A Little Bit of...

So this is a little bit of me trying a new thing: "tumblr." I don't know how consistent will I be but I hope this will allow me to express myself in a way that I can't do in real life. A perspective of my reality and my society. So, let the blogging begin!

[femmenietzsche]

Ways I Am Like the Standard Model

Clearly flawed, but with no obvious path to improvement

Can go from a top to a bottom under the right circumstances

I too have a problem with hierarchy

Influenced by Richard Feynman

Too weird to be widely understood

If you froze my body and shattered it down the middle that would arguably be symmetry breaking

Lots of self-coupling

Many of my interactions are weak

Incompatible with gravity (I fell out of bed the other day)

Will break down under extreme conditions

All of my friends describe me as a gauge quantum field theory containing the internal symmetries of the unitary product group SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1)

[yonoteam]

XD

[nickthejam]

[amnhnyc]

Before the days of Bill Gates and OS updates, the word “computer” was used (as far back as the 17th century) to describe a person who performs calculations. The latest episode of Shelf Life includes a segment about Henrietta Leavitt—an astronomer and human “computer” whose discoveries allowed researchers to determine cosmic distances.

Leavitt was one of a group of about 80 women, known as “the Harvard Computers,” who worked at the Harvard Observatory at the turn of the century. The Computers were hired by the Observatory’s director, Edward Charles Pickering, to help catalog and analyze thousands of early photographs of the night sky.

This assembly of scientifically-minded women has a somewhat apocryphal origin story: that Pickering—frustrated with his assistant’s sloppy cataloging—fired the male staffer with the words, “Even my maid could do a better job.” He did, in fact, then hire his maid Williamina Fleming as the first of the female computers. Fleming, who had been a teacher before becoming a maid, made several lasting contributions to astronomy, discovering the famed Horsehead Nebula and helping to develop a temperature-based classification system for stars.

The Computers worked six-day weeks and earned between 25 and 50 cents an hour.  Employed as technicians, their tasks included measuring the brightness of stars and analyzing spectra to determine the properties of celestial objects. Aside from their clerical bookkeeping, however, many of the women were fascinated with astronomy and made discoveries of great importance.

Annie Jump Cannon was hired by Pickering in 1896, but unlike some of her fellow Computers, she’d previously studied physics and astronomy at Wellesley and Radcliffe. Cannon classified hundreds of thousands of stars in her career and developed a standard stellar classification system that’s still in use today. She became the first woman elected as an officer to the American Astronomical Society and was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford.

Today, Museum astrophysicist Ashley Pagnotta (featured in the latest Shelf Life episode visits the Harvard College Observatory at least once a year to look at glass plates of the night sky and revisit the data generated by the Harvard Computers. “I use the same plates that these women did,” says Pagnotta. “When I go through them, I come across ones that have their notations. That’s one of my favorite things about going to the plate stacks. These are women whom I’ve looked up to for a long time.”

This post was originally published on the Museum blog. 

[scientiststhesis-at-pillowfort]

[yonoteam]

XD

[scientiststhesis-at-pillowfort]

I’ve been planning on writing a post along these lines, and the recent thing on tumblr about the LW community has given me just the right motivation and environment for it. Specifically this nostalgebraist post gave me the inspiration I needed. He described the belief-content of LW as either...

[yonoteam]

Wow!! This person basically described some of mu beliefs!!

[yonoteam]

Another great video by Veritasium!

[scishow]

Why do dogs tilt their heads to the sides in that adorable way when they are confused/thinking?

Well, we don’t really know, but there’s some evidence that it has to do with the shape of their faces. Dogs are constantly scanning the faces of their owners (and other dogs) searching for emotional context. We know that for sure, which is pretty cool. But it appears that their big adorable dog noses actually prevent them from seeing the lower part of your face when they’re looking at you. When they turn their heads to the side, the muzzle isn’t blocking your mouth anymore so they can get the full picture again.

This clever hypothesis was tested by seeing if dogs without large muzzles tilted their heads less and, indeed, they do!

-Hank

[yonoteam]

:O

[ilovecharts]

countries by income equality

[yonoteam]

o.O

[engineeringnow]

[all-the-other-humans]

Fucking physics

[ketchuprocket]

Somewhere in the world, a physics professor writes the perfect exam question.

[itsokaytobesmart]

[curiosamathematica]

Mankind’s first picture of the Mandelbrot set, from the paper The dynamics of 2-generator subgroups of PSL(2,C) by Robert Brooks and J. Peter Matelski.

[spring-of-mathematics]

Mathematics and Traditional Cuisine

The mathematics of Pasta: A process analysis to find unity, formulas and ways to express structure mathematics of pasta shapes, by their mathematical and geometric properties. See more at: The Maths of Pasta by George L. Legendre.

Image: 

'Pasta By Design' - Created by a team of designers, ‘Pasta by Design’ book reveals the hidden mathematical beauty of pasta: its geometrical shapes and surfaces are explained by mathematical formulae, drawings and illustrations.

Animated gifs - From video: The traditional pasta making techniques used at Della Terra Pasta by Chris Becker [Video] - shared at here.

Types of Pasta in the post (From left to right):  Agnolotti - Tortellini - Saccottini - Sagne Incannulate - Pappardel

[yonoteam]

The third and fourth videos of these guys are already up. They explain how connectives work with truth values and they teach how to work with truth tables.

[mathprofessorquotes]

So basically if you take the sin of some shit, and divide it by precisely the same shit, the limit is 1.

Calculus professor (via mathprofessorquotes)

[scienceisbeauty]

Going to `The Walking Book´? Well, death is the only absolute certainty we have as living beings… but then… what happens to your social accounts when you die?. An interesting infographic by Webpage FX via LifeHacker.

(High-res)

[mindfuckmath-deactivated2016062]

No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto

Happy Tau Day, everyone!  In case you don’t know, Tau = 2 Pi, or the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius which works out to being 6.283185307179586…

Compared to Pi, Tau is a much more natural and logical choice for the circle constant. Think about the radians on a circle. For example, a quarter of a circle is a quarter of Tau radians, as opposed to the confusing half Pi radians.  Half of a circle is half Tau radians, as opposed to the bewildering Pi radians.  A full circle is Tau radians, as opposed to the inelegant and ridiculous 2 Pi radians.

Make sure to click on the link above for videos and all sorts of other good stuff on Tau, and read Michael Hartl’s brilliant The Tau Manifesto. I also recommend reading the wonderful paper that started this debate Pi is Wrong! by Bob Palais.  

[proofsareart]

Happy Tau Day 2014!

Have you accepted the circle constant into your heart and given your life over to geometric beauty and reason? We just want you to stop living in the darkness of π and let the light of τ illuminate your understanding. Perhaps we could just leave you with a copy of the Tau Manifesto. The truth will set you free!

[with apologies to the Goose.]

[yonoteam]

I totally do this xD!!

Devout Christian: "Do you believe in one God?"

Mathematician: "Yes, up to isomorphism."

[ilovecharts]

The Largest Immigrant Population in Each State

[yonoteam]

We are a plague!!! :O