Mostly Maths: Random Thoughts @mostlymaths-blog-blog - Tumblr Blog

Sketches 20110410-20110417

I've not drawn as often this week as the previous week, and most of my drawings have been either in my iPad or iPod Touch. The first drawing is from a clock we have hanging over a shelf, inspired by Dali's The Persistence of Memory, done Sunday afternoon with Adobe Ideas in my iPad. Monday I did a quick sketch in the station, of the view of the railway... The train arrived too quick before I could add some detail. This was done in my iPod Touch with Sketch Club.

On Thursday I did a pair of pencil drawings over wooden bowls (inspired by 19th century Japanese scripts) to pyrograph over later. I have not finished them yet. First a little sanding to make it smoother. After drawing with pencil, I burn with the pyrograph, clean with a rubber all pencil marks and sand a little if needed. Several applications of water-soluble mahogany tint to make it look more interesting. A few layers of pore closer (it is like bookbinding white glue) and several layers of rubber-lacque to make it shinier. And finished! So far I'm still in step 2 :) These two can be seen in higher resolution. Click away!

The same day I drew our broken lamp. The 'head' is broken and falls over, this is why it looks odd. Done with Sketch Club, iPad. Saturday while I was having coffee I drew a stack of books in front of me, with my Pentel Brush Pen.

On Sunday we had barbecue with some friends, and while on the train I drew the pose of a guy looking through the window and a Chinese boy with a cap. Done with Sketch Club, iPod Touch

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. I only do this with stuff I love!

#sketches #drawing

Drawing again, Sketches 20110406 - 20110410

A few days ago I read Michael Nobbs free booklet Start to Draw Your Life, and soon after I bought his ongoing ebook (ongoing because he adds stuff regularly) Sustainable Creativity (this is an affiliate link, the book is 15.95$ and I have liked it, and love the fact that it is an ongoing project). And as a result, I have picked up my brand new brush pens (Sakura Brush Pen and Pentel Color Brush Pen) and an old plain white Moleskine and forgot about how beautiful the blank pages and cover look and started to draw. Draw whatever comes to be in front of me. Draw and do nothing else. Don't mind about how shitty something looks (hey, I tried drawing my cat below...) Here are this week's results. Probably next week I'll have more to post.

If you draw a lot in front of the table... you end drawing lots of cups and chairs.

The clock comes from a picture in Michael's book, the ship from the cover of a chocolate bar. That was my mid-evening treat, and then I drew Svartifoss, Iceland.

More chairs, TV command over some travel guides and Laia while doing the readathon. This is when I switched from the Sakura to the Pentel pen.Still getting used to it.

Lamp, spice and food rack.

This is everything. Just getting the pad and pen out and drawing. Forget about getting it perfect, just do something and learn. And repeat.

#Drawing #Sketching #Sketches

Being Early by Default = Waiting Too Long

From blumblaum@flickr

I have an incurable illness. In every appointment I have, I'm always early, by a long stretch. So far I've been unable to solve it. Even when I was just about to go and get a coffee with some friend I know is invariably 20 minutes late, I arrive 10 minutes before. And I spent 30 minutes of my life watching people pass me by. As I got more used to it, I started bringing books, now I carry my iPod Touch and lately my brand new iPad, too. But in any case, I wait too much for no reason A few months ago, for example, I had to take a plane to Warsaw, taking the train to get to the airport. I was 13 minutes early for the train and arrive at the check-in counters more than two hours in advance. Of course, this meant I could take it easy as the passengers in front of me managed to bring two cats on board (because they did when they came), talking it with the clerkwoman for 15 minutes. And I had time to eat something, drink a coffee and take a look at the book stand. An buy me something to eat on board. But summing this up, I could have rushed everything and spend another hour at home with Laia and Fatou. The problem is that it is incurable, and I'm bound to arrive early everywhere and do everything in a more relaxed and Zen way.

#Zen #Airport #Time management #Productivity

Invariant manifolds Saturday

Last Wednesday I had an interesting idea, (in which I am still working) to compute invariant manifolds. I wrote the C code for it Thursday evening, tweaked it a little on Thursday night and Friday morning and then realised I needed to code it in higher precision arithmetic, so I switched to pari-gp. I did it this morning, and started playing with it in the afternoon...

And here you have a homoclinic tangle for the Duffing map.

My Ben Nanonote Patchwork Case

Here is my patchwork Ben Nanonote case, done by my lovely girlfriend. Doesn't it look nice? It even has a small hole for plugging the micro USB charger or the plug for the earphones.

Done with a Japanese script based fabric and a plain grey to add colour. Slightly soft to add some cushioning for when the Ben is in my pocket or smashed in the back of my backpack.

Gcal: the ultra-powerful command line GNU calendar

Get Yacas in the Ben Nanonote

Unpacking my Ben NanoNote

My first port to the Ben NanoNote: gnugo

Another Ben Nanonote port: pmars

The Baseballs in Concert, Barcelona 1/11/2010

Yesterday we had the great pleasure of watching the German group The Baseballs play in Barcelona. They are on tour for their album Strike! Back, follow up to Strike!.

They do versions of popular pop songs in a rockabilly 50's and 60's style, for example their version of Rihanna's Umbrella:

They are really fun on stage, asking the public to participate. They sang two songs from the disc a capella, and sang several songs we had not heard. Even a small excerpt from Hit the Road, Jack! as intro for another song.

The only drawback, the organisation that sold a lot of tickets for a not big enough place.

If you have the opportunity to watch them live, don't hesitate and go watch them. In the meantime, follow them on Facebook or buy one of their CD's in iTunes.

Picture taken with Hipstamatic for iPhone by Shanidar

Keeping Your MacBook from Sleeping When Closing the Lid

Last week we bought a new TV, since our cat spilled water from a pot over our old TV, killing it completely. We bought an LG PC monitor that has TDT and can act as a normal HD TV, 23 inches. It is really nice and all, but these days without TV we got used to watching a lot of Flash Video on our computers. And plugging an external monitor in a MacBook just means you have mirrored video. The ideal solution would be to keep the MacBook with its lid closed. But then, the MacBook sleeps. How to solve it?

It turns out that you can wake up your MacBook by using an external mouse and keyboard, making your computer act in clamshell mode. But there is another solution: you can wake your MacBook by using your Apple Remote: that seemingly un-useful gadget that usually comes with your Mac.

Just connect your external monitor to your Mac, close the lid and then press any key in your Remote. Your make will wake up and show in your screen. Now the question, how to use it? We do it with RemotePad for iPhone a nifty application that lets you use your iPhone as a trackpad and keyboard, via Wifi.

Don't have an Apple Remote? No problem! Plug any USB device in your MacBook. Close the lid and then unplug the device: The system should then wake up, too.

Happy video watching!

#MacBook #Sleep #LG TV #RemotePad #Apple Remote

Now and Then

From MonikaThorpe@Flickr

Back in the 60's my grandparent had to emigrate to Germany in seek of a job to send money to his family. So had to do a lot of fellow spaniards, working abroad for less pay than a local, but at least making a living for them and those back home.

These days I've seen quite a few friends, mathematicians, who are relocating out of this country (France, U.S., Colombia, England). And when they post so in Facebook, the most common answer from his friends is 'Whoa you are going to work in (country)! That's cool!!!'. I wonder if back on the 60's people were saying the same.

#Thoughts #Jobs #Maths

arachneng

Brainfuck interpreter in 2 lines of C

mostlymaths-blog-blog

arachneng:

I did know about the twIP, a very small IP stack that can only respond to pings and also fit in a tweet, but recently I tried to execute the idea of making small and still usable things like that.

Well, I ended up with a slightly large program than a tweet, but it fits in two lines, i.e. 160 bytes. Let me introduce the world’s smallest Brainfuck interpreter1 in C: (Gist)

s[99],*r=s,*d,c;main(a,b){char*v=1[d=b];for(;c=*v++%93;)for(b=c&2,b=c%7?a&&(c&17 ?c&1?(*r+=b-1):(r+=b-1):syscall(4-!b,b,r,1),0):v;b&&c|a**r;v=d)main(!c,&a);d=v;}

Test it yourself! For example:

$ cc bf.c -o bf $ ./bf '++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.' Hello World!

Gadget Idea: 'The Spotibox'

This morning I had a bizarre idea. I was about to start working on pen and paper, and lately my procrastination has reached quite high peaks. I wanted my computer closed to keep temptation away, but I wanted to listen to Spotify (in case you don't know, it is a free music streaming service, with occasional ads). Dilemma.

There should be no dilemma. You should be able to listen to Spotify using your standard stereo system, without needing a computer (or not always).

Spotify could market 'The SpotiBox'. How should it work?

You plug the device to your USB enabled stereo system,

The stereo system recognises it as an USB disk with a song on it,

Starts playing a Spotify playlist.

How would you do that?

The SpotiBox would need wifi connection,

You would need a main computer/iPod Touch/iPhone to select which playlists and songs to play, also to configure it,

Once the stereo starts reading the file, the Spotibox starts streaming. It can either mimic an unending song, or stream them sequentially for the player to pick them up

Would it be too big? Probably not: the computing power is less than an iPhone (it just depends on which format Spotify streams in), you mostly need a wifi capable CPU and the wifi receiver.

Would it be useful? I guess it would, at least, I would buy one if the price was right (let's say 99$/99€ with a 3 month free subscription to Spotify? how does it sound?).

Why there is none? Dunno. Probably Spotify makes enough money to don't need it (as it would need to be done by them, as they don't allow anyone to mess with its protocols), and anyway, they prefer people paying for subscriptions and then listening through their iPhones. Or they don't have enough money and can't follow such a bizarre idea.

If someone wants to market one, feel free, I just had the idea but didn't build it.

#Ideas #Music #Hardware

Trees close to Es Grau, Menorca (Spain)

#Menorca #Pictures #Travel #Trees

Thomas I. Abercrombie: A Star on the Rise?

Last Sunday, as usual when there is a basketball tournament, I turned the TV on and watched a few games. In case you don't know, the World Cup is being played in Turkey these days. First, after lunch I watched some minutes of the China-Ivory Coast match, athen Lithuania-Canada for another while. When I arrived back home from my parents (Sunday lunch with them) I caught the final minutes of Slovenia-United States and prepared for the interesting match (for me) Spain-New Zealand.

I watched it to see how Spain was faring (after the quite humiliating defeat against France the day before... I won't talk about the refs here). They played a lot better (with a few glimpses, at last of the Rudy Fernández we all know about), but also had some bad moments.

But Thomas Abercrombie did not need any bad moment on Spain's part to shine over the rest of the New Zealand squad (except for Penney, who shot 3-pointer after 3-pointer to end with 21 points... he scored 37 the previous day against Lithuania!).

This boy (23 years old), currently playing for the Waikato Pistons was impressive last Sunday, scoring 19 points with 6 rebounds. At only 1m98 (6ft 6) and playing as shooting guard, he was able to dunk the ball like it was nothing. With an impressive two-footed vertical jump, he had also good hand skills to dribble and slam.

While on High School, he was a volleyball player (or that is what the TV commenters said), explaining his huge leaping.

You can view his World Cup profile, I bet he won't be playing in New Zealand any longer and will make the jump (no pun intended, more or less) to Europe or even maybe the NBA (he is un-drafted).

#Basketball #FIBA World Cup #Promising Basketball Player #Dunk

Headline Capitalisation Rules

The headline rule I prefer for capitalising (the one I feel is right) turns out to be the convention described in The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (Amazon link):

Capitalise all nouns, pronouns and verbs, and all other words of four or more letters

I think this is a pretty easy rule to remember... But everyone writes his headlines as he wishes. Do as you wish, but in case of doubt, follow The New York Times advice.

#Headline #Capitalise #SEO #Writing #Blogging

Invocation of the muse in T.E. Lawrence's translation of Homer's Odissey

O Divine Poesy Goddess-daughter of Zeus, Sustain for me This song of the various-minded man, Who after he had plundered The innermost citadel of hallowed Troy Was made to stray grievously About the coasts of men, The sport of their customs good or bad, While his heart Through all the seafaring Ached in an agony to redeem himself And bring his company safe home. Vain hope – for them! For his fellows he strove in vain, Their own witlessness cast them away; The fools, To destroy for meat The oxen of the most exalted sun! Wherefore the sun-god blotted out The day of their return. Make the tale live for us In all its many bearings, O Muse.

Asynchronous Google Analytics and AdSense integration

Since I switched to the new (well, it was new when I read about it, but it was already 7 months old) Google Analytics Asynchronous code, I lost my AdSense integration.

It took me a while to realise it... And a while more to decide to act on it. Now it is quite harmful for my statistics: it's been almost two months.

Yesterday I decided to act, without any luck. All suggestions in the Google help forums were unhelpful... You can read a sample answer from here.

The real problem is with AdSense integration with the code tracking multiple subdomains. My asynchronous code was set to track mostlymaths.net, random.mostlymaths.net and plants.mostlymaths.net and this interacts badly with AdSense integration. The solution is simple... but hard to come by if Google does not put it in a more visible place. It can be found here, and is to add

where '.sampledomain.net' has to match what you wrote in Google Analytics' set custom domain code:

_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.sampledomain.net']);

With this your AdSense integration will work again. Enjoy!

Two fractals

Reposted from MostlyMaths.net. Two fractals that appeared after some calculations. The jagginess in the colors of the middle comes from some re-compressing after uploading to Tumblr, I guess.

#Fractals #Mathematics #Programming #Julia set #Parameter plane #Siegel disk

Fractals for lunch

Steamed fractals for lunch: Romanesco broccoli. It is green in the outside, but white in the inside. This also happens with usual broccoli, but I didn't remember it was so evident.

#Fractals #Lunch #Broccoli

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