Liverpool:
28 August 2009, 9:11am • habitat Comments (View)
I’d forgotten I’d already plugged Last.fm into Tumblr, but I’m inordinately pleased with the design of klangfarbe, a home for trying to turn music into words.
(The typeface you might be missing is Constantia. I should have sIFR‘d it, perhaps?)
30 July 2009, 3:17amComments (View)
could I build one of these? how rocky are my carpentry skills? The tallness like a ship’s mast delights me.
1 July 2009, 1:46pmComments (View)
Alternative, elegant uses for Twitter - like poetry. More?
7 June 2009, 7:57pmComments (View)
I like: Nebo Peklo; also known as Natalie Tweedie. (and her blog)
12 May 2009, 4:15pm • drawing art Comments (View)
(photo by Project Rwanda)
Land of a thousand hills, of bicycles which carry enormous cargoes. Rwanda now has a professional cycling team – who aren’t too used to getting up on time. Article from the Guardian.
3 May 2009, 7:23pm • bicycles Comments (View)
Having started on maths, thought I should bring back to light one of my favourite things: crochet models of hyperbolic planes.
The previous method of modelling hyperbolic planes was William Thurston’s paper method.
Noting that one of the qualities of hyperbolic space is that as you move away from a point the space around it expands exponentially, Thurston designed a paper model made up of thin cresent-shaped annuli taped together.
Not too surprisingly, such a solution proved not at all durable. Dr Daina Taimina’s crochet constructions are ingenious, practical, and absolutely make me smile.
The beauty of Taimina’s method is that many of the intrinsic properties of hyperbolic space now become visible to the eye and can be directly experienced by playing with the models. Geodesics – or straight lines – on the hyperbolic surface can be sewn onto the crochet texture for easy examination. Through the yellow lines in the model below look curved, folding along them demonstrably produces a clean straight line.
Read on for hyperbolic parallels, triangles, cones (pseudospheres – of which the above image is one), and why (if it’s not obvious) models of hyperbolic planes are so delightfully frilly. Article at The Institute for Figuring, and many others too for the curious.
18 April 2009, 2:04pm • craft mathematics Comments (View)
Google Calculator has constants other than ‘miles’, ‘grams’ &c. built in. So you can query au/c and be reminded of how long it takes light from the Sun to reach Earth.
(thank you, Language Log)
18 April 2009, 1:45pm • mathematics Comments (View)
