Geometry
milhayser | December 10, 2014Modern science stands on the shoulders of giants, as well as average humans, dwarves and elves, ancient civilizations, and all the bones of the dead—forgotten and otherwise. But sometimes you have to start a new branch of science from scratch. On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel continues his count-up to Dec. 25, the birthday of Sir Isaac Newton. Orzel explores the origins of agriculture in the Americas, where nativized people made the best of their local flora, turning a humble, nearly inedible grass into one of the biggest food staples on Earth. Chad writes, "Our other staple crops are also…
grrlscientist | March 25, 2010tags: nature, numbers, geometry, mathematics, Fibonacci sequence, Golden Ratio, Angle Ratio, Delaunay Triangulation, Voronoi Tessellations, filmmaking, animation, Cristobal Vila, Nature by Numbers, streaming video
In this beautiful video, "Nature by Numbers," filmmaker Cristobal Vila presents a series of animations illustrating various mathematic principles, beginning with a breathtaking animation of the Fibonacci Sequence before moving on to the Golden Ratio, the Angle Ratio, the Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellations. The words are scary-sounding, but the math is beautiful and the…
sciencepunk | March 23, 2010I'm not really one for collecting things. The fact that I move around a lot twinned with the pathetic size of British homes, doesn't square well with building up much of anything. I finally dumped all my CDs last summer; I give away my books when I'm done with them. Plus, I always felt that collecting things was for people with more money than they knew what to do with.
Nevertheless, my current bedroom is as anonymous as a hotel room, and so I thought I should do what every self-repecting gentleman scholar did in times gone by: build myself a cabinet of curiosities. As the name suggests…
rallain | November 5, 2009Very simply, parallax is an apparent motion of an object due to a change in observation position. Let me start with an example. Here are two photos. I took a picture of the cabinet in the background from two slightly different positions. In the foreground is a clone trooper that did not actually move.
I added the dotted line so you could see how the clone trooper appeared to change positions with respect to the background. Here is a diagram of the camera in the two positions along with the toy.
Since the camera changed positions, the object that is closer appears to have moved with…