Fractal poverty

I got this link from Andrew Sullivan's blog. Maps of income levels apparently look the same at any scale.

The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel

I read this story by Jose Luis Borges years ago - in fact, the link where I first read it still exists. Just the other day I found this book in an actual library, so I checked it out. I have yet to start it but it looks like it will be good.

Math and Science Shirts

Happy π Day!

I hope Professor Hawking knows about this, and thinks it's awesome.

Try and hear it in Bogart's voice.

This place is basically a cornucopia of science-apparel hilarity.

For some reason, several of the shirts in the store of the hipster-soap-opera webcomic Questionable content are science related.

Fractal broccoli and other links

Fractal broccoli

The type of calculator I used in high school can still be found. Mine is still going strong after almost 16 years.

Before you click on the link, ask yourself: "Do actual socialists like Avatar?"

Going to the Bookstore

An Anthropological Curiosity

The reports predicted snow that night. So Friday in my classroom, the possibility was on my students' minds. Having finished her work, one girl asked to draw on the board and so I allowed her to do so.

She proceeded to draw a snow scene, complete with snowman. I thought I had seen something like this before, some event related somehow - and I realized what it was. Cave paintings.

One theory about the purpose of those paintings has it that they were magical in nature, as they often showed hunting scenes. If some of them were done as a way to attract success in hunting, what happened in my classroom was another example of the same thing - sympathetic magic.

In some ways, how little do we change, as a species, in thirty thousand years. The girl would most likely not be happy to think of her actions as magical, and it is possible she would doubt that humanity was so old. Nevertheless, without knowing it, she affirmed the connection we all still have to our ancestors in the ancient past.

James Joseph Sylvester: Mathematitian and "poet".

There is a rather interesting transcribed speech here which discusses the poetical efforts of J. J. Sylvester, who was the first Jew to hold a professorship at Oxford. In particular, as mentioned by Bell, he wrote a poem called, "To a missing member of a family of terms in an algebraical formula" which starts as such:

Lone and discarded one! divorced by fate,
From thy wished-for fellows--whither art flown?
Where lingerest thou in thy bereaved estate,
Like some lost star or buried meteor stone?

So yeah, his math was better than his poetry.