About Wyrd Smythe
The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.
I just finished Humble Pi (2019), by Matt Parker, and I absolutely loved it. Parker, a former high school maths teacher, now a maths popularizer, has an easy breezy style dotted with wry jokes and good humor. I read three-quarters of the book in one sitting because I couldn’t stop (just one more chapter, then I’ll go to bed).
It’s a book about mathematical mistakes, some funny, some literally deadly. It’s also about how we need to be better at numbers and careful how we use them. Most importantly, it’s about how mathematics is so deeply embedded in modern life.
It’s my third maths book in a month and the only one I thoroughly enjoyed.
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2 Comments | tags: Matt Parker, numbers, Parker Square | posted in Books, Math
I finally finished Our Mathematical Universe (2014) by Max Tegmark. It took me a while — only two days left on the 21-day library loan. I often had to put it down to clear my mind and give my neck a rest. (The book invoked a lot of headshaking. It gave me a very bad case of the Yeah, buts.)
I debated whether to post this for Sci-Fi Saturday or for more metaphysical Sabbath Sunday. I tend to think either would be appropriate to the subject matter. Given how many science fiction references Tegmark makes in the book, I’m going with Saturday.
The hard part is going to be keeping this post a reasonable length.
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34 Comments | tags: anthropic principle, block universe, doomsday argument, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, Max Tegmark, MUH, MWI | posted in Books, Philosophy, Physics
I’ve been on something of a mission to crank out posts in an effort to reduce my backlog of drafts and notes. (What’s discouraging is that I just found a pile of notes I’d tucked away and forgotten about. With any luck, most of those ideas will have aged out, and I can trash them.)
Since it’s Friday, I thought I’d burn off a bunch of small ones in a Brain Bubble post. As usual, these are small seeds that never grew into a full post, but I hate to just toss the seedlings.
Today’s theme: Things that annoy me, but only slightly.
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12 Comments | tags: Apple Corporation, ear buds, static electricity, tennis shoes | posted in Brain Bubble
Multiplying by i…
Recently I did a series of posts about how the complex numbers arise from a natural progression of math realizations. I’ve done posts in the past about how the natural numbers lead through the integers and rationals to the real numbers. (And I’ve done posts about how weird the real numbers are, but that’s another topic.)
I recently came across another way a progression of obvious natural questions directly leads to the necessity of a new type of number, and this progression takes us all the way from the naturals to the complex numbers.
All by asking, “What do you get when you…”
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7 Comments | tags: complex numbers, complex plane, group theory, groups, integers, irrational numbers, natural numbers, rational numbers, real numbers, sets, town barber paradox | posted in Math
Quantum Corral
There’s an old saying (attributed to Stanislavski) that, “There are no small roles, only small actors.” (One might argue that writers do sometimes create small roles, but that’s another blog post and not really what Stranislavski was getting at. He meant actors must take any role seriously, no matter its size.)
What I have today approaches the smallest possible actor in the smallest possible role. Despite this being seven years old, I think it still holds the title of “World’s Smallest Movie” — at least until we can make one starring nucleons or quarks. (I especially like the electron banding; that’s quantum mechanics in action.)
For a Wednesday Wow, a movie starring a single atom.
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2 Comments | tags: animation, atoms, IBM, making movies, stop-motion animation | posted in Movies, Science, Wednesday Wow
Sunday night I watched the last episodes of Will & Grace, a comedy that first premiered on NBC in 1998. It enjoyed eight seasons, ending in 2006. Then, eleven years later, in 2017, the original creators and actors rebooted it in what turned out to be a three-season run. (Eleven-year gap; eleven seasons total. Cute.)
The show was quite popular during its first six seasons but experienced a pronounced drop in viewership during seasons seven and eight. The reboot did okay the first year, but wasn’t huge, and people lost interest by the second year.
If I’m honest, this third year I’ve kinda been waiting for the patient to die.
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6 Comments | tags: Debra Messing, Eric McCormack, Foster Brooks, Megan Mullally, NBC, Sean Hayes, Will & Grace | posted in TV, TV Tuesday
‘X’ is for… ??
I’ve written about secret codes before. The Pigpen cipher was pretty simplistic, almost more a child’s game, but the Playfair cipher was a bit more interesting. That one came from a murder mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. Today I thought I’d show you another simple code from another mystery novel.
1829 2125 0038 2226 1600 2125 0027 1722 4200 1829 1600 4219 2518 1617 1900 4122 3916 3200 3700 4019 0025 2016 0028 1724 2718 2241 4400 2118 0020 2516 2500 1829 1600 1819 2316 1517 2118 1617 0038 2226 1643 0015 2921 3829 0030 2025 1800 2425 2521 2841 2500 4120 4240 1617 2500 1822 0018 2916 0031 1619
Stop! See if you can decode the above before continuing.
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8 Comments | tags: Bernie Rhodenbarr, cipher, code, decipher, Kinsey Millhone, Lawrence Block, Sara Paretsky, secret codes, substitution cipher, Sue Grafton, V.I Warshawski | posted in Books, Mystery Monday
Recently I mentioned that mathematician John Conway died last April. To his eternal disgruntlement, he is most famous for his “game” of Life — something he considered trivial and inferior to his real mathematical work. That fame is largely due to a Martin Gardener column in Scientific American — the most popular column the magazine had published up to then.
I said I wasn’t going to write about Life because it’s such a well-covered topic, but I thought I might whip up an implementation in Conway’s honor. (Went there; did that; videos below.) Getting into it made me realize Life connects back to my virtual reality posts.
So it turns out I am going to write about it (a little).
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4 Comments | tags: computation, computer generated images, computer model, computer program, Conway's Life, John Conway, Turing Halting Problem, Turing Machine, virtual reality | posted in Computers
One of the older notes on my board just reads: “Armageddon (1998) vs Deep Impact (1998)”. On weirdness points, the note could just as easily have read: “Antz (1998) vs A Bug’s Life (1998)”.
The coincidence that both coincidences take place in 1998 (ah, the good old days) does makes it a bit weirder, but weird coincidences aren’t the point of my note or this post. The point is how audiences reacted to the films.
For this Sci-Fi Saturday, I thought I’d ramble about some SF Yin-Yang pairs that have struck me over the years.
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9 Comments | tags: Frank Miller, George Lucas, Michael Bay, Mimi Leder, Peter Jackson, Robert Heinlein, science fiction movies, SF, SF Movies | posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Saturday
Have you ever lain awake at night wondering where the name Triscuit came from and what could it possibly mean? No? Me either, but apparently some people have, at least a little, and now they can finally sleep easily. It seems that, due to some intrepid detective work (by a comedian), the mystery is solved. It wasn’t ghosts after all but the work of humans.
The punchline is that the name stands for “electric biscuit” — because back in the early 1900s, when Nabisco invented the Triscuit, electricity was a Big New Thing. Everyone was into it. So, they presented biscuits baked to perfection using that new-fangled electricity stuff which was clearly superior to any old-fashioned source of heat.
And now, like Pringles and potato-chips in general, they come in lots of flavors and some variations. I don’t know if they’re still electric biscuits, though.
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12 Comments | tags: ATC, coronavirus, Friday Fun, laser light, Nabisco, Scientific American, Triscuit | posted in Life
Logos con carne 