The personal weblog of Ian Luke Kane. Thoughts on mathematics, logic, and life. The beauty therein and the strangeness of it all.
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I’ve seen Craig Damrauer’s New Math pictures across a bunch of different places on the web, and they always make me take pause. A lot of them are downright hilarious, while others are more thoughtful. Check this one out:
I actually laughed out loud the first time I saw this. And then I thought about pirates in recent news history. And then I thought about Pirates of the Caribbean. And then I realized that in my brain there was a giant chasm between these two impressions.
My post from a few days ago that mentioned the public domain status of Bertrand Russell’s “The Problems of Philosophy” reminded me to check whether LibriVox had any audio recordings of Russell’s works that are now in the public domain. If you’ve never heard of LibriVox, the site explains that:
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.
The site has some amazing content, including a complete audio copy of “The Problems of Philosophy” (as well as a few other Russell titles). So for those of you who prefer to listen to audio books, there are some great philosophy, logic, and mathematics related books are available. Here are links for a few:
(Photo by Phil Moore)
In 2007 BBC Four released a documentary named Dangerous Knowledge, which is summarized on the official page as follows:
In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.
Sounds uplifting, huh? Well, David Malone, the British filmmaker, does a really great job tracing how mathematical ideas tie together the four individuals through history. While some of the films claims are a bit…over the top and dramatic, overall the content is solid and quite informative. There’s a lot of information given not only about mathematics, but about how these four individuals dealt with various difficult aspects of their personal lives. These videos may still be up on YouTube, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for them being there for long given the copy protection issues involved. Having said that, I won’t even attempt to embed one of the videos here. But you CAN watch a clip directly from the BBC 4 official page by clicking here. If provided with the opportunity, you should take advantage of checking it out the program in its entirety.
I’ve come across a few sites that list facetious facts about Gauss, similar to the wonderful Chuck Norris Facts that we’ve all come to love. Gauss, if you don’t know it, was one of those hyper-intelligent individuals who may have in fact been a space alien. It’s the only natural explanation, right? It’s hard to tell who originated the facts, but the two people who have listed the most are Matt Heath and Andrew Dolphin. My favorite two facts from these links are:
I thought I would give it a go as well. So here are 20 original Gauss facts coined by me this evening in a state of tiredness. Please keep in mind that if you understand at least 3 of these, you’re every bit as much of a geek as I am. Fair warning.
Have any more? Leave one in the comments!
I mean, how can you argue with this?
UPDATE: Thanks to ll for finding attribution for this image. It comes from GraphJam, and the pie chart is here. The author is Jamie Schimley. I’m looking forward to browsing through more hilarity at this link.
ORIGINAL: Thanks to AdArena.net for this one. You should check them out. They’ve got some great stuff posted. I’m not sure where this picture originates, but it certainly made me laugh out loud. If anyone has further attribution on this photo, let me know. It’s truly hilarious.
I mean, how can you resist this? Hilarious, cute, and math oriented. I hope this brings a smile to your face today!
more cat pictures
Another caption given for this picture in the comments is “Delta Kitteh knows the difference”. Hehehe.
I’m sorry, but this XKCD comic was so wonderful that I simply had to post it. If you don’t read this comic religiously, shame on you. I had to shrink the photo down a bit to make it fit, so feel free to click on the comic to head over to the XKCD page.
I hadn’t heard of the “Look Around You” BBC television series before yesterday, but I was nearly on the floor laughing by the end of the following video segment about “Maths”. Read up on the series at their Wikipedia entry. I’m sure the other episodes are equally as hilarious. In my opinion, there are few things better than British humor mixed with math. Enjoy the video!
Since today is March 14 (3.14), I’d like to wish everyone a happy pi day. Read more about the wonderful number of pi here and here. I’m sure that some of you have seen the following visual representation of pi before, but this animated gif should give everyone a refresher on exactly what pi is. This informative animation was created by John Reid. [Note: I have this animation set so that it will only loop 6 times in total. If you'd like to see it again please refresh or restart your browser.]
Yes, it seems that Edwin A. Abbott’s wonderfully original novel about the travels of the square named A. Square through one, two, and three dimensional space will soon be brought to video. The website for Flatland: The Movie can be found here. The trailer for the movie is available on the website or on YouTube here. Here’s the synopsis of the movie:
Flatland: The Movie is an animated film inspired by Edwin A. Abbott’s classic novel, Flatland. Set in a world of only two dimensions inhabited by sentient geometrical shapes, the story follows Arthur Square and his ever-curious granddaughter Hex. When a mysterious visitor arrives from Spaceland, Arthur and Hex must come to terms with the truth of the third dimension, risking dire consequences from the evil Circles that have ruled Flatland for a thousand years.
Well, it sounds like there has definitely been some license given to modify the orginal plot of the novel. But I have to say that the plot modifications were immediately forgiven once I found out that Martin Sheen was going to do the voice of A. Square. Who can argue with that? Also, Tony Hale, of the late TV show Arrested Development, will be playing the King of Pointland. At any rate, as the website explains, “The movie will be part of an educational DVD, which will include the original text from Abbott’s book.” Also, it looks like it will be coming out in spring 2007, which isn’t too far away! If you’re dying to get a copy you can sign up on the website for priority access to the DVD. While you’re anxiously awaiting its release, I suggest reading Abbott’s original work. It’s a really quick read and is imaginative and original.
Yet another reason why I’m a total dork. If you don’t understand what’s going on just laugh when the people in the video laugh. Trust me, it’s funny. Also, this is actually what you do in graduate school. 
Watch the music video here.
This evening I went to the theater to see the movie The Prestige, which was a fantastic. I highly recommend it. The acting was superb and the subject matter was intriguing. And hell, David Bowie was in it! Magic, and ultimately its relationship to science, were key themes in the story. Though there were a few minor holes in the plot it was definitely the type of movie that spurred some discussion after the viewing.
I don’t want to spoil anything with this post, but I will say that Nikola Tesla plays an important role in the story. When I got home I immediately turned to Tesla’s Wikipedia entry where I learned that three pieces of information played up in the movie were at least partially true:
1. There was some bad blood between Edison and Tesla, not least of which because Edison seems to have screwed Tesla out of a large chunk of change for some brilliant work he did for Edison.
2. Tesla did move his base of operations for a time to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he did some work on “wireless telegraphy”.
3. Especially later in life Tesla held some fantastic theories regarding subjects such as UFOs and the like. It seems to be the case that some of these beliefs came out of an untreated psychiatric disorder (probably OCD).
Interesting. Feel free to read more about Tesla at the link above. And I’d highly recommend seeing the movie. It’s one of the best I’ve seen this year.
How could I NOT include this picture of a pumpkin carved into the likeness of Alan Turing? It just wouldn’t be right to overlook this one! Read more about Turing here. In case you don’t know much about Turing, let’s just say he laid a substantial foundation for computer science.
Also, here’s a post from Boing Boing describing some mystery explosions that seem to be occurring around the world. More Halloween goodness!
Thanks to Boing Boing I found Randall Munroe’s website this morning, which describes itself as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”. Some of the comics are tremendously funny, especially if you’re a dork, which I am. Here’s one of my favorites:
Here are a few of my other favorites from the site (warning: there’s a bit of swearing in some of these if you’re offended by that kind of thing):
Computational Linguistics
Centrifugal Force
dPain Over dt
Science
Su Doku
Fourier
Happy laughing everyone!
Check out this article over at Science News Online that explores some of the wonderful mathematics references that have found their place in episodes of The Simpsons. For instance, in one episode “Kwik-E-Mart proprietor Apu brags that he can recite pi to 40,000 decimal places. “The last digit is 1,” he announces. To get that detail right, the Simpsons writing team faxed a query to NASA, where mathematician David Bailey obliged with the digit in question.”
It’s good to know that great comedy doesn’t always have to be brainless.
So this isn’t new at all, but when I saw it about a month ago for the first time I thought it was hilarious. Yeah yeah I know it should be “as x approaches 8 from above”, but come on now, let’s just let ourselves laugh a bit. Let me know if you have any funny math jokes/quotes!
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