Kyomibukai...

writersandkitties:

Grant Morrison and his vignette super-kitty.

hiremebecauseimsmart:

Leonardo da Vinci’s ability to embrace uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox was a critical characteristic of his genius. —J Michael Gelb

Say you want to use a mathematical metaphor, but you don’t want to be really precise. Here are some ways to do that:

• Tack a +ε onto the end of an equation.
• Use bounds (“I expect to make less than a trillion dollars over my lifetime and more than $0.”)
• Speak about a general class without specifying which member of the class you’re talking about. (The members all share some property like, being feminists, without necessarily having other properties like, being women or being angry.)
• Use fuzzy logic (the ∈ membership relation gets a percent attached to it: “I 30%-belong-to the class of feminists | vegetarians | successful people.”).
• Use a specific probability distribution like Gaussian, Cauchy, Weibull.
• Use a tempered distribution a.k.a. a Schwartz function.

Tempered distributions are my current favourite way of thinking mathematically imprecisely.

Tempered distributions have exact upper and lower bounds but an inexact mean and variance. T.D.’s also shoot down very fast (like exp −x², the gaussian) which makes them tractable.

For example I can talk about the temperature in the room (there is not just one temperature since there are several moles of air molecules in the room), the position of a quantum particle, my fuzzy inclusion in the set of vegetarians, my confidence level in a business forecast, ….. with a definite, imprecise meaning.

Classroom mathematics usually involves precise formulas but the level of generality achieved by 20th century mathematicians allows us to talk about a cobordism between two things without knowing precisely everything about them.

It’s funny, the more “advanced” and general the mathematics, the more casual it can become. Like stingy sticklerisms that build up to a chummy, whatever-it’s-all-good.

Our knowledge of the world is not only piecemeal, but also vague and imprecise. To link mathematics to our conceptions of the real world, therefore, requires imprecision.

I want the option of thinking about my life, commerce, the natural world, art, and ideas using manifolds, metrics, functors, topological connections, lattices, orthogonality, linear spans, categories, geometry, and any other metaphor, if I wish.

(via proofmathisbeautiful)

redbeanice:

This is how you pick up hot dates.

(via fuckyeahmath)

casserolesandcleavage:

Tea and Tweet!

WANT

8bitfuture:

First practical “artificial leaf” revealed.

Scientists today claimed one of the milestones in the drive for sustainable energy — development of the first practical artificial leaf. The system is an advanced solar cell the size of a poker card that mimics photosynthesis, the process green plants use to convert sunlight and water into energy.

“A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades,” said Daniel Nocera, Ph.D., who led the research team. “We believe we have done it. The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” he said. “One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.”

About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly. Placed in a single gallon of water in a bright sunlight, the device could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day, Nocera said. It does so by splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen.
 
The hydrogen and oxygen gases would be stored in a fuel cell, which uses those two materials to produce electricity, located either on top of the house or beside it.

(via 8bitfuture)

feathermethis:

lovely book covers

(via fuckyeahsciencefiction)

(via occidio)

(via fuckyeahmath)

via t.qkme.me