This is just about the most right-on, 21st-century paper and associated PR I’ve seen this year. MIT’s SENSEable City Lab has produced this little video to go with a paper by some of their researchers, led by Carlo Ratti: [youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-hlP8Ql384] So we have a slickly produced YouTube video announcing an open-access paper about big…
One half of one percent of your time
If I gave you 200 tokens representing your available time this week, would you spend one of them on listening to the Math/Maths Podcast? John Read tweeted, on the occasion of our 100th episode/2nd birthday of Math/Maths, that: to hear all 100 of them within 2 years ≈ 0.6% of the time listening.– @johndavidread on…
“Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks” – 10 years on
ScienceWatch has published an interview with Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz on the decennial of the publication of their paper “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks”, which contained some counter-intuitive results about the spread of disease and sparked the development of network theory. The interview covers what they did, what it means and what they hope…
Math52 reaches Kickstarter goal
Math52, a project by Mathalicious to “offer a fresh vision of what it means to teach math”, has surpassed its Kickstarter funding goal, which means that the project will receive the pledged money and can go ahead. At the time of writing, over $36,500 have been raised, well over the target of $27,000. The aim is…
Film “The Turing Enigma” online for free
The Turing Enigma, “a dark thriller, commemorating the tragic death of Alan Turing,” is available to view for free online. First, here’s a trailer: [vimeo 25774798]
Converting a stream of binary digits to a stream of base $n$ digits
James Coglan asked on twitter: Suggestions wanted: how to turn an indefinite stream of bits (01110010…) into a stream of [A-Z] where letters are evenly distributed. — James Coglan (@jcoglan) June 11, 2012 And I don’t mean just select character codes, I mean select from an arbitrary-sized character set of any length. — James Coglan…
Problems I’m currently thinking about
I’ve been in a bit of a problem-posing mood recently. Hopefully I’ll do some problem-solving soon. Here are a few questions I’ve thought of but haven’t got solutions for. I haven’t done any literature searching, so these might have been done before. All the problems are quite computery. Maybe I’m a computer scientist, really. Problem…