wisdom in the ninth century, in Greater Iran—presently Uzbekistan—whose the namesake for the unambiguous computational instructions that machines can act upon through tributes by several local artists hosted by a Tashkent gallery. Entitled Dixit Algorizmi after the opening line of his comprehensive manuscript, Thus Spake Al-Khwārizmī, there is much more to explore at the links above.

avoirdupois

Via Slashdot, as the Independent reports because of Brexit—as if EU standards were the sole compelling reason that the UK was harmonised with the standard that (nearly) the rest of the world uses—that should legislation pass, markets and shops will be able to opt out of metric units and regress to customary measures. Albeit as valuable as the colour of one’s passport, in reality the matter is more complicated and bound in other treaties including with the International Organisation of Legal Metrology, agreeing that only one official system of measurement be used.

5x5

life finds a way: samples from Perseverance suggest Martian surface was wet for a long time  

yan, tan, tethra: finger counting conventions across various cultures—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links

well-tempered clavier: the mathematical magic of JS Bach  

annals of improbable research: laureates of this year’s Ig Noble prizes announced—see previously  

uchuu: cosmologist create a detailed simulated pocket Universe—downloadable to the public, a hundred terabytes worth of data

conspicous calculation

Addressing the lexical weight of numeracy and the outsized weight we attribute to it as we do with all jargon from coding to spellbinding, we really enjoyed the panel discussion between host Helen Zaltzman and guest Professor Stephen Chrisomalis featured on the latest episode of the Allusionist on numbers and notation. 

We especially appreciated the disabusing reminders about bias, audience and the recent dominance of Indo-Arabic numerals (see also) and the vestigial systems, like Roman numerals, that accord prestige and the fact that I, V, X, L, C, D, M were not immutable from Antiquity until now with medieval abbreviations sometimes reflecting the Latin name or using Claudian letters and that the symbols were never meant to denote centum or mille but rather that half X is V and half C is L, and so on.

6x6

1:1: a growing collection of architectural models appearing in film and television—via Everlasting Blört

brutsch 200 spatz: an unproduced concept microcar trialled in 1954  

hej, hello: the first episode of a Finnish television programme that taught English language skills featuring two very British bobbies and a cat on the Moon 

subway: a comprehensive map of subterranean Washington, DC—via Things Magazine  

purple prose: the 2021 Bulwer Lytton (previously) literature prize winners and dishonourable mentions—via Web Curios  

demosaicking: a biographical history of the pixel and its correspondence to reality

little twelvetoes

Having considered myself pretty familiar with the entire Schoolhouse Rock! catalogue (see previously here and here) and enjoying them as a kid, I was taken aback to be introduced to this segment that not only teaches one the twelves multiplication table but also about the duodecimal system and other bases—plus acceptance of actual polydactyly. Including My Hero, Zero and Three is a Magic Number, Bob Dorough performed and produced a dozen (the number one not given an episode) maths shorts during the course of 1973.

the life of π

Whereas astrophysics suggest that extending out the significant digits to thirty-nine decimal places would be at the level of precision to measure the circumference of the known Universe to within the breadth of a hydrogen atom, we quite enjoyed the overkill and ambition, as reported by the Guardian, of a team of Swiss mathematicians that have calculated out the transcendental, irrational number, also known as Archimedes’ Constant and whose use of the Greek letter to symbolise it first attributed to Welsh professor William Jones in 1706, to sixty-two trillion places for the accomplishment in itself plus the bonus facts and anecdotes. Not only is it fiendishly useful to understand and is embedded in all sort of applications, there’s quite a bit of lore attached to pi. There’s its elegance in comprehending a bit of the Cosmos, cameo appearances and an infamously misguided attempt in 1897 by the Indiana state legislature to round it up to 3.2 and be done with it.

qed

In plane geometry, according to the theorem proved by mathematician John Horton Conway (see previously, *1937 - †2020), when the points of a triangle are extended by the length of the side opposite each vertex, the six points fall on a circle which shares the same centre as the triangle. Computationally, logically, this geometric construct demonstrates something that could have easily been included in Euclid’s Elements but took several millennia to be discovered.

your daily demon: astaroth

Our twenty-ninth spirit is an infernal grand duke ruling from today through 17 August is part of the unholy trinity along with Beelzebub and Lucifer and likely derives his identity from the goddess Astarte, consort of Ishtar. Presenting as a fallen angel and commanding forty legions, Astaroth chiefly lures individuals to do wrong through laziness, self-doubt and rationisation but can be compelled to impart skill in mathematics and handicrafts as well as the power of invisibility. Treasurer of the Underworld, Astaroth is countered by the guardian angel Reyiyel as well as appeals to Bartholomew the Apostle who can repel the archdemon’s vices.

the velocity of money

In the unfolding of the worst case of hyperinflation (previously here, here and here) and devaluation in history, the Hungarian pengő (an onomatopoetic word for the ringing of silver struck, the clinking of coins), itself a replacement currency for the Austro-Hungarian korona, liquidated under the terms of the Peace of Saint-Germain that dissolved the joint bank of the monarchy, battered and bashed by the ensuing Great Depression and a second world war, was pegged to the reintroduced forint (in use prior to the imperial union in 1892 and named for city of Florence) at an exchange rate on this day in 1946 of one Ft for four hundred octillion pengők, shedding twenty-nine zeros and starting over, notes in the millions and billions reused and reissued marked with exponentially higher values.

A last ditch effort to rescue the collapsing economy in January brought in a parallel currency that would hold its value called the adópengő for tax and postal payments—sort of like those forever stamps that aren’t subject to rate hikes or the specie of old pennies with high copper content, starting at parity with what was then in circulation but eight months later each was worth two sextillion. The largest denominated bank note issued was the one hundred quintillion (ten to the twentieth power, one million billion and worth about two US dimes) featuring an anonymous Hungarian woman wearing scarf on her head who back in March appeared one the one hundred million pengő bill.

=

Coined by Welsh mathematician and physician Robert Recorde (*1512 – †1558), the equal sign (see also) entered common parlance on this day in 1557, and while not inventing +, he introduced the addition sign to England at the same time.
Wanting to avoid repetition in his treatise The Whetsome of Witte, he refers to the shorthand expression of balance as Gemowe lines—twin ones from Latin gemellus, Gemini. Appointed Comptroller of Mines and Monies under Edward VI and Queen Mary in Ireland, Recorde suffered libel from suit of a political enemy and died in a debtors’ prison, but not before leaving a legacy including authoritative works on algebra and geometry as well as the frequently cited Urinal of Physick.

geometry of circles

In 1979 Children’s Television Workshop animator Cathryn Aison, who first studied dance and choreography with Martha Graham before switching her academic concentration to industrial design created this very memorable interstitial for Sesame Street and commissioned composer Philip Glass, who gladly took a break from his opera Satyāgraha (सत्याग्रह, insistence on truth) based on the biography of Mahatma Gandhi and part of a decades’ long work on a trilogy including chapters on Akhnaten and Einstein on the Beach to help out, to set the transformations, arcs and bisections to music. I remember singing this choral piece over and over again in my head and being both engrossed and terrified by this incantation.

your daily demon: beleth

Ruling from today until 25 May this thirteenth spirit is an infernal king who presents as a feline riding a pale horse with a retinue of bewitching musical instruments. The exorcist must accord this demon due deference accorded to his high rank and office and must maintain courage though Beleth will try to frighten the summoner. Citing the Pseudomonarachia Dæmonum, the first conjurer to call on him was Noah’s son Ham after the Great Flood, who then co-authored a treatise on mathematics. Beleth commands eighty-five legion and is opposed by the angel Iezalel.