A Use for the Useless

I am a mathematician that does computers to pay the bills. I am a powerlifter that does bodybuilding on his off days. I am a photographer when time permits and his camera is handy. This is where I will write things, and you are more than welcome to...

[riebart]

I look more than a little like Mr. Zorg, quiaff?

[panatmansam]

Fractal Four Dimensional Tesseract

[riebart]

*Sploosh*

[riebart]

Outtake from yesterday morning.

[riebart]

Tagged by @marbus-maximus, so here I am.

[definitelyjupiter]

Are you a morning or night shower person… A sunset or lightning watching kind of person.. A chocolate or caramel person

[thelannistersroar-deactivated20]

Reblog if your best friend is pretty.

[kind-cult]

sometimes i try to scroll past this but then i feel guilty

[ourconsciences-deactivated20160]

She’s one of the best beautiful people you’ll ever meet 👀

[afriskylittleminx-deactivated20]

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Shown above are a trio of microscale rockets, each about 10 microns in length. These tiny rockets are roughly cylindrical in shape, with a narrower diameter at the front than the back. Like their space-faring brethren, these microrockets are chemically propelled. They draw in fuel from their surroundings, which reacts with the catalysts coating the interior of the microrocket to produce gases. Those gases bubble out the back end of the microrocket, creating thrust capable of propelling the rockets more than 1000 body lengths/second. Researchers have already demonstrated that these tiny rockets can haul cargo along with them. Scientists hope one day to use these self-propelled microrockets to help deliver drugs or isolate cancer cells. (Image credit: J. Li et al., source)

[riebart]

#rocketsurgery

[riebart]

Guess who got sued today. I'm not day drinking your day drinking.

[preludioefuga-blog]

Two-hundred-terabyte maths proof is largest ever

A computer cracks the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem — but is it really maths?

[curiosamathematica]

The Boolean Pythagorean triples problem asks whether it is possible to assign a color to each positive integer in such a way that no Pythagorean triple (a trio of integers a, b and c satisfying the equation a^2 + b^2 = c^2) has a single color.

In a paper posted on arXiv on 3 May, Heule, Kullmann and Marek have now shown that there are many allowable ways to colour the integers up to 7824, but when you reach 7825, it is impossible for every Pythagorean triple to be multicolored. There are more than 10^2300 ways to colour the integers up to 7825, but the researchers took advantage of symmetries and several techniques from number theory to reduce the total number of possibilities that needed to be checked, to just under 1 trillion. It took the team about 2 days running 800 processors in parallel on the University of Texas’s Stampede supercomputer to zip through all the possibilities. The proof was then verified using another computer program.

Another way to state the result is: the set {1,…,7824} can be partitioned into two parts, such that no part contains a Pythagorean triple, while this is impossible for {1,…,7825}.

[riebart]

This feels like we are making progress towards knowing more about Ramsey numbers and the associated counting problem.

Erdos would be happy, we may not have to lose a war against overpowering alien forces.

[itsbyrosie]

70% of what comes out of my mouth is dumb or embarrassing :-)

[afriskylittleminx-deactivated20]

Him: You should hang out with her. She’s an introvert too.

Me: I don’t think you understand how being an introvert works.

[riebart]

A good night with friends, cupcakes, beer, video games, and exceptional conversation.

[mathed-potatoes]

Yesterday I went to dinner to catch up with my buddy from the math department, and he told me this story about how he ran the city marathon in 2 hours, 59 minutes. That’s an amazing time. He was 19th out of thousands. 

He was doing pretty well for the first half, but then his ankle started to hurt. He slowed down for a bit, but then this girl he passed before passed him, and he started overthinking whether or not it was awkward to pass the same person multiple times, and, like, what if they small-talked about it? He decided it was better to pass her and stay ahead, so he picked up the pace. A few miles later, he fell in with two dude-bros who started talking to him. Not pleased to find himself in the company of dude-bros, he pulled ahead once again. This continued for a while; every time he got closed to a group of other marathoners, his social anxiety kicked in and he ran faster because he felt nervous being near people. 

TL;DR A mathematician ran an record marathon to avoid making small-talk with randos. He introverted his way into qualifying for the Boston marathon. 

[hedon-hoarder]

Gpoy

[geekagora]

@riebart

[riebart]

Aside from the cardio, sounds exactly like me.

[riebart]

[riebart]

Beers with friends, and i have decided that double standards can sit on a cactus. I am putting on an approptiate shirt, and thats it.

[themarzipanvolta-deactivated201]

Hi Mary. I've been lifting for a while now. Though I'm more comfortable with how my body looks, the scale just keeps going up. I'm now in the "overweight" category according to bmi. Should I worry or should I just avoid the scale?

Avoid, avoid, avoid. I am overweight according to my BMI. Assessing your fitness by the scale is mostly useless. Go by how you feel and how your (non-elastic 😉) clothes fit.

[marbus-maximus-deactivated20170]

I am also overweight according to my BMI.

[riebart]

Me too.

Scales provide largely non actionable information as it is, at best, a proxy for aesthetic goals. Two much better indicators are what you see in the mirror and how you are performing athletically as they are direct measurements of properties linked to goals.