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| I have realized that all my obsession with "the human brain isn't ready for the internet" is really "No, my compulsive little monkey brain isn't ready for the internet." |
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| Oceanic methanogens. Image from the Oregon State University Subsurface Biosphere Initiative |
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| Mappings are a way to associate objects from one group to another. I remember when I first encountered this concept in one of my very first logic courses and was struck at how useful a concept it was. (Image from Mathworld. Yes, I know it turned itself into a sketch when it loaded on my blog.) |
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| Hold out a finger or a thumb and close your right eye and then your left. Your finger will appear to move. This is very much how distances are calculated in space! |
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| An image of marine snow, little gooey particles of a variety of organic matter that slowly sink to the bottom of the ocean, also known as marine detritus. Marine snow plays an incredibly important role in the ocean's carbon cycle and is a major source of food for deep-sea organisms. Image from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. |
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| These flowers don't care who I vote for. Yet another reason why flowers are awesome people. |
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| This is actually very tasty, vegan-friendly and very cuddly when you have a cold. |
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| Freaky little midget with many psychological complexes. Right now, just finishing up a re-read of Eric Fromm's "Escape from Freedom," which is about the psychology of Nazism. It was written in 1941 (GASP! An old book!!!) |
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| Chirality is all about "handedness." Bet you didn't know that a molecule could have a left or a right "hand"! (Image from Nature Publishing Group, Chiral molecules: High-speed photography, research highlight.) |
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| That beautiful back and bottom belong to Sydney Leroux ,one of the forwards for US women's Olympic soccer team. Now who wants to watch women's sports? |
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| A picture from NASA of the constellation Orion. The three stars in the middle in a row are his belt. The bright one up in the upper-left-hand corner is Betelgeuse. Special camera techniques were used to get this effect. You can see more at NASA's site here: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap030207.html |
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| Me with my brand-new Ruger that my husband gave me for our anniversary. As someone who loves guns but hates violence I feel the need to speak up. (And yes, my hair is wet... he surprised me with it while I was getting out of the shower. :-) ) |
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| These paper lanterns - also known as Kongming lanterns - are taking off due to some of the physical laws that Avogadro was investigating during the late 1700s and early 1800s. |
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| Mark Tansy's "Myth of Depth." Image from Adbusters, specifically Tactical Briefing #19. |
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| Bust of Sulla (Wikipedia.) It was under Sulla's dictatorship that Cicero first gained prominence as an orator. Cicero lived during a particularly turbulent time in Rome. |
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| Sarcastic mathematician v. Tyrannosaurus rex: it doesn't take Freud to figure out why I think this is cool . |
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| Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter. Although in many ways a brilliant design, da Vinci's helicopter would not work because it lacks a second, antitorque rotor. The antitorque rotor applies an opposing force to the torque created by the rotor which provides lift. |
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| René Magritte's "The Son of Man" |
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| Immaculate Conception, the church I'm attending here in Fairbanks. Beautiful little Catholic church with a wonderful priest. |
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| Gödel's incompleteness theorems state: (1) if you can list out the base assumptions of a system, then you cannot know all logically true statements possible in the system or the system is inconsistent, i.e. contains a logical contradiction and (2) if you can use the system to prove the system is consistent - does not contain a logical contradiction - then the system must be inconsistent. There's a nice little rant here at the University of Michigan's website where a mathematician complaining about the misapplication of Gödel's incompleteness theorems ends up appearing to support intuitive reasoning over logical reasoning, i.e. that intuitive reasoning is more complete than logical reasoning. I'm not sure if he's aware of this; I may pester him... |
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| Yes, yes I do. |
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| A bivariate Gaussian distribution, also known as a "bivariate normal distribution." I often think I can see the reflection of the minds of the mathematicians who study certain fields. In the case of Gauss (1777-1855) I wonder what Gauss was expressing about himself in his exploration of the normal distribution. Later the Gaussian distribution would become essential not only for modern statistics but also for understanding modern physics. For example, Einstein connected the Gaussian distribution to Brownian motion and, therefore, diffusion in 1905. |
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| If Thor (Chris Hemsworth) posed like this? I would be very okay with that. Very, very okay with that. |
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| At the end of this rainbow isn't a pot of gold. It's the next several months of arguing about what goes on in other people's bedrooms. |
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| A Koch snowflake is a strange mathematical object with a limited area but infinite perimeter, that is, the length around the object is infinite but the space that the object takes up is finite. Koch snowflakes are made by taking an equilateral triangle and adding three more equilateral triangles to each face and so on to infinity. This relates back to the coastline paradox, a real problem in the real world. Due to the coastline paradox, the apparently simple question "How long is the coast of Britain?" is, in fact, unanswerable. |
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| What if your view of people different from you was entirely built by television?... |
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| I love my friends in the Education Department. But when one tried to explain "intuitive math" to me today... Yikes. |
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| Ted Nugent. Was totally using a metaphor when he made a direct threat against the President. Or something. |
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| A beautiful painting by William Blake that I feel captures many of the tones of "The Meek One," if not directly than by poetic analogy. One of my favorite paintings which I will probably discuss again later in one of my "Sundays with William Blake" posts. |
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| Party time with a friend's AR. |
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| "I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds" - Oppenheimer at the Trinity Test |
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| Chaotic oscillators can be very much like haikus or koans. In written form they are often very short. They can be just a small system of three ordinary differential equations. Chaotic oscillators are both predictable and not predictable. A small difference in initial conditions can lead to profoundly different results. And yet, as long as those initial conditions are within what is often a very wide range, the widely variable results all stay within certain bounds, as if tied by an unknown string... |
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| Dude, did you do what I think you did?... |
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| From left to right: My best friend Tom, myself, and my husband Peter. This photo was taken on Peter's mid-deployment leave from Afghanistan. We've been best friends forever. Peter's giving Tom a playful jack to the stomach (I hope it's his stomach...) |
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| The spiral of a sunflower follows a very specific pattern known as the Golden Ratio, which is the limit of the ratio of the Fibonacci numbers as you approach infinity. Not everything that people claim follows the Golden Ratio actually does - nautilus shells, for example, do not. But sunflowers really do. To see how the sunflower's pattern relates to the Golden Ratio, check out this tool called "Turn, then Grow." |
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| The caption reads "Better to pump even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not pumping." |
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| No spoilers here, I just thought this was a great spoiler warning. I found it on a blog that I'm now following. |
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| Kittens are cute. LOLcats are a sign of the decline of Western civilization. Cutesy, self-affirmative BS. Here's a hint: find a real cat and pet it. Don't irritate me by sending me emails about how this picture of a kitty played a major role in your path to self-actualization. |
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| Laplace's demon or just a cryptic cat that likes to screw with people's heads? Either way, the Cheshire Cat is very cool, but tragically did not make the cut! |
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| Fractals are self-similar objects, which means that as you zoom in and out the pattern, while not identical, remains extremely similar. Their eerie beauty has given them the nickname "the thumbprint of God." |
