sloth unleashed

(via martin klasch: Mathematics)

archery

muddypolitics:

(via Nate Silver’s Trashiest Post-Election Trash Talk — Daily Intelligencer)

Ever since discovering math and using it to very accurately predict the presidential election, Nate Silver has been on something of a score-settling media tour. Over the past six weeks, Silver hasn’t been shy about letting his adversaries and detractors (mostly, Politico and “pundits”) know just how much they suck, an undertaking that continued today with the release of a profile in Out magazine, which named Silver its Person of the Year. Herewith, a compilation of Silver’s post-election trash talk, ranked in order of trashiness.

7. “Politico ran 15 (!) stories on Seamus the Dog in a 72-hour period in April.http://bit.ly/U0wyF6 ”

6. ”Gallup’s demographic weighting algorithms probably contain a few bugs. They need to hire better statisticians.”

5. ”I think I have a better value system than the pundits — I care about truth, and I care about informing people, and they care about ratings.”

4. “Punditry is fundamentally useless.”

3. ”What’s remarkable for me is that you had some journalist for Politico who tweeted out , ‘All Nate’s doing is averaging polls and counting electoral votes? That’s the secret sauce?.’ Well, yeah, and the fact that you can’t comprehend that very basic thing, that says more about you than it does about me, right? Politico is a ‘who won the day’ kind of thing, right? They’re trying to cover it like it’s sports but not in an intelligent way at all, right? And they want to create noise, basically, right?”

2. On Politico’s Dylan Byers: “I think he’s a terrible journalist.”

1. ”Peggy Noonan is someone who is very, very skilled at making bullshit look like some elegant soufflé. She’s very good at rhetoric and argument, but it’s still not grounded in the truth — it all falls apart every four years, but I don’t think she’ll be out of a job any time soon.”

this guy…

cnet:

Nate Silver called all 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) last night.

Witch.

(screenshot from IsNateSilverAWitch.com)

hard work, scientific deduction and logic…you gotta love it…

(via xkcd: Math)

frenchtwist:

via undr:

Eve Arnold

Schoolgirl in Kuban, 1965

prostheticknowledge:

One of the First Computer-Generated Films, from 1963 - AT&T Archives 

A short, simple 3D animation of a satellite object orbiting a globe:

This film was a specific project to define how a particular type of satellite would move through space. Edward E. Zajac made, and narrated, the film, which is considered to be possibly the very first computer graphics film ever. Zajac programmed the calculations in FORTRAN, then used a program written by Zajac’s colleague, Frank Sinden, called ORBIT. The original computations were fed into the computer via punch cards, then the output was printed onto microfilm using the General Dynamics Electronics Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. All computer processing was done on an IBM 7090 or 7094 series computer.

Zajac didn’t make the film to demonstrate computer graphics, however. Instead, he was interested in real-time modeling of a certain theoretical construct. At the time, The Bell System was still deeply engaged in satellite research, having launched Telstar the previous year, with plans to continue developing communications satellites. Zajac’s model is of a box (“satellite”), with two gyroscopes within. In the film, he was trying to create a simulation of movement — the pitch, roll, and yaw within that system. 

More Here

(via dainfagerholm)

(via Physicist uses math to avoid traffic penalty | Ars Technica)

A physicist faced with a fine for running a stop sign has proved his innocence by publishing a mathematical paper, and has even won a prize for his efforts.

Dmitri Krioukov is a physicist based at the University of California in San Diego. When faced with a court hearing over allegedly driving through a stop sign, he put together a paper called The Proof of Innocence, which he has since published. The abstract for the paper reads: “A way to fight your traffic tickets.” The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California.

Krioukov’s argument is based upon the premise that three coincidences happened at the same time to make the police officer believe that he had seen the physicist run a red light, when, in fact, he hadn’t. He writes: “[In this paper], we show that if a car stops at a stop sign, an observer, e.g., a police officer, located at a certain distance perpendicular to the car trajectory, must have an illusion that the car does not stop, if the following three conditions are satisfied: (1) The observer measures not the linear but angular speed of the car; (2) The car decelerates and subsequently accelerates relatively fast; and (3) There is a short-time obstruction of the observer’s view of the car by an external object, e.g., another car, at the moment when both cars are near the stop sign.”

As Physics Central explains, because the police officer was around 30m from the intersection where the stop sign was situated, “a car approaching the intersection with constant linear velocity will rapidly increase in angular velocity from the police officer’s perspective.”

The physicist even created graphs showing what would have happened to his angular velocity if he had either been driving at a constant linear velocity or had made a quick stop and then accelerated back to speed, which is what he claims happens (actually, he sneezed, causing him to brake harder than usual). It was during this sneeze stop that another vehicle obscured the police officer’s view of Krioukov’s car, argues the paper.

The conclusion of the paper? It isn’t the police officer’s fault but he/she was wrong as their “perception of reality did not properly reflect reality.” Bet that’s a statement the other officers loved to remind them of.

forgottenantiquities:

Life in the Soviet Union, 1940-60.

(via novocainelipstick)

front cover (by Millie Motts)