Students from the Cornell Summer Animation Workshop have produced a fantastic and suitably quirky animation for Jonathan Coulton’s “Mandelbrot Set”: You can find out more about Jonathan Coulton on his website. I actually don’t know much apart from his most popular songs, but perhaps someone will enlighten us (with further song recommendations, for example) in
Today I’d like to direct your attention to a blog that I’m adding to our blogroll: Mind Hacks is one of my favorite blogs. It provides short, accessible, and insightful commentary on new developments in psychology and neuroscience. Much like the HRSFANS blog, it often provides links to longer articles, in both popular science and
I am so excited about this: Andrew Lipson and Daniel Shiu are reproducing M.C. Escher drawings in LEGO! Escher is one of my favorite artists because of the fantastic ways in which he plays with tilings and with perspective. Lipson and Shiu have taken on the seemingly impossible task of reproducing these, using a combination
Neil Sinhababu from Donkeylicious explains how modal realism allows us to be in love with someone in another universe. He even discusses how you can make sure they’re in love with you too, and why it’s not cruel for you to break up with them to start a relationship with someone in this world. Basically,
Generally we try to write some about why a post is interesting, but this one speaks for itself. It looks like you could even use a regression to attach an inverse-exponential equation to it, or something. I would like to say that that moment in Star Trek 2, when Kirk screams “KHAN!” and then “the
I’m not much of a videogamer, but I’m intrigued by what I’ve read about the new video game Mirror’s Edge. The game is a “first person runner” based on parkour, the art of running, jumping, climbing, and otherwise moving quickly through urban environments. Amusingly, the game’s main selling point seems to be that playing it
Google has a new service which reports U.S. influenza activity by state using aggregated data of how often people in an area search on flu symptoms. Here’s how it works. Note how ridiculously well its curves overlap the CDC (Center for Disease Control) curves. Quoth Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC:
