February 9, 2012
Don’t Copy That Floppy was an anti-copyright infringement campaign run by the Software Publishers Association (SPA) beginning in 1992.
The video for the campaign, starring M. E. Hart as ‘MC Double Def DP,’ was filmed at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. The commercial’s mention of the game ‘Tetris’ is ironic given the original version was copied and smuggled out of the Soviet Union then commercialized without any legal rights or payment to its creators (or to the Soviet Union, which had the copyrights of what its scientist produced).
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February 9, 2012
A squircle [skwer-kul] is a mathematical shape with properties between those of a square and those of a circle. It is a special case of superellipse. The word ‘squircle’ is a portmanteau of the words ‘square’ and ‘circle.’ A shape similar to a squircle, called a rounded square, may be generated by arranging four quarters of a circle and connecting their loose ends with straight lines. Although constructing a rounded square may be conceptually and physically simpler, the squircle has the simpler equation and can be generalized much more easily. One consequence of this is that the squircle and other superellipses can be scaled up or down quite easily. This is useful where, for example, one wishes to create nested squircles.
Squircles are useful in optics. If light is passed through a two-dimensional square aperture, the central spot in the diffraction pattern can be closely modeled by a squircle (also called a supercircle). If a rectangular aperture is used, the spot can be approximated by a superellipse. Squircles have also been used to construct dinner plates. A squircular plate has a larger area (and can thus hold more food) than a circular one with the same radius, but still occupies the same amount of space in a rectangular or square cupboard. The same is true of a square plate, but there are various problems (such as wiping up sauce) associated with the corners of square plates.
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February 9, 2012
In geometry, a superegg is a solid of revolution obtained by rotating an elongated super-ellipse with exponent greater than 2 around its longest axis. It is a special case of super-ellipsoid. Unlike an elongated ellipsoid, an elongated superegg can stand upright on a flat surface, or on top of another superegg.
This is due to its curvature being zero at the tips. The shape was popularized by Danish poet and scientist Piet Hein (1905–1996). Supereggs of various materials were sold as novelties or ‘executive toys’ in the 1960s. A 1-ton superegg made of steel and aluminum was placed outside Kelvin Hall in Glasgow in 1971, on occasion of a lecture by Piet Hein.
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February 9, 2012
An egg of Columbus refers to a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact. The expression refers to a popular story of how Christopher Columbus, having been told that discovering the Americas was no great accomplishment, challenged his critics to make an egg stand on its tip.
After his challengers gave up, Columbus did it himself by tapping the egg on the table so as to flatten its tip. The story is often alluded to when discussing creativity. Continue reading →
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February 9, 2012
Salting the earth, or sowing with salt, is the ritual of spreading salt on conquered cities to symbolize a curse on their re-inhabitation. It originated as a practice in the ancient Near East and became a well-established folkloric motif in the Middle Ages. The custom of purifying or consecrating a destroyed city with salt and cursing anyone who dared to rebuild it was widespread in the ancient Near East, but historical accounts are unclear as to what the sowing of salt meant in that process. Various Hittite and Assyrian texts speak of ceremonially strewing salt, minerals, or plants over destroyed cities.
The Book of Judges says that Abimelech, the judge of the Israelites, sowed his own capital, Shechem, with salt, ca. 1050 BCE, after quelling a revolt against him. Starting in the 19th century, various texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Africanus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BCE), sacking it, and forcing the survivors into slavery. However, no ancient sources exist documenting this. The Carthage story is a later invention, probably modelled on the story of Shechem (a city now residing in Israel’s West Bank).
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February 9, 2012
The role of salt in the Bible is relevant to understanding Hebrew society during the Old Testament and New Testament periods. Salt is a necessity of life and was a mineral that was used since ancient times in many cultures as a seasoning, a preservative, a disinfectant, a component of ceremonial offerings, and as a unit of exchange.
The Bible contains numerous references to salt. In various contexts, it is used metaphorically to signify permanence, loyalty, durability, fidelity, usefulness, value, and purification. The main source of salt in the region was the area of the Dead Sea, especially the massive six mile long salt cliffs of Jebel Usdum. The face of the ridge is constantly changing as weather interacts with the rock salt. The Hebrew people harvested salt by pouring sea water into pits and letting the water evaporate until only salt was left. They used the mineral for seasoning and as a preservative. In addition, salt was used to disinfect wounds. Continue reading →
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February 9, 2012
Dietrich Varez (b. 1939) is an iconoclastic printmaker-painter. His work is among the most widely-recognized of any artist in Hawaii. A long-time resident of the Big Island, he is known primarily for scenes of Hawaiian mythology and of traditional Hawaiian life and stylized designs from nature. The studio where Varez works and lives is in a rural forested area near the small town of Volcano, Hawaii a few miles from the entrance to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
He built the house himself after many years of living in tents or cabins on the land or in the Park. For most of his life there, he and his family have lived a self-sufficient pioneering life. They capture rainwater for their needs, and had no electricity for thirty years. The road to his home has been described as ‘barely passable.’ Varez and his wife rarely leave their homestead, virtually never travelling off-island.
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February 8, 2012
Prehistoric music (previously called primitive music) is a term in the history of music for all music produced in preliterate cultures (prehistory), beginning somewhere in very late geological history. Prehistoric music is followed by ancient music in different parts of the world, but still exists in isolated areas.
Prehistoric music thus technically includes all of the world’s music that has existed before the advent of any currently-extant historical sources concerning that music, for example, traditional Native American music of preliterate tribes and Australian Aboriginal music. However, it is more common to refer to the ‘prehistoric’ music which still survives as folk, indigenous or traditional music. Prehistoric music is studied alongside other periods within Music Archaeology.
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February 8, 2012
The pregap on a Red Book audio CD is the portion of the audio track that precedes ‘index 01’ for a given track in the table of contents (TOC). The pregap (‘index 00’) is typically two seconds long and usually, but not always, contains silence. Popular uses for having the pregap contain audio are live CDs, track interludes, and hidden songs in the pregap of the first track. On certain CDs, such as ‘Think Tank’ by Blur, the pregap contains a hidden track. The track is truly hidden in the sense that most conventional standalone players and software CD players will not see it. Such hidden tracks can be played by playing the first song and ‘rewinding’ (more accurately, seeking in reverse) until the actual start of the whole CD audio track. Not all CD drives can properly extract such hidden tracks. Some drives will report errors when reading these tracks, and some will seem to extract them properly, but the extracted file will contain only silence.
The pregap was used to hide computer data, tricking computers into detecting a data track whereas conventional CD players would continue to see the CD as an audio CD. This method was quickly made obsolete in late 1996 when an update to Windows 95 made the pregap track inaccessible. It is unclear whether or not this change in Microsoft Windows’ behavior was intentional: for instance, it may have been intended to steer developers away from the pregap method and encourage what became the Blue Book specification ‘CD Extra’ format.
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February 8, 2012
A micromort is a unit of risk measuring a one-in-a-million probability of death (from micro- and mortality). Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. The micromort concept was introduced by Ronald A. Howard who pioneered the modern practice of decision analysis.
An application of micromorts is measuring the value that humans place on risk: for example, one can consider the amount of money one would have to pay a person to get him or her to accept a one-in-a-million chance of death (or conversely the amount that someone might be willing to pay to avoid a one-in-a-million chance of death).
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February 8, 2012
‘Manifold Destiny‘ is a 2006 article in ‘The New Yorker’ written by Sylvia Nasar (known for her biography of John Forbes Nash, ‘A Beautiful Mind’) and David Gruber. It gives a detailed account (including interviews with many mathematicians) of some of the circumstances surrounding the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, one of the most important accomplishments of 20th and 21st century mathematics, and traces the attempts by three teams of mathematicians to verify the proof given by Grigori Perelman.
Subtitled ‘A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it,’ the article concentrates on the human drama of the story, especially the discussion on who contributed how much to the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. Interwoven with the article is an interview with the reclusive mathematician Grigori Perelman, whom the authors tracked down to the St. Petersburg apartment he shares with his mother. The article describes Perelman’s disillusionment and withdrawal from the mathematical community and paints an unflattering portrait of the 1982 Fields Medalist, Shing-Tung Yau.
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February 8, 2012
Grigori Perelman (b. 1966) is a Russian mathematician who has made landmark contributions to geometry and topology (the study of geometric deformation). In 1992, Perelman proved the soul conjecture. In 2002, he proved Thurston’s geometrization conjecture. This consequently solved in the affirmative the Poincaré conjecture, posed in 1904, which before its solution was viewed as one of the most important and difficult open problems in topology.
In 2006, Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal, but declined to accept the award or to appear at the congress, stating: ‘I’m not interested in money or fame, I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.’ In 2010, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. He turned down the prize ($1 million), saying that he considers his contribution to proving the Poincaré conjecture to be no greater than that of U.S. mathematician Richard Hamilton. Continue reading →
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