One of many witty, math-y cartoons from www.xkcd.com:
To create this, I think you’d need to draw panels both on the front and the back of a strip of paper, making sure that the end of one side can precede (or follow) the end on the other side in the story. I imagine it would be best if the circular story had no beginning or end.
This is a lovely three-minute visual homage to the Fibonacci sequence and its relationship to various natural phenomena.
I was talking to some friends (and one cab-driver) about electric and hybrid cars the other day, and the concept of range anxiety came up. Consumers may very well wish to purchase electric cars, but they are apprehensive about getting stranded on long trips: auto makers call this range anxiety.
I wonder what the average consumer’s range anxiety is (measured in, say, miles), and I wonder how that compares to the capabilities of a typical electric car. Consumers are assumed to act with lots of information (provided by commercials and marketing, for example), but perception is often far from reality. There could be a large gap between someone’s range anxiety and the capability of the car–range dissonance, perhaps? In order to make sales, car manufacturers need to close that gap, through technology or marketing.
There’s a lot of interesting quantitative analysis to be done here, both of the car’s performance, and the consumer’s perception of performance. In addition, the government–which seems interested in promoting electric car use–must understand the needs of the cars and consumers as well, as it starts to develop the geometry of “filling” stations.
I found this attempt to quantify the decline in quality of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies very amusing:
Using the rotten tomatoes rankings is a very interesting idea. I wonder what other kinds of analyses could incorporate that data.
For the second consecutive day, I unexpectedly crossed paths with an acquaintance. In both cases, the encounter occured outside my daily routines, the person was someone I know only minimally, and we were both en route to different destinations when we happened to notice each other.
There are a lot of interesting results associated with objects moving around randomly in a given space, but as is usually the case with mathematics, the situations are idealized to eliminate some of the complicating real-world issues. Imagine a dot moving back and forth on the number line, or randomly around the Cartesian plane, for example.
I’m not really sure how unlikely it is for me to have two serendipitous encounters on back-to-back days, but the following questions are probably significant: how dense is the population? How many people do I know? How attentive am I? How popular is my destination? There are probably many more other important and complicating factors.
In any event, it’s certainly unlikely that it will happen again today.