Pizza Exchange Rate | FlowingData
This is a story about pizza and geometry.
The interactive widget here really demonstrates the difference between showing and telling.
Tags: math
24
Wednesday, July 27th, 2022
Thursday, February 20th, 2020
“Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination – The Public Domain Review
The characteristica universalis and the calculus racionator of Leibniz.
Saturday, February 15th, 2020
The Map of Mathematics | Quanta Magazine
An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!
Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.
Saturday, November 16th, 2019
The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising - The Correspondent
The benchmarks that advertising companies use — intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed — are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).
It gets worse: the brightest minds of this generation are creating algorithms which only increase the effects of selection.
A terrificly well-written piece on the emperor’s new clothes worn by online advertising. Equal parts economic rigour and Gladwellian anecdata, it’s a joy to read! Kudos to Alana Gillespie for the great translation work (the original article was written in Dutch).
We currently assume that advertising companies always benefit from more data. … But the majority of advertising companies feed their complex algorithms silos full of data even though the practice never delivers the desired result. In the worst case, all that invasion of privacy can even lead to targeting the wrong group of people.
This insight is conspicuously absent from the debate about online privacy. At the moment, we don’t even know whether all this privacy violation works as advertised.
The interaction design of this article is great too—annotations, charts, and more!
Saturday, February 16th, 2019
Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile - Issue 69: Patterns - Nautilus
The forbidden symmetry of Penrose tiles and quasicrystals.
Sunday, April 22nd, 2018
the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming – The Composition
An interesting piece by Jessica Kerr that draws lessons from the histories of art and science and applies them to software development.
This was an interesting point about the cognitive load of getting your head around an existing system compared to creating your own:
Why are there a thousand JavaScript frameworks out there? because it’s easier to build your own than to gain an understanding of React. Even with hundreds of people contributing to documentation, it’s still more mental effort to form a mental model of an existing system than to construct your own. (I didn’t say it was faster, but less cognitively strenuous.)
And just because I’ve spent most of last year thinking about how to effectively communicate—in book form—relatively complex ideas clearly and simply, this part really stood out for me:
When you do have a decent mental model of a system, sharing that with others is hard. You don’t know how much you know.
Wednesday, March 7th, 2018
Metaballs
Metaballs, not to be confused with meatballs, are organic looking squishy gooey blobs.
Here’s the maths behind the metaballs (implemented in SVG).
Sunday, February 11th, 2018
How many dimensions are there, and what do they do to reality? | Aeon Essays
In this terrific essay by Marina Benjamin on the scientific and mathematical quest for ever-more dimensions, she offers this lovely insight into the mind-altering effects that the art of Giotto and Uccello must’ve had on their medieval audience:
By consciously exploring geometric principles, these painters gradually learned how to construct images of objects in three-dimensional space. In the process, they reprogrammed European minds to see space in a Euclidean fashion.
In a very literal fashion, perspectival representation was a form of virtual reality that, like today’s VR games, aimed to give viewers the illusion that they had been transported into geometrically coherent and psychologically convincing other worlds.
Thursday, October 5th, 2017
The Nature of Code
A web book with interactive code examples.
How can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? How can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? This book focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems using Processing.
Sunday, June 18th, 2017
Beyond Curie—a design project celebrating women in STEM
Beyond Curie is a design project that highlights badass women in science, technology, engineering + mathematics.
Monday, December 19th, 2016
The math of CSS locks
A very very in-depth look at fluid typography in CSS using calc.
Sunday, December 13th, 2015
Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace—Stephen Wolfram Blog
A detailed history of Babbage and Lovelace through the lens of Wolfram’s work today:
Ada seems to have understood with some clarity the traditional view of programming: that we engineer programs to do things we know how to do. But she also notes that in actually putting “the truths and the formulae of analysis” into a form amenable to the engine, “the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated.” In other words—as I often point out—actually programming something inevitably lets one do more exploration of it.
If this piques your interest, I highly recommend the Babbage biography The Cogwheel Brain by Doron Swade.
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
How Not To Sort By Average Rating
I don’t understand the maths, but the logic is fascinating.
Monday, December 20th, 2010
A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com
Solving the city.
Friday, July 9th, 2010
aM laboratory
A beautiful piece of musical mathematical poetry.
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
Firefox 4: the HTML5 parser – inline SVG, speed and more ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog
Henri Sivonen gives the lowdown on the HTML5 parser that will ship with the next version of Firefox. This is a huge development ...and yet users won't even notice it (by design).
Monday, August 17th, 2009
Re-finding five numbers
So, remember when I posted all those episodes of Simon Singh’s Five Numbers radio series on Pownce so that they’d have permanent URLs? Yeah, well, so much for that.
Fortunately Brian had saved all the MP3s. I’ve posted them on S3 and huffduffed them all. I can be fairly confident that Huffduffer won’t be going the way of Pownce, Magnolia, Geocities, and so many more.
Anyway, if you want to listen to the fifteen episodes of the three radio series’ on mathematics, you can subscribe to the podcast at https://huffduffer.com/adactio/tags/five+numbers/rss.
Or you can listen to each episode at these permanent URLs:
Five Numbers
Another Five Numbers
A Further Five Numbers
Friday, April 3rd, 2009
NEW MATH by Craig Damrauer
Equations to live by.
Monday, February 9th, 2009
Quantum Random Bit Generator Service
There's no such thing as a good CAPTCHA but if there were, these would be ...Best. CAPTCHAs. Ever!
Friday, August 8th, 2008
Finding five numbers
I like Tumblr. I like Pownce. They both make it very quick and easy to post discrete quanta of information. I use Pownce for posting audio files and links to videos. I use Tumblr to post quotations. But both services suffer from the same problem: refindability.
Magnolia and Delicious encourage tagging. Those tags can then surface some pretty interesting aggregate behaviour but first and foremost, they’re useful for the individual doing the tagging. It’s pretty easy for me to track down something I bookmarked on Magnolia even if it was quite a while back. I don’t need to keep a list of all the tags I’ve ever used: I just need to search for a word that I think I might have used when I was tagging a bookmark. While it would be very difficult for me to try to second-guess how someone else might describe something, it’s usually pretty easy to put myself in the shoes of my past self.
As my store of data on Pownce and Tumblr increases, I’m starting to miss tagging (or any kind of search) more and more. Then again, I can understand why both services would resist that kind of scope creep. Both services rely on their simplicity. Adding another field to fill in could potentially be a road block between the user and the task they want to accomplish (although it doesn’t feel that way with Delicious or Magnolia). Update: it turns out that you can tag in Tumblr but it’s hidden behind the “advanced” link. Thanks to Keith Bell for pointing that out.
Here’s a case in point. Over time I’ve been posting MP3 files to Pownce of a series of radio programmes by Simon Singh, author of The Code Book — a superb piece of work. The audio from the radio programmes is available from the BBC website but only in Real Audio which, let’s face it, is complete pants. I originally got the MP3 files from Brian but after a catastrophic hard drive crash, I realised that it would be better to store them at an addressable URL. Besides, I wanted to geek out with my mathematically-minded friends. Pownce’s raison d’être is sharing stuff with friends so it seemed like the perfect home for the Singh files.
But without any kind of tagging or search, there’s no easy way for me or anyone else to revisit just those files at a later date. As a temporary patch, I’m listing the URLs for the Pownce posts that correspond to each episode. If you want to download the files, you’ll need to log in to Pownce.