Revolutions

Because it's Friday: Parable of the Polygons

What if we lived in a society where everyone really happy about living in a diverse neighborhood? What if people only wanted to move when the disparity was really extreme: say, when fewer than 33% of people nearby looked like them? Well, we'd end up with a society like this:

Still pretty segregated, as it turns out. At Parable of The Polygons (via Miles McBain), an interesting interactive website, you can experiment with the levels of individual bias that lead the eponymous Polygons to switch locations, and see the impact on the overall Polygon society. It's quite enlightening.

That's all from us at the blog for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back next week.

 

 

Because it's Friday: Hey, it's Enrico Pallazzo!

It seemed like such a simple movie. The Naked Gun (1988) is slapstick comedy through-and-through, but I never would have guessed (h/t Steven O'Grady) how much detail and planning went into the jokes, especially the baseball scene at the end. There's lots of interesting behind-the-scenes info in Sporting News's breakdown of the movie. Even Drebin's bungled National Anthem performance was composed in advance for the scene:

That's all from us for this week. Next week, I'm in Australia for the Melbourne R User Group and the eResearch Australiasia conference, so I expect blogging will be a little lighter than usual. Have a great weekend!

Because it's Friday: If IKEA did algorithms

Thanks to Mike Loukides I recently discovered IDEA, a series of algorithm explainers presented as IKEA assembly instructions. It's a brilliant concept: IKEA instructions have to be clear and easy to follow, in sequential steps, without use of language. There are entries for determining a convex hull and for various sorting algorithms, but this one on public key encryption is my favorite (not least because it's the first time I feel like I "get" the concept).

Credit: idea-instructions.com. License: CC by-nc-sa 4.0

That's all from us for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back next week.

Because it's Friday: Fly Strong

I was about the same age as student pilot Maggie Taraska when I had my first solo flight. Unlike Maggie, I didn't have to deal with a busy airspace, or air traffic control, or engines (I was in a glider), or — most significantly — one of my landing wheels falling off during the flight. But Maggie handled the entire situation much more coolly than I remember my own short, uneventual, first solo. Just listen to the radio chatter below. If you're in a rush, you can skip the period from 2:00 – 7:30 while she circles the Beverly (MA) airport waiting for a couple of other planes to land first, but the whole thing is worth a listen to hear how she successfully lands with only one wheel on the left side.

 

That's all from us at the blog for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back next week.

Because it's Friday: Hurricane Trackers

With Hurricane Florence battering the US and Typhoon Manghkut bearing down on the Philippines, it's a good time to take a look at the art of visualizing predicted hurricane paths. (By the way, did you know that "typhoon", "hurricane" and "cyclone" are just different names for the same weather phenomenon?) Flowing Data has a good overview of the ways media have been visualizing the predicted path (hat tip: reader MB), including this animation from Axios which does a good job of demonstrating the uncertainty in the forecast:

A good thing to be aware of, though, is that the cones around the predicted tracks do not represent the size of the storm, but rather the uncertainty in the position of the center of the storm.

For a "live" view though, the place I like to look at is the global wind visualization from the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network. Here's how Florence looks at this writing (3:45AM East Coast time). Click the image to see the current animated view.

That's all from us at the blog for this week. For those in the path of the storms, good luck and stay safe. 

 

Because it's Friday: Stars in Motion

In the center of our galaxy, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, lies the massive black hole around which the entire galaxy revolves. The European Space Agency has observed that region for 26 years, and you can actually see stars orbiting the the black hole! (via @_Astro_Nerd_)

Kinda puts things into perspective, doesn't it? Anyway, that wraps things up for this week. We'll be back again after the weekend — have a good one!

Because it's Friday: The Curiosity Show

This one's all about nostalgia. When I was about 7 or 8 years old back in Australia, my favorite TV show by far was The Curiosity Show, a weekly series hosted by Rob (Morrison) and Deane (Hutton) — they didn't use their last names — featuring segments about science and practical experiments you could do at home. My favorite part was the experiments: I remember pestering my parents for all manner of straws, construction paper, watch batteries and wire to follow along with the TV show (and also the companion books, themed around Earth, Air, Fire and Water). So I was thrilled to find this week that the entire series is now available on YouTube. I still remember the thrill of building my own electric motor:

If you have a young child with a burgeoning interest in science, you might want to check this out. As for me, I always assumed this was a local show (it was filmed in the town where I grew up, and I'm pretty sure my Mum took me to see Rob and Deane do outdoor shows once or twice), so I was pleased to learn that it was shown it was also shown in Asia or Europe.

That's all from us for this week. We'll be back after the long weekend — see you then!

Because it's Friday: One Million Integers

This is a visualization of numbers from 1 to 1,000,000, added in order in blocks of 1,000, located in the 2-D plane according to their prime factors:

The animation was created by John Williamson. The mathematical process begins by representing each integer as a vector of length 80,000: the first value is the number of times "2" is used in its prime factorization, the next for "3", and so on through the primes. Then all of those vectors together represent one million points in an 80,000-dimensional space, which is then reduced to two dimensions using a dimension-reducing algorithm. The interesting structure that results is partly an artifact of the algorithm, but also a results of the fractal nature of the primes on the number line.

That's all from the blog for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back next week. See you then!

 

Because it's Friday: A Titanic Brexit

Boris Johnson once declared that Britain leaving the European Union would be a "Titanic success". More than a year ago Comedy Central UK imagined what such a success would look like, and the prospects look much the same today: 

That's all from us for this week. Have a great weekend, and see you later! 

Because it's Friday: A data center under the sea

Microsoft's Project Natick is investigating the feasibility of housing data centers (like those that power Azure) in submerged pressure vessels, with the goal of putting computational services near the demand, powered by renewable energy. That's awesome in its own right, but the Project Natick team also recently installed live underwater cams to view the pilot data center in the North Sea. Apparently, it attracts a lot of fish! I've been waiting to get a clear view of the data center for the screenshot below, but it's always swarmed by fish. Click on the image for a live camera -- you might get a better view than I did.

That's all from the blog for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back next week!