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The Unraveling of Space-Time | Quanta Magazine

This special in-depth edition of Quanta is fascinating and very nicely put together.

Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine | Quanta Magazine

The mathematics behind the halting problem is interesting enough, but what’s really fascinating is the community that coalesced. A republic of numbers.

The man who tried to redeem the world with logic - Big Think

The fascinating—and tragic—story of Walter Pitts and Walter McCulloch whose lives and work intersected with Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann:

Thanks to their work, there was a moment in history when neuroscience, psychiatry, computer science, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence were all one thing, following an idea first glimpsed by Leibniz—that man, machine, number, and mind all use information as a universal currency. What appeared on the surface to be very different ingredients of the world—hunks of metal, lumps of gray matter, scratches of ink on a page—were profoundly interchangeable.

Pizza Exchange Rate | FlowingData

This is a story about pizza and geometry.

The interactive widget here really demonstrates the difference between showing and telling.

“Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination – The Public Domain Review

The characteristica universalis and the calculus racionator of Leibniz.

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.

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!

Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile - Issue 69: Patterns - Nautilus

The forbidden symmetry of Penrose tiles and quasicrystals.

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.

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.

Beyond Curie—a design project celebrating women in STEM

Beyond Curie is a design project that highlights badass women in science, technology, engineering + mathematics. 

The math of CSS locks

A very very in-depth look at fluid typography in CSS using calc.

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.

A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com

Solving the city.

aM laboratory

A beautiful piece of musical mathematical poetry.

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:

1. Five Numbers

   1. A Countdown to Zero
   2. Simple as Pi
   3. The Golden Ratio
   4. The Imaginary Number
   5. Infinity

2. Another Five Numbers

   1. The Number Four
   2. The Number Seven
   3. The Largest Prime Number
   4. Kepler’s Conjecture
   5. Game Theory

3. A Further Five Numbers

   1. 1 — The Most Popular Number
   2. 2 — At The Double
   3. 6 Degrees of Separation
   4. 6.67 x 10^-11 – The Number That Defines the Universe
   5. 1729 — The First Taxicab Number

NEW MATH by Craig Damrauer

Equations to live by.

Quantum Random Bit Generator Service

There's no such thing as a good CAPTCHA but if there were, these would be ...Best. CAPTCHAs. Ever!

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.

1. Five Numbers

   1. A Countdown to Zero
   2. Simple as Pi
   3. The Golden Ratio
   4. The Imaginary Number
   5. Infinity

2. Another Five Numbers

   1. The Number Four
   2. The Number Seven
   3. The Largest Prime Number
   4. Kepler’s Conjecture
   5. Game Theory

3. A Further Five Numbers

   1. 1 — The Most Popular Number!
   2. 2 — At the Double
   3. 6 Degrees of Separation
   4. 6.67 x 10^-11 — The Number that Defines the Universe
   5. 1729 — The First Taxicab Number

'Cool Cash' card confusion - News - Manchester Evening News

A seasonal twist on the lottery card is withdrawn because people don't understand how negative numbers work. "I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I'm not having it."