:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Sunday, August 03, 2008 ::

The Graphs of War

Andart: The Graphs of War

"Correlates of War attempts to collect data on international relations. During the recent conference on global catastrophic risks I started playing with their data on wars, coming up with the following graphs."



You can't really tell much at this size^ so please follow the link and read through the explanatory text.

[via Arenamontanus' photostream]

Labels: History, Maths, War

:: Dan 3.8.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Crazy Questions at Google Job Interview

That made me think! Good fun too.

Labels: Google, IT, Logic, Maths

:: Dan 19.6.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University, where he teaches and has developed a geometric method of representing musical chords.
"When you first hear them, a Gregorian chant, a Debussy prelude and a John Coltrane improvisation might seem to have almost nothing in common--except that they all include chord progressions and something you could plausibly call a melody. But music theorists have long known that there's something else that ties these disparate musical forms together. The composers of these and virtually every other style of Western music over the past millennium tend to draw from a tiny fraction of the set of all possible chords. And their chord progressions tend to be efficient, changing as few notes, by as little as possible, from one chord to the next."

Labels: Maths, Music, Visuals

:: Dan 20.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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The Amen Break and the Golden Ratio by Michael S. Schneider (M.Ed. Mathematics)
[Via Null Device & others]

Labels: Electronic Music, Maths, Samples

:: Dan 15.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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The Cool Cash [scratchcard] game was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.

"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."

Labels: Maths

:: Dan 6.11.07 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
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I commented on the fractal like qualities of a Romanesco a couple of years ago. Someone else has now taken it a whole stage further:
Fractal Food: Self-Similarity on the Supermarket Shelf by John Walker
[via grom]

Labels: Food, Maths

:: Dan 30.5.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Flatland [full text] by Edwin Abbott
+ more about it
"Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a 1884 novella by Edwin Abbott Abbott, still popular among mathematics and computer science students, and considered useful reading for people studying topics such as the concept of other dimensions. As a piece of literature, Flatland is respected for its satire on the social hierarchy of Victorian society."

Labels: Literature, Maths

:: Dan 15.5.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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"The Fibonacci sequence -- in which each successive number is the sum of its two preceding numbers -- regularly crops up in nature. It describes the number of petals around daisies, how the density of branches increases up a tree trunk, and how a pine cone's scales are arranged. Now, having performed "stress engineering" to create Fibonacci-sequence spirals on microstructures grown in the lab, physicists in China think they may have found the reason why the sequence is so ubiquitous -- with a little help from a seemingly unrelated physics problem posed over 100 years ago"

Labels: Maths, Physics

:: Dan 30.4.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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