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Monday, May 17, 2010 - 01:44 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Above The Stars Of God

"I will raise my throne above the stars of God..."
- Lucifer Morningstar

"...But first, what is the definition of 'above'?"
- A modern theorist


Basketball cancelled for want of participants, so this gives me some time to blog...


...in Numberless Dimensions


Next: Flattestland? (Source: ianstewart.joat)


Flatland is one of the few mathy texts that has found enduring favour with the general public, and has been constantly in print since 1884; it therefore takes an author with some gumption to attempt a sequel, which is what we have with Flatterland.

As with the original, it mixes social satire with mathematics, though the eyes of the granddaughter of the original narrator A(lbert) Square - Victoria Line.

It also clears up one of the lingering issues of Flatland, which is the observation that if male children consistently have one more edge than their father, the world would be filled with near-Circles in short order. Flatterland fixes this by stating that such improvements evolve at a pace far closer to that of the real world, and that an extra edge (or even the loss of an edge) happens very rarely indeed. Thus, most Flatland males are of the same order as their parent.

With that out of the way, the book covers the Kepler Conjecture (probably solved, with heavy computer number-crunching), the ubiquity of dimensions (strictly speaking, any value that cannot be expressed as another value is of a different dimension, so things actually have a far more dimensions than we usually think they have), fractals with non-integer dimensions (tangentially related to research I may be doing), the construction (and undecidability) of the Mandelbrot set using a (Stanford-educated?) cab-driver analogy...

...Topology with teapots and two-holed doughnuts being equivalent (cup-to-doughnut animation), one-sided Möbius strips and Klein bottles in the form of a cow, the projective plane, the close relationship between finite geometry and combinations, the classification of geometries by allowable transformations (which leads our heroine V. Line to posit that it is not the number of sides, but the number of symmetries that should matter, kickstarting Flatland feminism in the process) and hyperbolic geometry...

...and then delves into physics with Schrödinger's cat, wave-particle duality, quantum systems, special relativity and the twin paradox, spacetime and Feynmann diagrams, wormholes and the shape of the universe...

...which is quite a handful for a paperback. Worth a read, especially if you liked Flatland.


Changes

They happen, what with both Google and Wikipedia implementing interface updates. And as it was with the new monitor (and Facebook), I guiltily found that I got used to it much faster than I would have thought. Humans are adaptive creatures, after all.

And so it is with the venerable Grilled Birds website:


After eight long years


You know that you have a problem when the first thing that comes into mind when building a website is not "let's customize a ready-made content management system", but "hey, let's just write everything!", but after so long, I discovered that it might be faster to just code up one's own simple forum software, for instance, than modify an existing one. For the curious, the whole shebang took about a week in all (more trivia: the site is 4000+ lines of Perl code, and 2+MB of database data), and it's a load off my back; I'll probably get around to rewriting my blog software after I get my first serious publication.

The site did mark a milestone - it's my first production piece that actually uses mySQL, since my first projects hailed from the bad old days when web hosts didn't have that option, but did allow writing to plain text files; not having to worry about delimiters and whatnot turned out to be helpful, as were cross-table queries that might have otherwise proven clumsy.

Notably, the site is also centered on screen, a convention that I should have followed with this blog, but instead got lazy with the not-quite-so-silver bullet of absolute CSS positioning. Next time, then. Didn't discover a good way to align stuff both to the top and to the bottom in a table cell, and ended up using way more tables than divs than I intended to (I was trying to migrate from the dark days of late-1990s HTML) and not quite meeting validation standards; however, the site works fine on both major browsers and Chrome, and that's good enough for me.


Fitness

Those with longish memories might recall my not-a-resolution in January, and I am happy to announce the results:


Note: only the start and end points for January-April are accurate; weight loss was certainly not linear


The story goes like this: I was enthusiastic enough for the whole of January up through the first week of February, at which time my grandma began to get concerned about my sometimes-45 minute jaunts on the elliptical machine (and of course if I sit on my butt, she has to have a word too...). Not much appeared to be happening despite compulsive weighing, and I took a fortnight off before getting back into it for the remainder of February and about the whole of March. I only got on the elliptical once for April, but by then my weight had automagically dropped from 71kg to about 65kg, which was my goal to begin with.

I expected a rebound of sorts as I weaned off my eat-less routine and began consuming the odd night snack for the examination period, but surprisingly nothing much happened, as my weight settled around 66kg despite almost two months of doing very little. I suppose it simply isn't that complicated at all - eat less, exercise more, and keep at it for a bit.

And what from here? Losing more weight is a no-go, as that path leads to skeletonization. I'll keep my next fitness target under wraps for now, then.

On a related note, I should perhaps try to sleep earlier - however, the almost-guaranteed strange dreams that I get by retiring in the early morning are almost worth it for themselves; I would surely not have had the imagination otherwise to recreate them.

The not-a-resolution-about-attitude thing is a work in progress, but if nothing I (re-)discovered that I can do a lot of s**t if I put my mind to it. Nothing new then.

Still, I sometimes wonder unworthily what life might be like if I loved (say) money exclusively (not that I have no love for it at all) - might things be far simpler, and life easier to endure?


FS Error

And finally, a tribute to one of the stupidest programming errors... where one attempts to press Alt-F-S to save the file, but ends up typing "fs", unchecked, into the code on the first failed attempt. Unsurprisingly, there is then a fatal error, which is made worse when the platform is not configured to return error messages (i.e. Perl on the web), nor write them to a log.



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Next: Bookmarked


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1 comment

anonymous by msn said...
(which leads our heroine V. Line to posit that it is not the number of sides, but the number of symmetries that should matter, kickstarting Flatland feminism in the process)
in reality, this observation is indeed made by a female, much admired by einstein
check: Noether's Theorem
each set of continuous symmetry transformation is related to a conserved quantity
spatial symmetry---> momentum conserved, rotational symmetry---> angular momentum conserved , temporal symmetry---> energy conserved
lala


May 19, 2010 - 17:01 SGT     

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