A bit more than three years ago (on February 3, 2021, to be specific), I posted a Wednesday Wow about COVID-19. Seeing the reported numbers in the news back then inspired me to obtain my own dataset and do some analysis. The results then were jaw-dropping, hence the Wow!
For quite a few months now I’ve been meaning to do an update to see what’s happened since then. Yesterday I pulled a new dataset and re-did the analysis.
The results are still jaw-dropping. And horrific and sorrowful.
Today is the Vernal Equinox, the official starter gun for spring! Now we get six months of more sunlight than not. And the length of the day is changing (towards the long summer days) at its fastest rate during the year (except for the Autumnal Equinox, the other fastest).
Ironically, the last few days have been chillier than what has passed for normal this winter. The high three days ago (on 3/17) was only 30 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course).
The weather has been so strange (thanks to global warming) that I just had to make a bunch of charts to share here.
It has been a while since the last Wednesday Wow post. Not so much due to the lack of things that made me go “Wow!” so much as a lack of genuinely interesting things that made me go “Wow!” I suppose the older one gets, the more jaded (and faded) one gets. [Don’t grow old if you can avoid it. It kinda sucks.]
But I found myself actually (literally!) exclaiming “Wow!” (and LOL-ling) when I watched the video that’s the centerpiece of this post. To fill out the post, I’ll include some similar videos they’ve done. It’s all about framing size comparisons to help communicate the smallness (or largeness) of something.
In this case, ants. All the ants. In the world.
It started in January with a local PBS show. I was trying to figure out a really good gift for a really good friend with a birthday in March. I often feel I’m a poor gift giver. It’s not a lack of generosity but that I forget to allow the time necessary for proper gift selection. I find I need that time to find something that both appeals to me and (more importantly) is a great fit for the recipient.
Part of my gift giving philosophy is that the gift should be something I’d almost rather keep than give away. I figure if it appeals to me, it should appeal to my (generally like-minded) friends. I’m not sure that logic always follows, but c’est la vie.
Anyway, I was watching PBS…
Last post I wrote about a simple substitution cipher Robert J. Sawyer used in his 2012 science fiction political thriller, Triggers. This post I’m writing about a completely different cool thing from a different book by Sawyer, The Terminal Experiment. Published in 1995, it’s one of his earlier novels. It won both a Nebula and a Hugo.
I described the story when I posted about Sawyer, and I’ll let that suffice. As with the previous post, this post isn’t about the plot or theme of the novel. It’s about a single thing mentioned in the book — something that made me think, “Oh! That would be fun to try!”
It’s about a very simple simulation of evolution using random mutations and a “most fit” filter to select a desired final result.
We live in an era of unprecedented change. My grandparents’ generation saw the rise of the automobile. My parents’ generation saw the rise of space travel. My generation saw the rise of the digital world and social technology. The current generation is seeing the rise of the robots.
A bit over two years ago I posted An Uprising of Robots. (We haven’t picked a collective noun for robots, but my submissions are an uprising of and a clank of.) That post featured Atlas, the Boston Dynamics humanoid robot, and Spot, the four-legged “dog” robot (seen in the image here).
Since I posted that, Spot has become a hit on YouTube and has entered the work force, so here’s a Wednesday Wow starring Spot, the $75,000 robot dog.
I posted a while back about the wonders of Fourier Curves, and I’ve posted many times about Euler’s Formula and other graphical wonders of the complex plane. Recently, a Numberphile video introduced me to another graphical wonder: Euler Spirals. They’re one of those very simple ideas that results in almost infinite variety (because of chaos).
As it turned out, the video (videos, actually) led to a number of fun diversions that have kept me occupied recently. (Numberphile has inspired more than a few projects over the years. Cool ideas I just had to try for myself.)
This all has to do with virtual turtles.
It’s been a while since the last Wednesday Wow post. It isn’t so much a lack of things that invoked a “Wow!” so much as that they were the wrong polarity of wow — negative rather than positive. (Speaking of which, I’ll be posting soon about Sprint-which-is-now-T-Mobile, Apple, and some other tech companies that have wowed me in quite the wrong direction. Why are tech companies so awful?)
But as I watched some videos by one of my new favorite YouTube channels, The Critical Drinker, I was (in both senses of the word) positively wowed by two of his videos about two outstanding and worthwhile movies.
And in general, he does some of the best movie reviews I know.
It’s no secret; I’m hard to impress. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, been places, learned stuff, bought the tee-shirts. I’m not willfully hard to impress; I don’t resist being impressed. It’s just that after all these years it takes something genuinely impressive.
Like volcanoes. They’re impressive. Something about lava really grabs me. Rock running like molasses; I want to play in it. Yet somehow there is only one volcano in my heart: Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawai’i. I’m so impressed I did two Wednesday Wow posts about it.
And this baby makes three…
Lately I’ve been playing a little game of What’s the Wavelength? The question is certainly a bit evocative. Wavelength could refer to many things: a favorite radio station or, metaphorically extended, a favorite anything. It might even evoke an old news meme, although the supposed question posed that time was about frequency (which is just the inverse of wavelength).
Wavelength might even apply to one’s political, social, sexual, musical, or whatever, alignment, but in this case I mean it literally and physically. Under quantum mechanics — our best description of small-scale physical reality — everything manifests as a wave. That means everything has a wavelength — the de Broglie wavelength.
I’ve been curious about it for a couple of reasons.
Posts pertaining to programming!
Logos con carne 