in my head, almost daily, i go on these little trips. how i get there i don't know, but each trip is always beautiful and always ends at one of the following.

i urge you to read at least a couple of these. true: i will never know whether you did, but i will sleep easier knowing i asked.


the mandelbrot set
when we finally isolate the higgs boson, we will smash it apart and julia will emerge and open her eyes.

kolmogorov complexity
and not just because it links to the mandelbrot set.

the lorenz attractor
credo, sine ratione, reality is fractal. there is no smallest grain.

quaternions
these little guys are all tangled up with my thoughts of the grand unification theory. it's out there, and it will extract a terrible price, you mark my words.

hyperbolic geometry
what a difference one little axiom makes: the universe (at one extreme) ends in fire, or (at the other) in ice, or (at the lack of extreme) neither.

the normal distribution
every, repeat every field of knowledge can be seen better when cast in the warm light of the bell curve.

euler's identity
cthulhu fhtagn euler—it is the source of his power.

the laplace transform
as the article says, these buggers will not only drastically reduce the time and effort required to solve the problem, but will fundamentally change the way you think about the problem.

turing machines
reductionism! reductionism! reductionism! HOW MANY TIMES MUST I TELL YOU

the unary magic square
and, of course, it works with arbitrarily lonely values of one.

separatiőn
i saved the best for last. this is basically the holy grail of the mathematical universe. (i'm a simple guy, and i don't say that with pretense.)



p.s. happy birthday, harry.

it starts late in the afternoon with google news linking to a story on slashdot. the slashdot article has an interesting discussion. one of the posters has a sig linking to xkcd, reminding me i haven't had my xkcd fix in a while. during my time there i check the blag, and engorge myself in one particularly stimulating exploration of ludicrously large numbers

at this point my memory becomes slightly fuzzy

and suddenly it's like a quarter to five the following morning and i'm in my underwear with my old college texts out and i'm scribbling notes about exponential towers and *omorphisms whilst humming 'woman in love.' the internet is a gateway to the darkness waiting deep inside.

number of birds mercy-killed, month-to-date: 1

damn cats.

and in my best behavior i am really just like him
look beneath the floorboards for the secrets i have hid
-sufjan stevens, john wayne gacy, jr.

i've been thinking about this a lot, recently; do not mistake brevity for flippancy.



if M is mood, the magnitude of dM/dt here is so large as to be beyond mortal comprehension.

wife attached at the eyeballs to television (not to mention spandex'd quarterback bums) for up to twelve additional hours per week = up to twelve additional nerdy computer game hours per week for the next five months.

though 'decision model' might have been more accurate, her use of 'algorithm' certainly didn't hurt—she's generally so heuristic.

bottom line: two thumbs up, and totally worth the extended bucks for extended cable.

consider a falling body. human body.

let it be given the body falls for 7.0×10¹s. approximate the acceleration due to gravity (at g = 9.8 m/s²) to ignore air resistance until reaching terminal velocity of 195 km/h, or equivalently 54.16_m/s. from v = gt, we have 5.52 s of freefall in this manner. from d=(gt²)/2 this yields d = 149.7 m.

we have 64.48 s left. from d = vt, where v is terminal velocity defined above, d = 3492.6_. this gives us a total distance fallen in 70 seconds of 3642 m, or (for the non-metrically minded) 2.263 miles. we report two significant digits.

so gandalf fell 2.3 miles.


this is what i get for working in a place where the jokes involve redundant light bulbs and hot-swappable trash cans. i get freaking awesome, that's what i get.

so we're only a few days off daylight saving time, and i'm already feeling it. seasonal affective disorder hits me pretty hard this time of year every year as far back as memory goes. whether you ascribe to the theory that it's all in my head seems immaterial, as my head is devastatingly powerful and is not to be underestimated.

the point is this: gah! i'm tired of being messed with. as i've whined before and will whine again (to anyone who will listen), daylight saving time is altogether annoying. it's a mightily dumb law and we don't really save any time no matter what we do with the clock.

unless, that is, we were really damned serious about getting more daylight hours, and did something really damned drastic. something like redefining the very notion of the 'hour.' we'd have to compress twenty-three hours per diem into the daytime, and expand the remaining hour to fill each night. think about it: we'd work eight hours (we, the soul-crushed wage slaves) daily and still have a monstrous fifteen daylight hours in which to play. we'd sleep a mere one hour a night and be fully rested! think of everything we could accomplish! … lan parties every morning … maybe some other stuff too …

or if we really wanted to shake things up, we'd launch into space a giant sunblocking obstacle, the shadow of which would bring a premature end to the day; complementary to this, we'd launch a giant mirror, positioned such that it reflected some otherwise wasted sunlight and hit the earth where it would otherwise be one hour pre-dawn. we wouldn't have to mess with clocks at all! i wave my magic wand of science, presto-chango!, and the semiannual temporal vertigo disappears into a very silly past.

or we'd just agree to get up earlier, but how lame is that? it doesn't even involve lagrange points. seriously.