Category Archives: sciences

Hilbert’s palette

A space-filling path through this square is matched to an analogous path through the color-cube. I had this idea in mind for years but the algorithm for Hilbert’s curve defeated me; then I stumbled on Steve Witham’s Python code, and … Continue reading

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | 4 Comments

chaos and health

In a private forum, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: I remember that one of my early epiphanies on the road to libertarianism came when I was reading about chaotic, scale-independent oscillations in heartbeat frequency. One might naively think that the healthier the … Continue reading

Posted in economics, medicine | Leave a comment

Takana go goth

See Takana. The 306 figures shown there can be reduced to 45 by rotation and reflection. I fitted a polynomial curve to each partial path, and superimposed them.

Posted in curve-fitting | 2 Comments

it’s a post, ain’t it?

a very clever picture — clean, but be warned, much of that site is NSFW. Bon mot from Sheldon Richman: Advocates of the free market are sometimes parodied for their seemingly all-purpose answer to any problem: Let the market handle … Continue reading

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Martian months

Most proposed calendars for Mars have 24 months, and various systems have been offered to name them. Here’s one more: use the names of the 24 brightest stars, in order of longitude right ascension (relative to the rotation axis of … Continue reading

Posted in calendars | Tagged | 4 Comments

the Big Whack

Giant impact hypothesis It has been said (though not in that article) that the Pacific Ocean is the scar of the whack. So if the whack hadn’t happened, would Earth’s crust be all continental? In that case the plates would … Continue reading

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the greatest thing ever!

Forgive my waxing hyperbolic . . . This is a tiling of the hyperbolic plane by triangles whose angles are π/2, π/3, π/7 – the smallest possible tile. I present it in a conformal mapping analogous to the Mercator projection, which I’ve … Continue reading

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | 1 Comment