symplectic geometries

Via the ever resplendent Everlasting Blört, we are treated to the mathmagic of assistant professor Clayton Shonkwiler, who has transformed his lessons and research into rather beautiful animations to pique interest in his discipline and make the subject more accessible. We are all math people when we foster our feelings about it and seek to apply it to our everyday lives. Much more to explore and learn at Shonkwiler’s website.

a higher plane of existence

Any time reason and enlightenment encroach upon superstition and mystery, especially in the late Victorian Era, there will be some notable movements in counter-reformation, as Public Domain Review explores, like in séance and mysticism and perniciously in opening up a new realm as the last refuge of miracles and the supernatural.
Sort of like how the indeterminacy and unknowability of quantum mechanics provides a hold-out for the magical (I’m guilty of this sort of thinking as well, from time to time) in those days, people looked towards the extra dimensionality outside of our perception and experienced—only briefly intersecting as for the denizens of Flatland (1884), not flat-Earthers but rather two-dimensional beings that could not imagine a realm of geometric solids, and these unexplainable encounters inspired maths lecturer William Anthony Granville to author a sort of Euclid’s Elements in 1922 that went about trying to axiomatically prove assertions in Christian text rather than the nature of polygons. Read Granville’s entire The Fourth Dimension and the Bible at the link up top and find out more about the precursor works that led up to it.

equilateral-curve heptagon

As part of an ongoing series to recognise significant contributions to the sciences and humanities in UK coinage, the Royal Mint is issued a commem-orative fifty pence piece with a reverse honouring the late Professor Stephen Hawking, with the seven-sided coin depicting one of his most important formulations—aside that is from making astrophysics accessible and increasing general literacy and numeracy—that the conservation of information is not a constant and dissipates as does an aging black hole.

signal-to-noise ratio

Mathematical modelling on the part of a research team at Boston University have produced a muting, sound muffling device (really more of a function than a gadget) that deflects virtually all unwanted acoustic smog back towards its source, instead of absorbing it—the usual method of dealing with errant noises.
The sound is channelled from its source along a tube where it’s silenced on the other end by this echoing ring with no membrane to obscure the view (or non-carrier-wave flow of air) back and beyond and could be scaled up or down to make offices, apartments and other shared spaces a bit more tranquil and adjustable, perhaps even as earplugs. As much as I’d like to be able to press a mute button sometimes and relish my peace and quiet, I’m a little afraid we’d grow overly sensitive to the general din of background noise, cushioned by our filters, and we’d wither without them.

micromégas

If ultimately accepted by the Paris-based International Bureau of Weights and Measures (Bureau international des poids et mesures), Marginal Revolution informs, the ronna- and the quecca- as prefixes for the outlandishly large amounts of 10²⁷ and 10³⁰ (plus their microscopic and vanishingly tiny counterparts, the ronto- and quecto-) would be their first new official unit prefixes added to the metric system since 1991.
The current upper limit of the officially recognised and scientifically sanctioned scale is the yotta- and data-storage capacity is expected to reach and quickly surpass ten to the twenty-fourth power (10²⁴, approximately the size of an individual human’s full DNA sequence, with the corollary yocto-) of bytes of information within the next decade. Though popular in common-parlance handy and a good avenue for talking about science literacy in general, the googol and related values are still vernacular and provisional.

9x9

aaron burr, sir: Alexander Hamilton’s mostly fraught relationships with the first five US presidential administrations

four baths in the course of a month: how to bathe in January, according to seventh century philosopher Hierophilus the Sophist

faux châteaux: drone footage reveals surreal failed real estate development project between Ankara and Istanbul

messrs. 1569 and 1571: some of the strangest declassified artefacts that are stumping the investigative team at Muckrock

got to catch ‘em all: custom-tailored Pokémon dress shirts

népzene: a quick-sort algorithm demonstrated by Hungarian folk dancing

heatseekers: night time skiing guided by overhead flares, via Memo of the Air

muzzy von hossmere: a fond appreciation of the life and career of the late Carol Channing (*1921 – †2019)

the president shall from time to time give to the congress information of the state of the union: until 1913, most State of the Union addresses were delivered in writing

it’s a gif to be simple, it’s a gif to be kind

Twisted Sifter treats to a small gallery of animations that elegantly and immediately illustrate how others might connect the same constellations of dots or interpret their relative motions in completely different and idiosyncratic ways. Though the specimen speaks for itself, there is also a couple nice articles linked at the source explaining what’s going on in terms bias and what’s called statistical underdetermination. Same otherwise.

intercalary days

As the calendar winds down and makes ready to welcome a new year, we pause to take a look at a few non-standard dates, evoked for neat calculation and exceptional circumstances. 0 January is the manner for referencing the coordinates of astral bodies—used in tables for stellar navigation and astrology—the day before the start of a calendar year while still keeping the annual ephemeris inclusive.
Furthermore, for practical purposes, the epoch of computing and programming only reaches back to 1900—and though they had intended the starting point of 0 January to be New Year’s Eve 1899, because the year 1900 was erroneous reckoned as a Leap Year (it is a Common Year under the Gregorian Calendar but a Leap Year under the Julian system, in use in some jurisdictions until 1923) 0 January 1900 is actually the penultimate 30 December 1899. While most of Western Europe transitioned from the Julian to Gregorian calendars by excising a week of Sundays—not at all in a coordinated effort either—the Swedish Empire, seeing hardship elsewhere, announced it would gradually catch up, by phasing out leaps days over the following four decades—from 1700 to 1740. Conflict and conquest, however, made keeping an accurate count of cheat days difficult and at one point—in 1712—Sweden observed 30 February. Ultimately, in 1753, and despite the earnest efforts of civil servants calendar synchronisation was complete, by fast-forwarding from 17 February to 1 March.

quod erat demonstrandum

Having devoted a rather joyful semester of study to Oliver Byrne’s masterful and lucid textbook adaptation of Euclid’s Elements during college, I am finding myself genuinely delighted and nostalgic to see that there’s going to be a re-issue of the authoritative 1847 tome on geometry, illustrating his proofs with colours rather than letters.
The geometer himself provided no pictures and relied on his pupils’ imagination—causing poet Edna St. Vincent Millay to extol that “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare” and I even semi-seriously contemplated getting a tattoo of the Pythagorean theorem or another of Byrne’s elegant diagrams—across my back where if I flexed and brought my shoulder blades together (or some such nonsense) the axiom would reveal itself—QED. More to explore at the link above, including a nice primer on the subject.

clockwise

We are fans of any method that encourages numeracy and engages and like the concept behind the Albert Clock, which does not surrender the hour without a challenge.  I always liked doing factorials (n!) myself and working out how many ways and with what operators one can reach a given number.  Depending on your target audience—this would be a good addition for a classroom or waiting area, the skill level of the problems to solve can be dialled up or down.

6x6

that’s like comparing apples and mass shootings: idioms updated for American contemporary culture

store brand: Christmas advertisement aimed to educate the public on habitat-loss due to palm-oil plantations banned for being “too political”

across the stars: John Williams’ fresh arrangement for the Star Wars prequels—which if nothing else continued the tradition of arch and on point scores

perhaps not forty-two after all: the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe and everything is instead one hundred and thirty-seven, the fine-structure constant that haunted Richard Feynmann and Wolfgang Pauli—via Strange Company

sacred and profane architecture: this is the church you go to when God is in the volcano forging a ring of power, a Twitter thread via Art of Darkness

bauhaus 100: the next instalment profiling Herbert Bayer who helped create a universal typographic identity for the movement

rubric

Like when learning there was an algorithm, a certain method to solve for Sudoku, I lost interest in it without really having given a try—dismissing it as an unworthy challenge, I think I was guilty of adopting the same attitude towards Ernő Rubik’s ingeniously engineered, elegant puzzle and could appreciate the correspondent’s initial outlook attending an educational outreach workshop ran under the auspices of the toy.
The brute numbers gave me my dénouement: there are forty three quintillion possible positions, which at a rate of trying each every second (as a computer would do) would take over a trillion years to arrive at the single solution out of those seemingly infinite possibilities. Unsure whether it could even be solved, Rubik played with his prototype for a whole month before arriving at a solution. Some of us are virtuosi while many of us just plod along but with persistence and a willingness to step outside of one’s self we can all be the cube.

i’m feeling lucky

Originally developed as a search algorithm provisionally called “BackRub” that ranked websites by the number of other pages backlinking to them in 1996 as a graduate studies project, Sergey Brin and Larry Page filed the paperwork for incorporation on this day in 1998 for their search engine and web crawler, Google. The name was selected as a misspelling of googol, shorthand for imparting the concept of ten duotrigintillon or a one followed by one hundred zeroes, as an illustration of the vast amounts of data circulating on the internet.
Liberal estimates of the mass of the Universe fall short of that by fully ten powers of ten—or in other words just one ten-billionth of a googol of kilogrammes. Google assigns the number in scientific notation “1e100.net” to its array of servers to identify them across the internet. The corporate headquarters “Googleplex” is a much later backronym, homage referencing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy super-computer Googleplex Starthinking (same spelling) that can calculate the trajectory of each mote of dust in a blizzard and contemplates the very vectors of atoms since the Big Bang—which is again a bit of over-engineering seeing that the value, a googolplex being ten to the googol power, something physical impossible to express outside of our imagination, and far outstrips the total number of subatomic particles in the Cosmos, reckoned at 10⁸⁰ or thereabouts.

customary units

Always a treat to indulge in the comprehensive, guided romps through etymology and colloquialism, The History of the English Language’s last thematic instalment was particularly interesting and just bursting with facts and anecdotes that seem glancingly familiar but are often decontextualized with trivia, like the origin of author Samuel Clements nom de plume, a bakers’ dozen, or why there are an inelegant number of feet to the mile.
For those answers, you’ll need to attend to the podcast but a bit more on the last term with the idiomatic phrase, “give him an inch and he’ll take a mile,” which was originally not so hyperbolic. Supplanting the cubit (from the Latin cubitus for elbow and retained in the word recumbent) as a measurement of length, the ell or double ell (from ulna, the forearm) came into common-parlance in the thirteenth century. Despite differing national definitions and anatomical considerations, the unit of measurement was useful in trade, especially for parcelling out bolts of fabric and measuring textiles and was one of the first to be standardised with Edward I requiring all market towns to keep on hand an official ellwand—a rod that kept brokers honest in their dealings. Metonymically a yard, the same length as an ell, comes from the stick or stave itself. An inch (from the Roman uncia, one twelfth part, that also gave us the ounce) was after a fashion something that could be independently derived as three barleycorns and scalable for reckoning greater lengths. The original saying, replaced by “mile” once the ell became obsolete, was to the effect “Give him an inch and he’ll take an ell.”

stacking problem

Researchers have described a new geometric solid, a scutoid, whose sides are comprised of a triangle, a hexagon, three rectangles and three pentagons that forms a sort of tapered prism, which were determined through computer modelling and observation to be the most efficient shape for cells to assume as they laid down layers upon layer of tissue during growth and development—sort of like the hexagonal frame of the cell of a beehive. The team named the new shape after the scutellum—Latin for little shield—of a beetle, part of the thorax and abdomen that incorporates most of the same eight shapes as above but head-on, across a two-dimension surface.

7x7

nimby: home garden phenology is perhaps the essential first step for combating climate change and the loss of the ecosystems we all depend on

keep america great: Trump’s re-election *sighs* motto isn’t particularly original

prophet of doom: machine translation, like deep dreaming, yields some sinister prognostications with eschatological overtones, via Boing Boing

dyi or mend and make due: the global network of repair cafes has grown to more than sixteen hundred strong

found footage: television curator extraordinaire comes across a BBC engineering test and breaks it down to its component segments

octonions: the strange properties of eight dimensional numbers could potential reveal something fundamental about the nature of reality, via Marginal Revolution

closer: a 1991 real estate brokerage video’s vision of the future 

tierkreis

In 1975, electronic and experimental music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen (*1928 - †2007) composed twelve melodic character pieces representing the twelve signs of the zodiac, structured in a mathematically interesting manner and originally arranged for music boxes, though it can be played on any suitable instrument or even sung. Contracting with a Swiss manufacturer (which is one of the last firms specialising in making music boxes), Stockhausen made the custom music boxes commercially available and continued to be sold through the 1980s with later commemorative editions. Learn more and listen to other performances at the link above. Here’s a rendition of my sign, Skorpion, by clarinettist Liam Hockley below:

highlighting the remarkable

I know it’s an advertising campaign but this series, found via Swiss Miss, from German marker manufacturer Stabilo takes a highlighter to historic photographs to help call-out the overlooked contributions of women to science and governance is pretty enlightening.

There’s just a few images in this print-run but surely there’s a lot of untapped potential out there. First Lady Edith Wilson, who assumed the roles and responsibilities of the US president after her husband was debilitated with a stroke in October 1919 (prior to the Presidential Succession Act and even before universal suffrage in the US) is included, as well as the pictured Austrian- Swiss physicist Lise Meither, whose celebrated career and academic recognition is overshadowed by the failure of the Nobel Prize committee to acknowledge her essential role in the discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s.

black hole sun

Using a super computer to model a complex and exotic star system, Universe Today reports, a physics professor worked out a theoretical arrangement wherein that a modestly-sized black hole could be the centre holding in stable orbit nine sustaining Sun-like stars with upwards of five hundred planets (plus their own satellites), a good portion of them under conditions (experimentally) suited for life.
Calculations demonstrate that such a fantastic solar system could exist—or various permutations thereof including a sufficiently advanced civilisation that could engineer such compact and neighbourly systems and tow them around the Universe—and that denizens of those places would experience frequent close-encounters with other worlds and see their skies (inexplicably to them or perhaps scientifically grasped) periodically distorted, objects gravitational lensed by the marauding black hole (which surely informs its own mysterious mythology as well) that groups them all together.

scientists’ corner

Preeminent scientist Stephen Hawking’s ashes were interred with honours in the royal peculiar and hall of fame, Westminster Abbey today. In addition to recognising his contributions to the understanding of the Cosmos by according his mortal remains a special place (between Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton), the European Space Agency—after the service—beamed a recording of one of Hawking’s lectures, a missive of peace and hope, into outer space aimed at the nearest known black hole, designated 1A 0620-00, with his voice expected to reach the event horizon in thirty-five hundred years.